The vortex of chatter that spirals around Andy Roddick is only picking up strength these days. People whisper about the way the 18-year-old has upset some of biggest names in tennis, and they marvel at a gunslinging serve that can crack up to 141 mph. They mark him as the "future of the sport" so often that the words seem to trail behind him like tin cans on a string.
But of all the accolades, of all the tidbits to snatch out of the swirl, this is the most important: Andy Roddick is not scared.
It is the one undeniable fact that makes the rest possible, the trait that powers the serve, that fuels the wins, that enables this gangly kid from Florida with the floppy hair and brown eyes to treat courts he has never even seen before as his own. The 6-foot-2 Roddick, ranked 24th in the world, will not be the favorite at the Legg Mason Tennis Classic, which will also include Andre Agassi and defending champion Alex Corretja when the main draw begins play Monday, but he will be a serious threat, a position that often makes others wobbly but that Roddick seems to relish.
"Why should it bother me?" Roddick asked recently, shaking his head after yet another grown-up asked him what they all ask, whether all the questions about the amount of pressure he's facing has created a sense of, well, pressure. "It's a good thing that people are saying I'm the future, that people are behind me. It's cool that the crowds are good. It's been pretty fun."
It's been a blast, actually, as Roddick has wound his way through his first year playing full-time on the ATP Tour, knocking off Pete Sampras and Gustavo Kuerten and Michael Chang along the way. He has won two tournament titles. He has wowed them on the clay courts of Roland Garros and made them stand up and cheer on the usually staid grass of Wimbledon. And with each victory, each round of applause, Roddick has found he only wants more.
It is an innate desire, an internal comfort level that can't be coached. All of the practice sessions in the world can't change the fact that when it is a player's turn to step onto the court for The Big Match, wherever it may be, his blood either quickens in anticipation or freezes in get-me-out-of-here fear. Roddick can feel his pulse take off with the speed of the Concorde, and once play actually starts, the rush only increases.
He has a dash of Jimmy Connors's showmanship and even a pinch of the Connors temper, often miming his glee or disappointment and sometimes even shouting out his inner dialogue to the crowd. Playing eventual champion Goran Ivanisevic at the All England club in June, Roddick watched serve after thundering serve pass by him before loudly proclaiming "my neck is getting sore." Frustrated with his play in a match against Marat Safin last month, he shouted to the fans, "I've got groundstrokes for sale."
"Even when he's not doing well," said his coach, former French pro Tarik Benhabiles, "he wants to be out there."
Roddick has always been this way -- outspoken, adventurous, more sure of himself than almost anyone else around him. He was so chatty as a toddler that at 2 1/2 years old, his father softly chided, "Andy, do you think you could sometimes give someone else a turn to talk?" Roddick turned to his mother, cupped his hands over his mouth and loudly whispered, "Mom, do you think we could bury dad in the garden?"
At 3, his pediatrician warned his parents that "you have to be careful with a kid like this -- he's so outgoing, he'll talk to strangers." At 10, he spotted a Reebok representative at a tennis tournament his older brother was playing, marched over and proclaimed, "My name is Andy, I'm going to be a great tennis player, and this is your chance." A week later, a box full of Reebok tennis clothes arrived at Roddick's Boca Raton, Fla., home, although "I had to have the shorts altered," his mother, Blanche, recalls, "because he was too small to fit into any of them."
Still, growing up as the youngest of three boys, Roddick used to be more runt than phenom, trying to elbow his way through the achievements of his oldest brother Lawrence, a diver who made the U.S. senior national team, and his middle brother John, an accomplished junior tennis player who eventually claimed all-American honors at Georgia. When John, six years his senior, went to tournaments, Andy tagged along and practiced on the sidewalk with the other little brothers and sisters, using the cracks in the concrete to mark an invisible net.
By the time he was 8, he had mastered the domain of his garage, where he pretended he was thrashing the players he was beginning to idolize. Roddick would disappear for hours in that garage, "playing both parts in his imaginary matches," Blanche explained. "So if he was being Ivan Lendl, he'd serve like Lendl, and then on the next point he'd serve like himself. He was a complete sponge, even at that age, he'd pick up everything. If he was being McEnroe, he'd hold the racket in his left hand."
"I played Andre Agassi, Pete Sampras, all of them hundreds of times," Roddick remembers. "And I had all the posters. There was one with Agassi on grass, and it was called 'Mowing the Lawn,' and a couple with McEnroe that said 'Rebel with a Cause.' "
By the time Roddick actually began competing against real, live opponents, he was still small, although a series of growth spurts -- he has shot up more than a foot in the last four years -- and the tutelage of Benhabiles, with whom he started working about two years ago, eventually helped ratchet up his game. By last year, he reached the world's No. 1 junior ranking and even began dabbling on the pro tour.
He showed up on the grounds of the William H.G. FitzGerald Tennis Center last summer already improving, making it through to the Legg Mason quarterfinals. He eventually fell, 6-4, 6-4, to Agassi, but he realized, according to Benhabiles, that "that he was different from the other kids, that he was much better."
"The tournament in Washington was a pretty big milestone," Benhabiles said. "It was the first time Andy played in front of those kinds of crowds. He really liked it."
Roddick doesn't seem to just like crowds, he thrives on them, riding each cheer like a wave. He gets a kick from how much everyone else gets a kick from his cannon-like serve, and when he is feeling tired and cranky and frustrated on the court, he lets the fans' voices take over, goading him onward. It's a pluckiness that has earned him the respect of his elders, including McEnroe, whose brother Pat has coached Roddick in Davis Cup play, and Agassi, who has asked Roddick to be a practice partner a few times this year.
Even Sampras laid down his racket to Roddick after the youngster beat him at the Ericsson Open this spring. "He's definitely the future of U.S. tennis, I mean the way he plays and competes," Sampras said. "Besides, he's still very young and he can go out there and swing away."
If Roddick's taste for battle was established against Sampras in Miami, it was entrenched against Chang at the French Open in May. Despite harsh cramping, Roddick plunked bullet serve after bullet serve onto Chang's side of the court, slugging away until the former champion finally folded. The victory set off a festival of attention, although it wasn't until the next round, when a strained muscle forced him to retire from a match against Lleyton Hewitt, that Roddick got caught up in a different kind of circus. Backbiting suggestions that he hadn't really been that hurt, or that even if he was, it was because he wasn't taking good enough care of himself, rose from the players' lounge, and Roddick's agent refused to release the results of an MRI exam.
Roddick, who underwent knee surgery last year, denied he is injury-prone, although eventually apologized for the confusion. "No one has ever cared about me getting hurt before, so maybe I didn't deal with it in the best way," he said. "I'm just not used to this kind of attention."
The interest has, of course, been overwhelming, as a public long-starved for the next American male star has decided to start snacking on Roddick. With his nearly ever-present backward baseball cap and loping gait, Roddick is relatively easy to pick out of a crowd, and he has been increasingly stopped for autographs, photos and, in what he calls "my Backstreet [Boys] moments," chats with girls.
Some of the experiences have been surreal. Just last year, Roddick's high school buddies were ringing his doorbell, asking him to come out and play -- earlier this year, the voice at the door belonged to Agassi, in town for a week of practice sessions.
"It's a big trip -- my former dream world is now my reality, which is really weird for me sometimes," Roddick said. But in many ways, Roddick's life has remained somewhat normal. He still lives with his parents, still borrows his mother's car, still runs errands around the neighborhood. Red-and-black Nebraska Cornhuskers wallpaper still covers one of the bathrooms in his house, a remnant of life in Omaha, where the family lived until Roddick was about 4 years old.
His father, Jerry, a private investor, takes care of most of Roddick's prize money, which this year has already totaled $325,253. Roddick's biggest splurges have been CDs and video games, and while he has occasionally talked about getting his own house, that desire seems to be borne less out of a need for privacy and more from a disinclination toward tidiness.
"Now when I tell him to clean his room, he says 'Call my agent,' " Blanche said, laughing. "He wanted to get a five-bedroom house, so he could sleep in a different one each night and not have to clean up."
Roddick's family has stopped traveling with him to most tournaments, trying to give him a little space as he crosses into adulthood, although his parents did come visit him in Cincinnati last week and John, who is an assistant tennis coach at Georgia, will be playing with Roddick in the doubles draw at the Legg Mason.
It is an important support network for a young player still trying to weave his way through the intricacies of the professional game. Roddick can lose his temper too easily, questioning umpire's calls, and veteran players sometimes force him into making poor on-court decisions.
Still, Roddick is learning. In Montreal two weeks ago, he beat former No. 1 Carlos Moya and current No. 1 Kuerten before losing in the quarterfinals to eventual champion Andrei Pavel. He is hoping for a similar run in Washington and then has his sights set on the U.S. Open, where the swirl of attention is only likely to get thicker.
"He deserves it -- he is absolutely the goods," said former No. 1 Jim Courier, chiming in from the takes-one-to-know-one camp. "Look at how he reacted to playing on Centre Court at Wimbledon -- he wasn't scared, he was excited and he played as well as he would play on any other court and sometimes even better. Andy's not shying from the spotlight, he's seeking it, and combined with his talent, that tells you right there all you need to know."
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
