Up Against It

by Pete Bodo

Two-thousand and eleven has not been a very good number so far for Andy Roddick. He embarked on the campaign with a good number of points to defend. In 2010, he won Brisbane and made the final in San Jose in advance of the two big U.S. early-season hard-court Masters events, where he played for the championships each time. Roddick was the runner up at Indian Wells last year (to surprise winner Ivan Ljubicic), and he took the Miami title from Tomas Berdych. That Berdych went on to make the semifinals of the French Open and the Wimbledon final is a pretty good indication of the quality of Roddick's win on Key Biscayne.

Roddick's career-defining result may be the 2009 Wimbledon final, when he came within a swat or two of preventing Roger Federer from bagging his 15th major. Federer won that epic, 16-14 in the fifth, ensuring Roddick a major place in the highlight reel of Open Era tennis history. That loss was a bitter pill for Roddick to swallow, yet it seemed somehow an accurate encapsulation of his career—a career spent in the shadow of the man who beat him, if only by a whisker.

Nobody likes to think of a runner-up finish as someone's finest moment, but if you value pathos, and could have measured it that day with a meter, the results would have been off the charts. Roddick lost a big match day but he won many, many friends.

Miami is a full grade below Wimbledon, and while Roddick's win there last year isn't quite as significant as his triumph at the 2003 U.S. Open, or career-defining, it was in some ways the most emblematic of his big moment.

Last year on the Key, Roddick showed what a man could achieve if he had unrelenting faith in himself and allowed himself to want and pursue something without brooding, second-guessing, or becoming side-tracked. It revealed what a man could make of himself, starting with fairly common clay. And it was a testament to—and a payoff for—a remarkable amount of work, almost all of it carried out under stressful conditions with players ready and willing to punish every failed experiment, every bit of reaching out for something that wasn't necessarily within Roddick's grasp—like straight-on serve-and-volley tennis. Federer's mastery of him nonwithstanding, Roddick is tennis' ultimate self-made man, and he has many characteristics of the type, including a realistic streak that can seem harsh.

Roddick beat a couple of good clay-court players early at Miami last year, and he took out Rafael Nadal in the semifinals. In doing so it helped keep Nadal from becoming a Federer-sized obstacle in Roddick's path. Roddick is 3-6 against Nadal, but 2-20 with Federer. Somehow, I think that if you offered Roddick the same winning percentage he has with Nadal but over 22 matches (the number he's played against his nemesis, Federer), he'd gladly take it—and the titles it would represent.

Roddick's win over Berdych was the happy ending he was unable to create at Wimbledon in 2009—and his biggest title in the nearly four years since he won Cincinnati in 2006. The victory left Roddick in good stead for the rest of the year. He spent it paddling around the eddy at the lower end of the Top 10. He came into this new year with high hopes, but has struggled since the get-go, despite starting with a final at Brisbane.

Roddick was defending quarterfinal points at the Australian Open, where last year he lost a painful five-setter to Marin Cilic. He went down one round sooner this year, a victim of an in-form Stan Wawrinka—just the kind of guy Roddick needs to beat routinely to keep up his mid-level Top 10 status. Roddick earned back some ground when he won Memphis. He won two Davis Cup matches, and that always makes Roddick feel good. But then came the fall: fourth round (but third match) at Indian Wells, second round at Miami. As a result, Roddick could drop as low as No. 15.

There are mitigating circumstances in play here; Roddick left Miami limping on a bad ankle and, in his own words, sounding "like a car that won't start" when he laughed. Apparently, he's had a lingering bronchial infection, and he's worried. At this time last year, a case of mononucleosis prevented him from building on the momentum he built in Miami. Roddick did not play from the end of March until the end of May last year, and when he returned at Roland Garros he went three rounds. Yesterday, after that frustrating loss to Pablo Cuevas, he told the press:

"Well, I'm going to get to the clay a lot earlier than I did last year, hopefully. I probably. . .I'm going to have to talk to my coach about that. There is a lot coming in here (the press interview room) I don't have the answers for you. You normally regroup after this tournament and see where you're at."

The lay of the land doesn't look great for Roddick, and the kind of competitor he is, he'll be the last to know, even when the game has clearly passed him by. I can't imagine that's the case yet. Roddick is a big, strong guy and he's still just 28. And that serve, combined with his record and attitude on grass courts, positions him as a contender at Wimbledon for at last a few more years to come. Roddick has always loaded up his points bag during the hard court segments. Those points will be harder to earn, especially if his ranking/seeding drops, but not by that much.

I've always felt that Roddick could do better than he has thus far in his career on clay. That's because clay gives players that extra bit of time to set themselves up for a shot, or to reach a ball (that helps explain the success on clay of players like, say, Sam Stosur or Robin Soderling). Roddick has told me in the past that he enjoys clay (he earned three of his first four titles on the surface), and he was bummed out last year when mono greatly reduced his spring schedule. If Roddick can get over what presently ails him, he'll go into this clay-court season with a greater sense of urgency and more at stake than at any time in recent years. Will that translate to wins?

I don't imagine we'll see Roddick toppling Nadal in Rome, or blasting Federer off the court in Madrid. But with his re-tooled game (he has a rally stroke now in that versatile backhand), his general wisdom and experience (he more and more sounds like late-career Andre Agassi when he talks Xs and Os), and—of course—that atomic serve, Roddick might have a better time of it on red dirt than most people might expect. And there are always the turf wars of June and July to motivate him.