The Ace

A week after winning the u.s. open in Flushing Meadows, Queens, New York, twenty-one-year-old Andy Roddick turned up in far-off Slovakia to play a little Davis Cup team tennis and was relaxing in his hotel room shortly before the first practice session. Since arriving the day before, he'd slept for about twelve hours. His room was a mess. The bedsheets were wadded up in the middle of his bed, and his clothes -- two pairs of jeans, a large number of T-shirts and a good bit of Reebok wear -- were heaped in clumps on the floor. He kicked them out of his way and opened a closet, where a couple of wrinkled dress shirts dangled on hangers.

"I was going to be organized this week,'' he said amiably, "but it's already gotten away from me.''

Then, after apologizing for the jumble and folding himself into the most uncomfortable chair in the room, he twirled a tennis racket around in one of his big mitts and gave an accounting of some little-known facts about what had taken place the previous Sunday, when he transformed himself from the future of American tennis to its present. That morning, in his room at the W Hotel, he ate some fruit, some yogurt, some cereal and a bagel, and after that he took a phone call from Elton John, who had been glued to his TV set all during Roddick's close-call semifinal match with David Nalbandian. "You asshole, you had me so nervous yesterday, you had me crapping in my pants," Roddick remembered Sir Elton saying. "You need to make it a little easier for me today,'' which he did several hours later, defeating Juan Carlos Ferrero in straight sets and dropping to his knees sobbing.

Following the victory, Roddick ate dinner with his mother, Blanche, his father, Jerry, his girlfriend, the pop star and actress Mandy Moore, his sports agent and about twenty-five others, with the huge tab being picked up by Reebok, which has sponsored Roddick since he was sixteen. Around 3 a.m., he finally fell asleep.

By 9 a.m., he was at the Today show studios, getting ready for his first live media appearance of the new day. After that, he did Access Hollywood (9:15 a.m.), Regis and Kelly (10 a.m.), ESPN Radio (12:15 p.m.), a photo shoot in Times Square (12:30 p.m.), two separate round-table press conferences (1 p.m., 2:30 p.m.), CNN (3 p.m.), MTV (5:00 p.m.), Late Show With David Letterman (5:30 p.m.), etc. When it was all over, he wasn't sure which was more tiring: playing in the finals and winning $1 million or spending a day with the press. At 9:30 p.m., he and Moore flew to Texas, where he hung out with his two brothers, John and Lawrence, goofed around endlessly with Lawrence's two young children and house-hunted for a second home, in Austin, where he was raised. By Friday, he was back in Boca Raton, Florida, his home base for the past eleven years.

"Friday night was my first night home since my twenty-first birthday,'' he said, "so I went out with the boys and they put a hurt on me.'' The boys amounted to a group of four: his roommate Scott Walkwitz, who is a waiter at a local restaurant; Greg Panas, who is a girls' soccer coach; Jay Mitsch, who teaches high school algebra in Spanish River, Florida; and Stu Kozlowski, a future lawyer. First stop was a sports bar called the Draft House; after that, a bar called Bradley's.

The next day, Roddick couldn't find his passport, so he flew to Washington, D.C., where the State Department flung open its doors and issued him a new one. And the day after that, the waters of the Danube were floating by not far from his hotel, a Radisson in downtown Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. "Is that where we are?'' he said humorously, still twirling a tennis racket.

He went on to talk some about his on-court behavior, which has always been colorful. He's been known to rip off his shirt and toss it into the stands after a game well-played; to high-five the crowd after a point well-played; to clap his racket in appreciation of an opponent's point well-played; and to mix it up with the umpires after a point badly called -- all of which has endeared him to fans, if not to the umpires. He's said some pretty nasty things to them since turning pro three years ago. He called one a moron and to another said, "Have you heard of that part of the body called a spine? Get one!'' His own personal favorite umpire-directed witticism, however, is the one he muttered for the benefit of those sitting in his box: "This guy's issues have issues.''

"I've dropped the F bomb on a couple of guys, too,'' he said cheerfully. "But I've never gone too far over the line. There's a way to go about it. Like, if you're on a center-court TV match and you go up and say point-blank, 'F you,' that probably wouldn't fly too well. You're probably going to get fined. So you'd say it more like under your breath and hope that they hear it but don't really quite hear it, if you know what I'm saying. I've said, 'You guys are the only guys who on a daily basis can screw up and still have a job,' which is not true, but sometimes I just have to vent. Actually, I've had some umpires come up to me and be like, 'Man, on the court, you're the biggest asshole to us, but off the court you always say hello. You're a totally different person. You're just weird, man.'

"When I was younger,'' he went on, chattily, "my mom once pulled me off the court because of my temper. It was in the juniors, where you call your own lines. One year I played this kid who'd just killed me; I couldn't hit the ball close to the line without him calling it out. So the next year I have to play this same kid again, and my mom says, 'Don't let him get the better of you. Try to be better than him.' I lose the first set on a call I don't agree with. Then I'm down one-zero in the second, he pops the ball up and I hit it as hard as I can right at him. He ducks. You know how in tennis you call a ball out by raising your index finger in the air? He does it with his middle finger, so I jump the net with my racket and try to go after him. After that, my mom says, 'Get off the court,' and I forfeit the match. You don't get many cool points for that at the age of twelve, your mom pulling you off the court. Yup, it's not easy to recover from that.''

Off the court, as the umps like to say, Roddick has always been totally different, an even-keeled sort, positive, thoughtful, happy, self-deprecating, the first to say that the early hype about him being the future of American tennis was undeserved, that he didn't think he had it in him to win a Grand Slam. As one dazzled sportswriter put it not long ago, "I can't remember meeting a world-class athlete so young and yet so wholesome and personable.'' He seems uncomplicated, too. His favorite movies include American Pie, The Shawshank Redemption, Dumb and Dumber -- "and, oh, yeah, Office Space. Office Space is awesome! I mean, I met Michael Bolton last week -- he did a great performance before the finals -- and I just kept thinking of the guy in Office Space named Michael Bolton.'' He can't remember the last time he cried in grief, if he ever has. Though he professes to have no interest in the minutiae of endorsement deals, a Wheaties cereal box "would definitely be cool.'' He's never smoked a cigarette or a joint; never done cocaine, acid or X; never shoplifted; never even downloaded a song off the Internet. He's got only one vice that he can think of. "My fingernails don't exist. I chew them something fierce. They're disgusting, gross. I've been doing it since I was nine. I've tried to stop, but I've given up on it. When you're twelve and your mom offers you fifty dollars per nail that you grow out, and you still can't stop, then you know you have issues with it.''

The only other real issue he's ever had to deal with, he said, is his height. Until his midteens, he stood only five feet one.

"I was tiny! Tiny! Teensy, teensy, teensy!'' he recalled. "And that bothered me, especially because girls always viewed me as their little brother or best friend instead of as the 'object of their desire.' That kind of sucked.'' Over a two-year period, however, he shot up to six feet two, began dating, lost his virginity ("It was probably later than when my buddies did, but it wasn't a big concern to me'') and found that when it came to girls, one thing he wasn't very good at was breaking up.

"Breaking up with girls makes me feel the worst,'' he said, twisting the cap off a bottle of water. "Oh, my God, there's nothing worse than that. I'm terrible at it. I'm the guy who sits there and reviews his story a million times and tries to think of some way that'll let her off easy. I've dated a couple of girls who've got the checklist -- funny, smart, attractive -- but I just don't know. So, what do you tell them? I say, 'Maybe I'm not into dating right now. I thought I was, but I'm not.' And they're like, 'What are you talking about! No!' And they have no bones about using the tears, because tears work and make you feel like horse manure. That's their go-to. Oh, it's terrible. A girl crying will break your ass down! I'd rather pay a girl a large sum of money to break up with me than go through that. I'd take a punch in the face from Tyson if I could fricking have her break up with me instead.''

Historically, he has favored blondes, he said. "But now I'm more in my brunette phase.'' These days, that brunette is, of course, Mandy Moore. They met in Toronto, where she was filming the movie How to Deal and he was playing tennis. Her mom showed up at one of his matches and invited him to the set. A week later, Roddick was in Cincinnati, and Moore flew there to go out with him on their first date. They went to the King's Island theme park and rode a couple of rides. It was extremely hot that day and Roddick was sweating big-time bullets, and all he could think was, "She's thinking I'm this gross thing.'' Finally, they got out of the sun, had an early dinner, went to a movie, drove around and capped it all off with more food, at a White Castle. At some point during the evening, though, Roddick made sure to make his move, because it was either make a move or that would be that, given the hectic, far-flung nature of their professional lives.

"We knew that we weren't going to see each other again soon,'' he said. "You know what I'm saying? You can't kiss and tell, but it didn't take that long before I kissed her.''

That was a little more than a year ago and, Roddick reported, all is well with the relationship, though Moore wouldn't mind it if her boyfriend's body contained at least one jealous bone. "She gets mad at me sometimes. She's like, 'Nothing affects you!' I'm like, 'I trust you. I have faith in you.' I mean, if something happens, it happens. I try not to stress about things I have no control over.''

He stood up, stretched, looked at his watch, grabbed a racket and went downstairs, where he was driven to a nearby stadium and gave his practice partner a good pounding, sent one ball through the open roof all the way to the next galaxy and cooled down by having Davis Cup coach Patrick McEnroe toss balls in his direction that he then tried to smack with the thin edge of his racket. Comically, he missed a few, whiffled a few, glanced one into the bleachers and called it quits. At 1:50 p.m., he showed up at a press conference with the rest of his Davis Cup teammates. It was supposed to be a group thing, but, naturally, the only player the Slovakian press really wanted to talk to was him. His teammates made jokes about this ("Maybe I should just turn off my microphone,'' one said); and when Roddick used the word super in an answer, they began saying "super'' under their breath every time he talked, until he couldn't take it any more and started cracking up.

The local reporters wanted to know what he thought of their players, their city, their clay courts and their women. Warming to this last one, Roddick said, "I don't know, but I see all these Slovakian players with these hot girls, so it must be something in the water over here. There are so many good-looking girls in this country!'' Teammate James Blake thought this was an especially entertaining answer and began to pantomime reading all about it in next week's issue of People.

Afterward, coach McEnroe took a seat and said a few words in favor of the new U.S. Open champion. "He's exactly what American tennis needed at the exact right time,'' he said. By then, Roddick was in the elevator, heading for another practice session. When that was over, he got a massage and went back to his hotel room. It was late in the day, a little over a week after he'd won the U.S. Open, and he and his teammates would probably get together soon for a friendly little game of poker, using their Davis Cup-supplied spending money -- $500 each -- to stoke the pot.

"With six or seven guys, it can really get up there," he said. "And, when it comes to poker, they love it when I play."

(September 24, 2003)