Andy Roddick’s explanation for his straight sets loss to Feliciano Lopez was pretty simple: “I got beat.” He did. He got his ass handed to him by a free-swinging Lopez, who hit 28 aces, more than 50 winners and only 7 errors. Seven errors! That’s one hell of a performance, and should provide plenty of motivation for Roddick for the US Davis Cup tie against Spain in two weeks.
The match with Spain will be in Austin, Roddick’s hometown. The USTA awarded Austin the Davis Cup as a favor / thank you to Roddick for his years of dedication to the Cup. After this Wimbledon, everybody has to be wondering how many more Davis Cup ties Roddick has in him, and how many more majors he will play.
There are times in life when a window closes without you even detecting it. You know it’s closing and then one day you look up and it’s shut. The sill is painted over. You’re never going through that window. For Roddick, I think you have to assume that the elusive chase for his second grand slam title has abruptly ended. He has been off form for almost a year now, but he was still winning enough at the smaller tournaments for it to seem plausible. But 2011 is where things really went off track. He now finds himself outside the top ten for the first time in a decade. The emergence of Djokovic is just one sign that there is too much distance between Roddick and the top of the field. Players ranked below Roddick are hungry and ready to move up the rankings (Tomic, Raonic, Harrison, Dimitrov). Worst of all, Roddick isn’t making it to the second week of his bst grand slam tournamnts, losing to lesser players like Lopez, Lu Yen (at SW 19) and to Tipsarevic at the US Open.
Roddick’s happy personal life is the root cause of his decline. As soon as I saw Andy’s wife Brooklyn Decker emerging from the surf in a deliberate reference to Bo Derek in the trailer for a Jennifer Aniston / Adam Sandler comedy, I though “uh-oh.” It means Decker suddenly has a hot career in Hollywood, which is great for her…but not conducive to her husband’s tennis.
It’s difficult for Roddick to sustain the single-minded focus that an elite tennis player must have if he’s got one foot in Hollywood. That’s not a criticism, just an observation. We’ve watched this play out before, with John McEnroe, Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi. Of that trio, Sampras’s wife temporarily shelved her career for him while he finished his career…but even then he spiraled pretty quickly.
Of course the reason Pete ran out of steam may well be the reason Andy eventually hangs it up: he gave it 100% for more than a decade, and once he experienced true happiness off the court, that was it. Former coach Jimmy Connors sized it up this way before Wimbledon:
“There’s other things on his mind probably that are taking up space,” Connors said. “Tennis is a 365-day-a-year job. If you’re not willing to put in that time and make that happen over the course of that year, other things creep in there, they take your mind off your business, and all of a sudden tennis is not the most important thing.”
I don’t think Roddick is going to quit tomorrow. However, last summer he said he was not afraid of retirement and did not expect to play beyond the point where he realistically felt he could win a major. He won’t play out the string as a journeyman, like James Blake is doing, because Roddick has always played to win majors. My guess is that he will hang on until the end of 2012, if only to play Wimbledon and then mixed doubles with Serena at Wimbledon in the 2012 Olympics.
Last year Roddick said if he won Wimbledon he would have everything he wants in life – so you know Wimbledon is his Great White Whale. Maybe in ’12 he can have a magical run a la Goran Ivanesevic, who was unseeded when he won his fourth final at SW 19. That’s what he’s trying to figure out now on that long flight home to the States.
Passing Shots 
Posted on June 27, 2011
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