Andy Roddick pulled on the strings of his gray hooded sweatshirt until his face was framed by fleece. The material was so snug against his skin it left little room for vanity. Roddick didn’t care how funny he looked. This winter he has had to be on guard against exposure.
“OK,” he said, grinning, to his girlfriend. “Heads down, baby.”
With that, Andy and Mandy Moore strolled out of the interview room at the Racquet Club of Memphis and into a drift of humanity in the hallway. The crowd snowballed as word spread that the tennis player and the singer-actress were leaving the building.
No tennis player worth his top-10 ranking believes there’s any racket he can’t control. Roddick’s strategy was pretty simple; he would wade into the crowd first and draw all the autograph seekers so Moore could slip out behind him with a minimum of fuss.
It seemed like a sound plan. Since his 8-carat gem of a victory in the quarterfinals of the Australian Open, Roddick, 20, can’t go anywhere without causing a commotion. A lot more people recognize the Boca Raton resident, who competed recently at the ATP Tour stop in Delray Beach. Roddick, the top seed, retired from his first-round match with Mardy Fish after twisting his left ankle.
Fans see him as the kid who made America forget for one day that a Super Bowl was being played. Roddick’s 21-games-to-19 mastery of Younes El Aynaoui in the decisive fifth set was bigger than Tampa Bay defensive tackle Warren Sapp and Oakland Raiders offensive lineman Frank Middleton combined, which is saying a lot.
Those two Super Bowl combatants collectively tip the scales at 633 pounds and have mouths that are wider than the Mississippi River. And yet they couldn’t eclipse the classic that was Roddick vs. El Aynaoui. On the last Wednesday in January, tennis was the top story in sports.
Roddick and Moore, whose first album, “So Real,” went platinum, are the PG-version of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. When one of them smiles, the other one glows. It’s enough to unclench a cynic’s heart.
Swept by Sampras
The public is smitten with them both. That much was as clear as Moore’s complexion when she and Roddick, the sixth-ranked player in the world, went walking in the halls in Memphis. Despite Roddick’s good intentions, Moore was swallowed up by fans seeking her autograph on their super-sized souvenir tennis balls or Kroger St. Jude programs.
Roddick glanced over his shoulder while he was signing, saw the crowd clamoring for Moore and smiled broadly. His power game is cutting edge, but when it comes to celebrity, Roddick is a throwback. He’s much more Stan Smith than Anna Nicole Smith.
He doesn’t need or want for all eyes to be on him. The renown is nice, don’t get him wrong, but the results on the court are what drive him.
That’s why Roddick’s marathon run to the semifinals of the year’s first Grand Slam mattered. He showed the tennis world that at least one of its pinups has serious designs on the pinnacle
After last year’s U.S. Open, Roddick knew he needed to do something. The kingmakers were getting restless.
The 2002 U.S. Open was supposed to be Roddick’s coronation. Everybody said so. His life-sized image appeared like a premonition on a billboard not far from Flushing, and his Tour-leading 30 hard-court match victories suggested his sophomore season was building to a crescendo.
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Of course, Roddick would make a lot of noise in New York. Like bagels or Woody Allen, he is a perfect fit for the city. His game is skyscraper big, and he’s a natural-born entertainer. Roddick’s mother Blanche can remember taking her small son to plays and the kinetic kid who couldn’t sit still long enough to finish a grilled cheese sandwich wouldn’t even twitch, he was so transfixed by what was unfolding on the stage.
Right on cue Roddick advanced to the quarterfinals opposite Pete Sampras, the fallen king whom Roddick is supposed to be succeeding. The transfer of power would be clean, bloodless. Sampras took his sovereignty back with a straight-sets victory.
The 6-3, 6-2, 6-4 result wasn’t just a loss for Roddick, it was an undressing. The prince was found to have no clothes.
Roddick’s serve and forehand are his big weapons, and when they failed him he meekly retreated, as if he had no Plan B. His detractors had a field day, and even his supporters wondered: Did Roddick really want to walk in Sampras’ sneakers or was he just trying them on for show?
A marathon classic
Roddick repaired to Boca Raton in the fall and went into hibernation. He resurfaced to escort Moore here and there, which gave wings to the whispers that tennis’ glamor boy had gone Hollywood instead of back to the drawing board. In fact, Roddick had recommitted himself to finding stamina, his backhand and a volley.
He juggled balance balls and medicine balls and tennis balls in a regimen that was not for the knock-kneed. Every day he worked to get physically stronger. The fitter he felt, the stronger he became mentally.
“I was just very focused,” Roddick said. “I worked on my quickness and my fitness and not getting too bothered–using my energy in a positive way.”
When people asked him how he was spending his off-season, Roddick was intentionally vague.
“I didn’t want to talk about it too much going in [to 2003],” Roddick said. “I knew what I did. I didn’t need to tell anybody.”
At Melbourne in the first Grand Slam of the year, the truth would emerge with all the force of the first winter storm.
The first hint of it came in Roddick’s fourth-round match against Mikhail Youzhny, when he rallied from a two-set deficit for the first time in his career. Then came the quarterfinal against the 31-year-old El Aynaoui.
For 4 hours 59 minutes, the two players put on a shotmaking clinic. The fifth set alone lasted 2 hours 23 minutes, making it the longest fifth set in men’s singles in Grand Slam history. It would have ended sooner if not for a match point Roddick saved at 4-5.
Around that time is when it ceased being a tennis match and turned into an opera.
Blanche Roddick had risen at 3:30 a.m. to follow the match on the Internet. A few times in the final set she had to get up and walk away from the computer. It was the first time pressure had chased her from her seat during one of her son’s matches. “My stomach was churning so badly,” she said.
The last few games were shown on television. Blanche Roddick tuned in, expecting to see two players straggling toward the finish line. “I thought they would be like two drunken sailors out there,” she said, “but they weren’t at all.”
Not even close. As Roddick remembered, “I was thinking to myself at 15 games apiece that even if I don’t win this, this is still a hell of an effort and I’ll still be happy to have participated in such a well-played match.”
Roddick and El Aynaoui combine for just 86 unforced errors in the 83 games. Roddick was a revelation; he hit three winners for every mistake, finishing with 102 winners and 31 unforced errors.
The match ended with El Aynaoui flubbing a forehand volley. Roddick’s run ended two days later when he was beaten by Rainer Schuettler in the semifinals.
Sidelined by injury
Roddick’s spirit was willing, but tendinitis developed in his right wrist, that particular joint having not been constructed to endure 11 1/2 hours of high-torque tennis over a five-day period.
The wrist balked during his 7-5, 2-6, 6-3, 6-3 setback to Schuettler, and Roddick was forced to pull out of the U.S. squad’s Davis Cup match at Croatia last month. He couldn’t swing a racquet for 10 days, which gave him plenty of time to watch the videotape of his Australian Open quarterfinal.
Roddick didn’t watch all of it, mind you. He couldn’t sit still for that long. “I can’t do anything for five hours,” he said, laughing. “I have no attention span. Zero. Seriously, people say, `How can you stay on the court for five hours like that when you can’t even sleep for five hours?”‘
Some things are better left unanalyzed. Roddick has no clue why tennis is the one thing he can do without misplacing his mind in midstream. All he knows for sure is that was no flake who put away El Aynaoui.
“I watched the videotape of the match from maybe 10-all in the fifth,” he said. “I was impressed with the way he played. I was impressed with the way I played. It’s tough for me to say that. I don’t say that too often.”
Roddick may be the only one who cares that he didn’t win the Australian Open. Since returning from Melbourne it seems as if he can’t leave his house without somebody chasing him down the block to say, “Wow! What a great match!”
“It’s kind of like that’s the only thing I’ve done in tennis,” Roddick said. He laughed. It is funny how fame works. Roddick can win five ATP singles titles in his first full two years on the circuit and become the youngest American in the top-10 since Michael Chang in 1992. Then he advances to his first Grand Slam semifinal and people hail him as though he were an overnight success.
“Maybe I just showed them something I hadn’t shown them before in as far as keeping it together between the ears or fighting or actually showing improvements in my game,” Roddick said. “It gets tiring watching some people who aren’t doing as well as you think they should be doing. Maybe people were just happy to see I’ve been trying to make strides, and maybe they appreciated the effort a little more.”
Dartmouth junior Neal Bobba, a friend of Roddick going back to their days in junior tennis, has another theory. “You look at Lleyton Hewitt,” said Bobba, referring to the taciturn No. 1-ranked player in the world, “and everybody credits him for his heart. With Andy the perception is that he has such a great personality.
“It’s like there’s some kind of tradeoff. People look at you either as a really great guy or a big-time competitor. Andy showed at the Australian Open that he’s both.”
No ordinary life
Style and substance are like money and class. It’s a rare thing to find somebody possessing lots of both. Maybe that’s why people keep thanking Roddick for playing that match against El Aynaoui, as if he had any choice but to keep going and going and going.
People talk about how normal Roddick is, which is so much rubbish. He’s not into ego-tripping, if that’s what people mean.
But his is no ordinary life, unless it’s considered normal to make your second million before your 21st birthday, to be traveling the globe while your friends back home are trolling the party circuit, to be a teenager and be absolutely, positively sure of what you want to do when you grow up.
Roddick turned pro shortly before his 18th birthday. He might as well have gone to Mars and his peer group to Venus for all they had in common eventually. Roddick, with his working man’s dossier of responsibilities, soon felt isolated–alienated, even–from his carefree school friends.
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It got to the point he one day wondered aloud to his mother if he shouldn’t maybe have given college a try before turning pro. Are you crazy? she asked him.
No. Just a little lonely was all.
Roddick gradually made a new set of friends. They are teachers and accountants–people with mortgages and car payments and perspective. Then, at a tournament in Toronto last July, he met Moore.
Sandy Moore, a big tennis fan, introduced her daughter, who was in Toronto at the time filming a movie, to Roddick. They quickly realized they had more in common than their People magazine clippings.
Mandy had wanted to be a singer since she was too small to be seen at a standing microphone. When she was 4 or 5, she’d stand in front of a mirror for hours singing into a hairbrush.
When Andy was the same age, he would stand in front of a mirror for hours swinging a tennis racquet. “Mandy’s mother and I laugh about [their parallel childhoods],” Blanche Roddick said.
Moore didn’t know much about tennis when she and Roddick started hanging out. The closest she had come to the sport was singing the national anthem at Chris Evert’s charity tournament.
It didn’t matter. She understood perfectly what it was like to be young and living impossible dreams.
A love match
They hit it off at once. It helps that both are as grounded as sequoias, with a deep-roots system of family and friends. In December, Roddick’s childhood friend Bobba drove over from the west coast of Florida to meet Moore in Boca Raton.
He was prepared not to like her. Because, you know, she’s famous and the famous are, well, different. “I was extremely skeptical,” Bobba said. “The entire ride over there I was ready to be grumpy, judgmental and hate this girl.”
Of course, Bobba ended up liking her a lot. You know what they say: You can’t judge a celebrity by her magazine covers.
Bobba said Roddick struck him as “extremely happy.” Roddick would sooner plant himself at the net than expand on that. It’s hard to blame him. Some things are too precious for words and too private for public consumption.
“We’re just cool with one another,” he said. “She has her stuff going on, and I have my stuff going on. When we get together we enjoy our time together.”
They’re just two kids trying to make their way in the world. Really, Roddick insists, that’s all they are.
The people in Memphis weren’t buying it. They know a King when they see one. After Roddick lost in the final to Taylor Dent, fans were on him like sharks on chum. They tore the shirt right off his back, then waited patiently for Roddick to emerge from the locker room so they could have him sign the shreds of the material.
He obliged them, marveling all the while at the reality show that is his life.
“It’s nice when people respect you for what you do and say they really enjoy watching you,” Roddick said. “When people get really excited and are on the verge of tears, you kind of want to say, `Calm down. I do the same things as you. It’s nothing too big.”‘