Al – Tennis cycling photographer and owner Al Murray Enterprises

I have not written enough about me in the past, so I have decided to expand my “About Me” to give you all more of my background.

I grew up in a rural part of Canada, forty-five miles southeast of Windsor, Ontario. This is near Point Pelee National Park, the southern most point of mainland Canada. While living outside the nearest town, we no longer farmed the land. We stopped farming it just before my teens after my grandfather passed away.

This was the time I picked up playing tennis. I had been bugging my parents to let me play baseball like my brother or hockey like so many of my friends. But having gone through all that with my older brother, they first decided swimming would be better for me. I was a natural in the shallow end. So much so that the instructors decided to throw me in the deep end. That act ended my swimming career.

One day we had one of the local teenagers come to our school to demonstrate tennis. I knew instantly that this land-based sport was for me. The draw back was that the courts were at the high school in town and my father worked in Windsor at this time meaning I had no known motor transportation. But I saved up my allowances and the remaining funds needed to buy equipment, for lessons and for a bike I charmed off my grandmother.

Every day during the first four years of high school, if it wasn’t raining, I was off on my bike for the 10-mile ride into town to the high school courts. There was a group of six to eight of us who would spend most of our summer days learning and playing tennis. Around 3:30 – 4:00pm, I would ride home for dinner and then after I got my driver’s license, I would head back until late in the evenings when my father was working the day shift.

There began my love of both cycling and tennis. Both of which continue to be a large part of my active life. I have played tennis tournaments across the world from Europe to the US. I through my 30s, 40s and 50s rode my bike to work as much as I could.

I at one point in my late teens had to make big decision. I was asked one summer by one of our transient tennis coaches if I wanted to go with him to Arizona and try our luck on the fledgling professional tennis tour. The other alternative was to enroll in an exchange program at university whereby I would spend half of the next school year in Barcelona.

It was a decision that was tearing me in two. Head off and play the sport I love or get out of the country. The decision was made easier when my doting grandmother stepped in and offered to cover some of the critical expenses to get me to Spain. I got nothing if I went off to play tennis. Decision made!

Living in Barcelona for six months, spurred my travel bug. Our instructor guide took us all over Spain, on a 24-hour trip to Paris. A couple of us after the semester was over went south to Malaga for a week then for a quick trip to Morocco.

After graduating with my Bachelors in Spanish & Comparative Lit, I decided I didn’t want to go into international law. I really wanted to do something more physical, so I enrolled at a Toronto college and got my diploma in fitness lifestyle and management. Again, this spurred me on more to really wanting to manage a fitness or recreation centre and life developments turned me back home. I enrolled in Sport Management at the local university.

I put myself through this course by doing various things like teaching fitness classes in the basements of local churches or schools (on concrete floors). I ran running clubs hoping to find someone to marathon run with me.

In the end, I returned to Toronto to check out the job market here. I ended up working in the financial industry for the next thirty plus years. While not my dream, it afforded me the ability to cycle, to play tennis, to travel to play tennis across North America and Europe. I have completed the spectator Grand Slam by having attended the professional tournaments: French Open, US Open, Wimbledon, and Australia Open (in that order over from 2015 – 2019).

Now in my retirement years, I am looking for more adventures. I want to share those with you and give you tips and tricks along the way. How I stay fit (or am trying to stay fit); what the places I travel to are really like; how I make my decisions on how, where and what to do while there. Also, I am looking for products and services that will make life in general easier for those of us in our pre- and post-retirement years.

But I won’t paint myself into a corner. As a photographer and videographer, I will be looking for products and services that will benefit anyone.

I would love to hear from you if there is anything specific you would like me and my expanding team to research or can give the benefit of what we might know.

Let’s get the journey together started!