By WAYNE COFFEY May 6, 2001
Daily News Sports Writer
HOUSTON - When Andy Roddick is hungry, which is most of the time, he's not one to mess around with fruit cups or mixed greens. He orders pizza, his favorite food, and often devours an entire pie without leaving his chair.
He did this during a recent visit with his brother, John, a former pro and an assistant tennis coach at the University of Georgia. He did it two hours after consuming a heaping plate of soul food in an Athens, Ga., restaurant.
"He can eat like nobody I've ever seen," John Roddick says. John Roddick's kid brother is 18 and isn't worrying about calories, major food groups or much of anything else these days. His life is hurtling forward at planetary speed, the upper limit of his potential being revised almost weekly.
Roddick's tennis growth spurt has even outstripped his body's growth spurt, and considering that he was 5-2 four years ago and is 6-2 now, that is no small statement.
Just ask Pete Sampras, winner of 13 Grand Slams, whom Roddick knocked off six weeks ago at the Ericsson Open in Key Biscayne, Fla., the fifth biggest tournament on the ATP Tour. "The way he competes and the way he plays, he really is the future (of American tennis)," Sampras said after the 7-6, 6-3 defeat.
"He certainly has the game to be one of the top players in the world," says Jan-Michael Gambill, another U.S. player on the climb.
Former world No. 1 Jim Courier watched Roddick overcome Sampras and told a friend, "I haven't been this interested in watching someone play tennis in a long time."
For a more than a half-decade, people have been scoping around for likely successors to Sampras and Andre Agassi at the apex of U.S. tennis. Scott Humphries, Justin Gimelstob and Paul Goldstein have had their backers, but for various reasons have never fully broken through.
Now comes Roddick, not even a year out of Boca Raton Prep (Florida), with a monstrous serve, a matching forehand and no apparent fear of gutting out tough points in big moments. The No. 1 junior in the world last year, he captured the Australian and U.S. Open junior titles and has cruised into the grownup world as easily as a car shifts from first into second.
Roddick wants no part of cheap sportswriter angles, being the next so-and-so. "That doesn't help you put the ball in the court," he keeps saying. But he had better get used to it.
Seven days ago at the Verizon Tennis Challenge in Atlanta, Roddick, a wild-card entry into the draw, captured his first ATP title, defeating Xavier Malisse of Belgium, in the finals, doing it in the first top-level clay-court tournament of his life. He became the youngest U.S. player to win on the tour since Michael Chang 11 years ago.
His serve was clocked as fast as 139 mph and averaged 124 mph. He went 42 straight games without being broken.
At the U.S. Clay Court Championships here last week, he beat Magnus Gustafsson on Thursday to advance to the quarterfinals. He will get his first invitation to a Grand Slam later this month on the most famous clay of all at the French Open.
Roddick's rank, 325 six months ago, is up to 32. His peers have already taken to calling him A-Rod, a name that befits his promise, no matter what it lacks in originality.
"I guess I can take a second-hand nickname," Roddick says. "I know I'm not the A-Rod."
* * *
Roddick is in a lounge at the Westside Tennis Club, home of the U.S. Clay Court Championships. He is spinning an empty sports-drink bottle as he talks, his everpresent baseball cap in its everpresent backward position. He has sandy hair, a square chin and the manner of a kid who's having a blast in his new profession, without being giddy about it.
"I need to work on everything," Roddick says. "There's lots of room for improvement, in all areas, and that really excites me."
Roddick still lives at home in Boca Raton, with parents, Jerry and Blanche Roddick. He still practices on the hardcourt in the backyard, and still loves hanging out with high school friends, who enjoy giving him a hard time about his burgeoning fame ("Did you see the ugly picture of that guy who won the tennis tournament in the paper?").
He has the same Nebraska Cornhuskers wallpaper in his bathroom, continuing the family fixation with Big Red football, which is what you get when you spend five years of your life in Omaha.
It's just everything else that has changed.
Roddick grew up recreating matches with a net in his garage, pretending to be Sampras or Agassi or Boris Becker or Jim Courier. Not even brother John, whose tour aspirations were felled by chronic back trouble, expected fantasy to morph so rapidly into reality.
"I don't think anyone dreamed he was going to serve an average of 123 or 124," John Roddick says. "Not many players come along who have that kind of weapon at 18."
Roddick did not always have service-line missiles going for him. He went through most of his junior career giving away much size and strength, thriving as a scrapper and a point-builder. Andy and John think it's the best thing that could've happened; having an overwhelming weapon at an early age often results in one-note players who don't diversify their games.
"He can create points if he has to," John Roddick says. "He's not afraid to win a match ugly. He can change the way he's playing during the course of a match. If some guys are playing bad, it's on to the next week. Andy will scrap it out if he has to, and it's because he's done it."
Patrick McEnroe, the Davis Cup captain, named Roddick to the team for the opening round against Switzerland in February. The U.S. lost, but Roddick won. McEnroe doesn't just admire Roddick's turbo-charged strokes, but his nerve. The night before the final in Atlanta, Roddick called McEnroe on his cell phone in Seattle. McEnroe told him he wanted to be there when Roddick won his first tournament.
"You better get your butt down here," Roddick told him. McEnroe took the redeye and Roddick delivered.
"He's the kind of kid who loves a challenge," McEnroe said. "He hates missing balls in a practice drill. You can see that in him. He's got the right attitude, in addition to a big game."
Kristina Jones, a tennis player at University of California-Irvine, has been Roddick's best friend since the ninth grade. She said Roddick is utterly loyal and unchanged by his success and equally unwavering in his competitiveness.
"It's easy to get him to do something," Jones said. "All you have to do is tell him, 'You can't do that.'"
Roddick began his ascension in earnest after hooking up with his coach, Frenchman and former tour player Tarik Benhabiles, in the summer of 1999. His junior rank then was in the 20s and 30s. He had grown up, started to fill out. Benhabiles told him the only way he would go anywhere was if he got serious, started to treat his tennis as a job, the same as if he'd just been hired by IBM. Not that Roddick was a slacker before, but his commitment to his game reached a new level, almost immediately.
"His work ethic is one of the best in the world," Benhabiles said.
By the end of 1999, Roddick had won two major junior titles in Florida, the Eddie Herr and the Orange Bowl. He turned pro early in 2000, shortly after becoming the first U.S. junior in 41 years to win the Australian.
Roddick's backhand and net games have improved immensely. Benhabiles is so adamant about adding dimension to his game that he sometimes will impose a no-winners rule; Roddick will not be allowed to prematurely end a rally with one stroke for two weeks. Instead, Roddick is ordered to work on changing speeds, altering patterns, mixing locations, being Greg Maddux instead of Randy Johnson.
"I used to just hit the crap out of every ball," Roddick says. "He challenged me to be better. He taught me how not to just be a hitter, but a player."
Said Benhabiles: "He's a totally different player now, at a totally different level. He has improved already a lot. He just has to keep working." The coach is wary of excessive expectation, assuming progress that has yet to be made. As long as Roddick keeps working the way he has been, Benhabiles said he sees no reason why his rise won't continue for a long time.
"Andy has no limits," Benhabiles says.
* * *
It's an hour before Roddick is supposed to meet Benhabiles on the practice court. Roddick is warming up by playing H-O-R-S-E in the gleaming Westside Tennis Club gym, the practice facility of the Houston Rockets and Houston Comets. His rivals are fellow American players Robby Genepri and James Blake, out of Fairfield, Conn. Roddick, who played on his high school basketball team, has already won two of three, and is one E away from making it three of four. He has the ball on the right wing, 20 feet out. He goes up straight, extends his arm, watches the trajectory of the ball as it slips cleanly through the net.
"Yes!," Roddick says, doing a little celebratory hop and fist pump.
Everything is falling for Andy Roddick. His rank is climbing. People are talking. There may be a pizza to polish off later, but for now, Andy Roddick's greatest appetite is for his tennis game, and where it is rapidly taking him.
Not even 24 hours after becoming the youngest U.S. teenager to win in more than a decade, after assuring himself many more mildly annoying questions about being the next so-and-so, tennis' A-Rod sounds like a Grand Slam veteran.
"I won yesterday, but I'm already zeroed in on what I have to do today," Andy Roddick says.
