Andy Roddick, the U.S. Open’s last American male champion, sees himself a tennis schlub

The basic arc of Andy Roddick’s life goes something like this:

One day you’re a chirpy, hot-shot teenager with a thunderclap serve, who wears a baseball cap on a tennis court before that becomes a thing, and then one day you’re not good enough anymore, because inevitably nobody is. In between, you go to the top of a sport that doesn’t love chirpy teenagers in baseball caps all that much.

Then one day you wake up and you’re a soon-to-be middle aged guy at the end of his career, wondering what the rest of your life is supposed to look like. There has to be something else besides 27 holes a day to occupy the brain.

Coach? Commentator? The guy who gets paid to show up and shake hands with some company’s sales force, to tell stories about what it was like to face Roger Federer and all your worst fears, in the forbearance of overtime in the fifth set of a Wimbledon final, shadows slanting across the grass?

Roddick didn’t have an answer. So what did he do? What came after everything the itinerant life of pro tennis had taught him, after 15 years of lonely hotel rooms, of too-long layovers in places he might never have chosen to be? “Wasn’t really motivated to work much,” he said.

He disappeared for a while, from the experience that made him vow to never “punt control of my geography to someone else again.”

Then he decided to wing it, thoughtfully.

“I’ve always been curious,” he said.

Roddick is talking from his garage in North Carolina. It doubles as the set for “Served with Andy Roddick,” the weekly (and sometimes more frequent) podcast that the Tennis Channel shows on its T2 network. It’s also where he sometimes beams in from for post-match analysis. There are plenty of moments when he still sounds like that chirpy teenager in the baseball cap, like when he recounts a guy questioning one of his calls during a recent set at a local club.

“Really pal? I played three Wimbledon finals, won the U.S. Open and spent three months as the world No. 1, and you think I’m hooking you on Court 11 in the Carolina ‘burbs?”

Listen a little more closely, and something else becomes pretty clear. Somewhere along the way during the dozen years since he called it quits, Andy Roddick morphed into a fully fledged grown-up, whether he likes it or not.

How did that happen? How did that chirpy teenager suddenly get to this middle-age existence, wife and kids and in-law dinners, wearing the status of millennial tennis wise man?

Where does life, his and ours, go?

When Roddick became a spunky 21-year-old, he went to the cathedral of American tennis in 2003 and came out with the trophy in his hands and the cap on his head. 21 years on, Roddick, 42, is a dozen years into retirement yet younger than Roger Federer.

No American man has cradled that U.S. Open trophy since, with No. 12, No. 14, and No. 20 seeds, Taylor Fritz, Tommy Paul, and Frances Tiafoe all vying to match Roddick’s achievement in 2024.

Roddick was still in his 20s when he married Sports Illustrated model Brooklyn Decker. Roddick and Decker, who is now a successful actor, have two children: Hank, their 8-year-old son, and Stevie, their 6-year-old daughter. Given what they could be doing, they live what is, by all accounts, a pretty normal life close to her parents. They gather for dinners on many Sunday evenings.

He has also amassed a small fortune built around what he described as “the most boring business you’ll ever hear about.” It’s a commercial real estate company that owns more than 100 properties. He and a partner began to scoop them up on the cheap after the financial meltdown in 2008. Their tenants are companies like Starbucks, Lowe’s, and Home Depot.

One thing he doesn’t do is coach. One thing he does do is stay in regular contact with roughly a dozen tour players who come to him for advice. Sometimes, it’s just texts or a phone call. Sometimes, they appear in North Carolina for a day or two of serving help from one of the masters of the most important shot in tennis. Coco Gauff and Jessica Pegula are in this group.

“I’ve never been paid for coaching and I never will be paid for coaching,” he said.

Roddick is a tennis nerd who likes talking through shots and strategy and the psychological challenges of the game. Don’t even think about asking him to consider heading out on the road to focus on one player.

During the final years of his career, there were some hints that life might go this way for Roddick. Pretty much everyone missed them.

Maybe it was the ball cap. Maybe it was that chin-first approach to the game, or the increasingly visible frustration of having the three best players of the modern era come along and hijack his career. The raw pain of those three final Sunday losses in five years to Federer at Wimbledon, plus another in a U.S. Open final, may have dulled. But it’s always there, a thematic reference point that can become jovial material for a podcast episode, a callback for the audience to go: “Hey, I know that bit!”

He won the U.S. Open in 2003, the last American man to do so. (Nick Laham / Getty Images)

To be a master of delusion and magical thinking is practically a requirement for world-class athletes. They have to convince themselves that they can win any match or game against anyone in the world on any day. Roddick could do that — and then he couldn’t.

A drubbing from Novak Djokovic was what broke him. Djokovic deigned to spend just 54 minutes on beating him 6-2, 6-1 at the All England Club during the 2012 Olympics, on Roddick’s best surface. These guys at the top of the game had a level he no longer possessed, if he ever even did.

Cursed with self-awareness, he woke up in a New York hotel room a month later, in the middle of the U.S. Open. He was feeling a little strange. He called Decker, who was out for a walk, and asked her to come back to the hotel. He needed to talk to her about something.

When she got there, he told her he would be done playing when the tournament spat him out. It didn’t matter that he’d won two of his last four tournaments. Didn’t matter that he could have likely survived with a ranking somewhere between No. 5 and No. 40 for another four or five years. Other statesmen of his era either retired just recently or are still out there, toiling in the three-figure ranks. Roddick wasn’t going to do that.

A few days later, he lost in the fourth round to Juan Martin Del Potro. The tournament honored him with a ceremony at its conclusion. And that was that.

“I know who I am, and I know who I’m not,” he said.

It’s a quality that has come in handy for Roddick, and in a meandering way, it helped bring him back to New York for this year’s U.S. Open, to accept an award for his work with hundreds of less-advantaged children in his hometown of Austin.

They participate in after-school and summer enrichment programs created by his foundation. The programs involve a bit of sport, but are more focused on making up the learning gap with wealthier children, who have access to all manner of extracurricular activities and summer camps when they are not in school.

Roddick started the foundation when he was still a teenager and without much thought. Raise some money. Give some tennis clinics to kids who probably would not be exposed to the sport otherwise. Pat yourself on the back.

For a decade, the foundation was what he described as a “typical athlete nonprofit.” Use your celebrity to raise a bunch of money and get your friends involved, and turn the money over to organizations that you like.

“Elton John would come play,” he said. “That’s not a hard thing to sell.”

Then during one of his final U.S. Opens, he was having dinner with one of his oldest friends, Jeff Lau. Lau is a buddy from their earliest years in junior tennis in Austin, when Roddick was 8 and Lau was 10. Roddick’s tennis got him to No. 1 in the world. Lau’s tennis helped him gain entry into West Point. After graduating, he served overseas, including in Iraq.

Andy Roddick serves to Juan Martin del Potro in his last U.S. Open. (Chris Trotman / Getty Images for USTA)

Lau eventually left the military and began working as an investment banker in New York. He and Roddick would have dinner whenever he came through the city, especially during the U.S. Open.

At one of those dinners, Lau started quizzing Roddick about the foundation, its mission, its structure, and its plan for survival. He wasn’t impressed.

“You’re on your way to irrelevance,” Lau told him. “How long do you think Elton John is going to come play for you?”

At the time, Roddick figured he had about three more years on the tour. He actually had about one. He left the dinner seriously irritated at Lau — because he knew Lau was right.

Roddick’s next thought was to start a charter school, like his hero, Andre Agassi, had done in Las Vegas. Then the smart people in and out of the government of Austin, as well as lots of parents, told him that the city didn’t need another charter school.

During their research, they stumbled on a piece of information that floored them. Texas sometimes used its fifth-grade literacy rates to project how many new prison beds it would need in the future. Could they lift those rates up?

“The biggest gap was actually out of school time,” Lau said.

That meant after school, when kids whose parents are working a second or third job are home alone, while more advantaged children are receiving private lessons or other extracurricular enrichment. Then come summers, when it’s all too easy for kids to give back the progress they have made in the previous 10 months.

When Roddick and Lau launched their programs, they wanted proof that they were making a difference. After five years, they saw what they hoped they would see.

More than 200 Austin kids took part in this summer’s Learn All the Time program. According to Roddick’s foundation they miss fewer days of school, have fewer disciplinary problems and perform better on state tests than their peers.

The seriousness that brought about that initiative carries through on “Served.” The energy is all jocular, sitting around naming tennis players, reviewing results, and making predictions sure to be wrong, but as with Roddick the player, there’s brain inside the baseball cap. These are the two sides to Roddick, who is serious about his work but not too serious about himself.

The Roddick that Roddick presents during the show might easily be confused with some random, pretty decent middle-aged club player, who maybe rose to No. 700 in the world and took home a couple of Challenger titles. Rather than a guy who was world No. 1, and won a few Challenger Tour events and a U.S. Open.

There’s almost always some moment in every episode where he puts the Big Three in one category and then lumps himself with everyone else, and that includes you, with a reference to his own game that is something along the likes of, “schlubs like us.”

Andy Roddick’s on-court demeanour belied the seriousness of his thoughts about tennis. (Ian Walton / Getty Images)

He’s also not afraid to be on the receiving end of just about anything. Lindsay Davenport, a longtime friend who is a former world No. 1 and the current Billie Jean King Cup coach for the U.S., called him out for mocking U.S. Open quarterfinalist Emma Navarro. Navarro had had to perform something, ahead of her inaugural appearance on the national team. She chose to rap.

It wasn’t a great performance. Then again, Navarro is a tennis player, not a hip-hop artist, and Davenport didn’t like the way Roddick had been, in her view, demeaning to a good-hearted young woman who was playing along with a joke. It wasn’t so much his words but his tone.

“You didn’t have to be such a…” she said. You can finish the sentence. The word rhymes with “stick.”

Lulled by all the irreverence, the pretty important tennis nuggets can rattle past at Roddick’s excited clip, especially when it comes to serving, his greatest skill.

He was one of the first to notice that Alexander Zverev had lowered his toss by about a foot, letting him crack the ball as never before. The adjustment has taken him to No. 2 in the world.

Gauff’s second-serve issues? She probably wants to move her toss back a bit, he explained in pretty simple terms. She’s trying to go too far forward into the court, and the further forward you go, the harder it is to control the serve.

Gauff followed his advice. After her struggles at this year’s U.S. Open with her serve, she may well seek more of it.

GO DEEPER

‘They slow things down in their minds’: How tennis players return 130mph serves

Advertisement

Carlos Alcaraz’s serve, having been good but kind of unthreatening compared to just about everything else he does, became borderline deadly at Wimbledon. Novak Djokovic couldn’t believe what was skidding and jumping off the grass in the final. Roddick saw why. Instead of raising his arms in a classic straight V-shape, Alcaraz was rotating his back shoulder more and coming around the ball. It was hitting the court and taking off in a more dramatic way. It probably felt a lot heavier when it hit Djokovic’s strings.

Drop any of those nuggets at your next tennis barbecue. Your buddies will be impressed.

He also took time to reveal his recent brush with skin cancer (he’s OK, but wear sunscreen, please) and he was one of the more sober voices after news broke that Jannik Sinner had tested positive for a banned anabolic steroid. No, he said, it wasn’t likely a signal that sustained doping, outside of those two failed tests, was a part of Sinner’s success. He explained the randomness of testing, the knocks on the door. He even explained it to Nick Kyrgios, who has his own “Good Trouble” media vehicle and no fear of having an opinion.

Lots of people in tennis have these thoughts. Players, fans, social media creators, tennis journalists. Roddick’s versions of these thoughts cut through, and it isn’t all to do with the cachet of being a former world No. 1, or taking Federer to an edge over which he would not be pushed.

“It’s one thing to be able to see the game and have clever thoughts,” said Bob Wiley, a top programmer at The Tennis Channel. “It’s another to be able to express yourself succinctly so people can understand it.”

Where all of this leads, not even Roddick knows, as if any of us ever do. At the moment, though, it’s a pretty beautifully boring grown-up existence.

“I just really like being home,” he said.

(Top photos: Cynthia Lum, WireImage; Tim Clayton, Corbis / Getty Images; Design: Eamonn Dalton for The Athletic)