Has He Lost His Mojo? (Seriously) - 網球

YOU'RE ANDY RODDICK.


AT 21, YOU NABBED A U.S. OPEN TITLE AND SCRAMBLED TO THE TOP OF THE TENNIS
HEAP.


BUT IN THE TWO YEARS SINCE, YOU'VE BEEN TAKEN DOWN ONE NOTCH, THEN TWO, THEN
THREE.



WHEN THE OTHER GUYS ARE IMPROVING AND YOU'RE NOT…
WHAT CAN YOU DO?








YOU'RE ANDY RODDICK ON A STEAMY AUGUST AFTERNOON, AND YOU HAVEN'T WON A GRAND
SLAM TOURNAMENT IN ALMOST TWO YEARS.


You stand shirtless at the baseline of a practice court in Washington D.C-
offering a glimpse of the topography that a strenuous workout regimen has
etched into your abdomen - and rifle ground strokes at the head of your coach,
Dean Goldfine, who lingers in the general vicinity of the net.


You hit three, four, five in a row with increasing urgency, but Goldfine
manages to deflect each back over the net. With your face screwed into a
grimace, you hit the next shot as if you're channeling all the frustration of
the past two years into one swing. Goldfine gets a racquet on it like a hockey
goalie, but that's all he can do. The ball ricochets into the next court.


An awkward silence settles over the two dozen fans who have gathered to watch
you hit. It's as if they've unwittingly stumbled into a domestic dispute,
expect that only you seem irked. Finally someone breaks the tension by saying,
"Is that why Brad Gilbert quit?"


"He wouldn't have stayed in there to take it," you snap. "He would have been at
the side fence, talking to someone."


It's just a quip, one of those blink-of-an-eye one-liners that you seem to toss
off so easily in press conferences and live interviews. You may have the
quickest mind in tennis. But as usual, your wit provides access to thoughts
that a more considered answer wouldn't.


With Gilbert, you won the 2003 U.S. Open and finished that season ranked No.1
in the world. In the months that followed, Gilbert enjoyed the attention,
talking up his role in your success and promoting his book, but you stopped
winning the big tournaments. Worst, perhaps, you lost your status as the
crossover star who just might save men's tennis. Roger Federer and Rafael
Nadal are the hot names now.


In came Goldfine, whose resume includes stints with Todd Martin, Aaron
Krickstein, and Jared Palmer. He's never had a pupil win a major or spend a day
at the No 1, but his loyalty is unquestioned. He's a coach, friend,
psychologist, Yahtzee partner, even a human target, if that's what you want.


Life with Goldfine is smoother, but you remain edgy. In your first tournament
after Wimbledon, you lose to Robby Ginepri in Indianapolis, then criticize the
ATP schedule as "ridiculous." You break a commitment to play the Los Angeles
and go home to Austin, where you crack a Mercedes-Benz logo with your racquet
during one practice session, then ask to have a spectator removed during
another. You can't believe you showed up to play San Jose in February after
reaching the Australian Open semifinals and were greeted by the media not with
plaudits but with a post-mortem: Why didn't you win? You're playing better
under Goldfine than you ever did with Gilbert, yet everyone wonders what's
wrong with your game.


Truth is, there are days when you wonder, too. Most of them happen when you're
across the net from Roger Federer. "He'll have to wait for Federer to slip a
little bit," says Carlos Moya about you - and after the way Federer played at
Wimbledon, you can't help but think on the court, he feels like he played the
perfect point, and he loses the point. He says, "What do I have to do to win?"


At its most discouraging, such as after losing to No. 62 Jose Acasuso at Toland
Garros or No. 68 Gilles Muller at the U.S. Open, you begin to doubt your
future. Before Wimbledon, you tell British journalist Paul Weaver that your
goal is "to win at least another Slam." To Weaver, that seems like setting your
sights astonishingly low. Federer, he writes, "could well win three or four
more titles at Wimbledon alone."


"Roddick beats lower-ranked players very consistently," Federer says, but that
seems like damning with faint praise because you sure can't beat him. You've
won only once in 11 tries, taken just four of 28 sets lifetime. You're
magnanimous, handling the press conferences with grace, yet it feels like
you're wearing someone else's suit. You're no Pat Rafter, equally comfortable
at No. 1 or No. 5, or Yevgeny Kafelnikov, with inscrutable goals and
mysterious motivations. You grew up playing and following team sports, a
prototypical American who embraces the Lombardi ethos of winning no matter what
the cost. "Being No. 1 is the American mind-set, and you see that in Andy,"
says Tarik Benhabiles, your coach from 1999 to 2003. "He has to be No.1 in
everything."


To see you play horse or poker, it becomes clear why even losing to a man who
played three perfect sets at Wimbledon keeps you up at night. You once went
an entire season as a 12-and-under playing the Florida circuit and beyond and
never lost a match. "Andy's tasted it," Taylor Dent says. "I'm sure if you had
him on the couch, he'd say he honestly believes he has the talent to be No. 1."


But how to get from here to there? Maybe you're thinking about that as you
turn back to the practice court and slap a forehand into the net. "Oh, wow,
that was special," you sneer, your contempt turned toward nobody but yourself.







YOU'RE ANDY RODDICK

AND PEOPLE KNOW THE NAME.



You became famous before you could consider the ramifications. Your dalliance
with Mandy Moore was far more publicized than the weakness in your backhand.
A lager American audience saw you host Saturday Night Live than win the U.S.
Open.


Your career has had a peculiar trajectory, more hang gilder than bell curve.
You'd barely begun being the hunter, a talented young American on the rise,
when you became the hunted. One minute you were helping Pete Sampras prepare
for a Davis Cup tie, and the next minute, it seemed, you were beating him, on
your way to fulfilling veteran tennis journalist Curry Kirkpatrick's 2002
prediction that you would "rescue, regenerate, and own American tennis."


You're barely 23, yet the expectations weighing on you are those of a
seasoned champion. "At 17, if I won a match, that was a great result," you
say. "Now, if I don't win the tournament, [journalists] will be writing stuff
about me."


Your game is a career now, with all that entails. It funds a foundation, a
retinue, a way of life: sushi dinners at Matsuhisa and steaks at the Ivy. Gone
are the trucker caps and unsightly visors, replaced by Lacoste Wimbledon
whites. They make you look as uncomfortable as an 8-year-old at a wedding, but
they fill your bank account.


You've grown up. You no longer punish yourself with a sprint through a golf
course as you did after a loss in Cincinnati last year, or through the tunnels
below Ashe Stadium after losing there, as if trying to inflict self-pain. Now
you sit after a loss and discuss it with Goldfine, figuring out what you can
learn: an adult dealing with failure as adroitly as he deals with success.
"When Andy first burst on the scene, he had no responsibilities," says your
trainer, Doug Spreen, who joined you in 2004 and has become one of your closest
friends. "We can all look back at when we were 20 and 21 years old see the
years when we stepped up and became men."


You're a businessman now, not just a tennis player. You've taken control of
your career, not hesitating to give orders to SFX, which represents you, or
sister-in-law Ginger Roddick, who handles your marketing. "Andy hired Brad
and Andy fired Brad," your mother, Blanche, says of your decision to leave
Gilbert. "We had very little to do with it." You sign off on magazine articles,
photo shoots, ad campaigns. The American Express TV spots about your missing
mojo that blanketed U.S. Open coverage rang with painful truth after your
first-round collapse, but they also helped package you as a hip, 21st-century
personality, steeped in self-parody, as shameless as any reality show star.


Sill, you are who you are, and much of that is who you've always been. On the
court, you still tug at your shirt like there's a bedbug inside, still
nervously spin your racquet before you serve. That serve remains "the best
weapon in men's tennis," according to Mardy Fish (through September you
ranked first in aces and in the Top 10 in first-serve percentage, an
unprecedented achievement), yet you don't seem to trust it. You lack the
patience to wait out an opponent like Sampras used to, matching your Nebraska
Cornhuskers obliterate opponents 77-0, you seem to equate margin of victory
with effort. You take winning a 7-5 set as an affront, forgetting that
Sampras 7-5'd his way to tennis immortality.


You're sill far less comfortable coming to net than whacking winners from the
baseline. Trouble is, Federer is quick enough to run down those winners. And
now Rafael Nadal has enough power to slug with anyone. So you wake up one
morning at No. 5 and wonder where yesterday's promise went. "In the past,
he's won, and he probably wasn't doing all the things he should have been
doing," Goldfine says. "Now, he says, 'Geez, I'm doing all the right stuff,
so what's going on? How come I'm not winning matches?'"


"He's struggling a little bit…and now [everyone is] comparing him to Federer,"
says Tim Henman, who knows something about the weight of expectations. But the
fact is, you didn't win a single tournament during the second half of 2004,
your Davis Cup losses last fall hurt as much as the Wimbledon final, and this
year's first-round departure from Flushing Meadows was your earliest from a
major since your teens, "People have to understand that any player will lose
more tournaments than he'll win," your mom says. But Federer - him again! -
finished 2004 74-6 and won 11 tournaments, including every final he reached.


You're impatient and stubborn, which makes it difficult to adapt to
circumstance. "It gets tougher when you always play the same game," Federer
said about you in Key Biscayne.


Goldfine has been preaching the importance of shortening the points against
Federer, who typically runs down the three fourth- and if you don't, grabs an
angle and takes control of the point. Come to net and make him hit the winner
on your terms, Goldfine advises. "Let's see what happens when it's 5-6 and
30-30, and you're right across the net from him."


The Legg-Mason tournament in D.C., where Federer, Nadal, Hewitt, and Safin
aren't appearing, where Andre Agassi pulled out and Henman lost early, seems
like and ideal opportunity to try out this mind-set. You step in against
Giovanni Lapentti, an Ecuadorian who has never cracked the top 100, but choose
to use the match to exorcise demons. You win in straight sets in less than an
hour, but Goldfine suggests that you could have followed some forehands up to
net. You shake your head and tell him you had winners in you sights.


Goldfine won't contradict you then, not right after a match. "But it's getting
[Andy] to look at the big picture," he'll say later. "Getting him to
understand that the ball will be sitting there against Giovanni Lapentti, but
it won't be against Roger. And you won't feel comfortable coming in against
Roger unless you've come in against Giovanni Lapentti."


It spelled doom for Giovanni Lapentti. And that's as far ahead as you care to
look.






THE NEXT NIGHT, YOU PLAY JUAN IGNACIO CHELA OF AGRENTINA.


You haven't forgotten that he beat you once; you mention it, your coach
mentions it. He servers well and hits some artful shots, but his holds are
perilous and your are uncomplicated. You wait him out and win the first set 6-4
, then lose a tiebreak in the second.


You get angry with yourself, frustrated, testy with the crowd. "Why are people
still coming in?" you yell, eager to serve following an odd-game break. After
a call goes against you, you gesture toward where the ball lands to make
certain the linesman saw it. "He's a lot more visible when he has discomfort
than Pete ever was," Jim Courier says. "He doesn't hide anything."


In the deciding set, you get an early break. Chela, who never seemed to believe
he could win the match, can't get it back. No surprise there, but you're spent
by the victory. It just seems like it's never easy these days. Later, Courier
psychoanalyzes. "Andy wants to deserve our attention," he says. "He knows he's
the guy in America holding the cards, and he wants to be worthy of that mantle.
He's not where he'd like to be, and he's realistic enough to know thatches got
some work to do to get back to the top. But he's in the conversation, which is
all any athlete ever really asks." In your quietest moments, you'd agree. But
it's hard to settle for that when the conversation used to be all about you.


With the Chela match over, a bizarre spectacle unfolds. The tournament has
offered three random fans the opportunity to try to return you vaunted serve,
the fastest in history. There's the first, a guy in what appear to be 1970s
gym shorts, holding his racquet like he's about to carve a turkey.


"Think he'll hit the ball back?" asks Wayne Bryan (father of doubles star Bob
and Mike Bryan), who's serving as matter of ceremonies. "No," you respond.
You take a deep breath. Is that a fretful fan waiting to receive the serve?
Or is it Federer?


No matter. Your competitive urge is kicking like a bronco. You release the
ball and twist your body into the familiar coil, then unleash a 145-m.p.h.
heater passes the poor sap before he has a chance to star his swing. You ace
the guy. You can't help it. You're Andy Roddick.


By Bruce Schoenfeld

in Tennis Magazine November/Decmeber 2005

http://TENNIS.com

*page 60-66

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