The Greatness of Andy Roddick

If you’re a casual fan, you might know Nick Kyrgios only as a “troubled” player to whom announcers are always cryptically referring.

(One of the big annoyances of the tennis press is that they treat the ATP like a ballroom dance club—never really criticizing the players and always trying to obscure unpleasantness. I suspect that’s because the world of players, announcers, coaches, and governing-body members is small and incestuous and most people in the business are always looking down the road to future gigs on the carousel.)

So here’s what you need to know about Kyrgios: He’s an Australian who comes across as something of a jerk. He is not a “truth teller” or an “in-your-face” personality to whom the kids these days really respond (as Chris Evert ludicrously described him before one match last week). He gets into Twitter fights and once talked smack at Stan Wawrinka during a match. Kyrgios seems to be not very popular in the locker room. But his greatest sin is tanking. Kyrgios takes points off. Sometimes games. Occasionally a set. Or a match. To give you a sense of the magnitude—he often doesn’t even hide it—have a look at this from last year when Kyrgios just started walking away from service returns at Wimbledon.

This isn’t just poor form. It disrespects the game, the other players, and anyone who admires sports. It also strikes into the heart of the darkest secret of professional tennis: that the game has a match-fixing problem. So tanking in tennis is a little like MLB players betting on baseball.

And none of this would matter except that Kyrgios is really, really good. If he were a journeyman ranked 300 in the world, no one would care. But Kyrgios has top-five talent. Maybe better.

The Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for a tennis player goes something like this:

At the bottom of the pyramid is insane athletic ability. A lot of people think of tennis as a country-club sport where anyone who takes enough lessons eventually succeeds. That’s wrong. The players on tour are ridiculous jocks.

I went to high school with a guy named Mike Sell. He won the New Jersey state singles championship all four years, something I’m pretty sure no one had ever done before. But if he hadn’t played tennis year-round, he would have been the star on every other sports team. Mike would have been the fastest guy on the cross country squad. In basketball, he could drain three-pointers all day long. If he’d played football he could have been an all-county tailback. He could do anything.

(Mike was also a tremendously great guy. An incredible athlete, the most popular guy in school, and the nicest kid you’d ever meet. The kind who was always laughing with people, but never laughing at anyone.)

Anyway, Mike went on to be an all-American player at the University of Georgia and had a great pro career after that, reaching as high as 136 in the world. I can’t emphasize enough what an accomplishment that is. And it all started with him being a stud athlete.

What separates guys like Mike from the next level of pros? Reproducible weapons. To be a top-50 player you need at least one weapon that you can draw on to win points: A big forehand. A booming serve. Speed. To be a champion—a guy who can win tour events—you need two or more of these weapons.

What separates the next level of players is the head. To win not just tour events, but majors, you have to be mentally strong—able to win big points and come back after losing big points. And finally, the thing that separates a dominant player, like Novak Djokovic, from a merely great player, like Juan Martin del Potro, is health. You can have everything else—the athletic ability, the weapons, the head—but if you have wonky knees or a bad wrist, you’re out of luck.

Nick Kyrgios has the first two levels of the pyramid; has them in spades. He’s an incredible athlete—rangy, big wingspan, strong, but with soft hands. And he already has three weapons: A huge serve, a devastating forehand, and great court coverage. He can hit you off the court or he can smother you with footwork. He’s only 21 and he could be winning majors already. Except for his head.

At the U.S. Open this year, Kyrgios had a straight shot into the fourth round, where he would have faced Wawrinka again. But in the third round he came up against journeyman Illya Marchenko. Kyrgios won the first set, but wasn’t especially into the match. He dropped the next two, and then retired, citing a bad hip. Throughout the affair he looked barely interested.

Which brings us to Andy Roddick. Roddick is one of my favorite players of the last 20 years because he’s the flip-side of Nick Kyrgios.

Like Kyrgios, Roddick had immense physical gifts. Like Kyrgios, Roddick had big-league weapons—the most dangerous serve of his era, a shattering forehand, and phenomenal net play. Roddick had all the tools.

Unlike Kyrgios, Roddick had the head, too. He was a hard worker who learned to manage big points. He never self-destructed on court. If you wanted to beat Andy Roddick, you had to beat Andy Roddick. And on top of it all, Roddick played the meat of his career without major injury.

Roddick should have been an all-time great. The only problem was that he had the misfortune to be born in 1982.

That sandwiched him between the two greatest players ever: Pete Sampras (born 1971) and Roger Federer (born 1981). Between 1990 and 2002, Sampras won 14 majors. Between 2003 and 2012, Federer won 17 majors.

Roddick turned pro in 2000 and retired in 2012. In any other era, he would have won multiple slams and been a contender in nearly every tournament he played. As it was, he was lucky to win the U.S. Open once. Because for the entirety of Roddick’s career you basically had to be one of the three or four best players ever in order to win a slam.

While Roddick was unlucky with his tennis timing, he was awfully lucky in everything else. He was the best American player of his generation and between that and his movie-star looks, he was guaranteed to be a major figure in American tennis, with all the endorsement deals and perks that entails. Oh, and he married Brooklyn Decker, an SI swimsuit model.

But here’s what I loved about Roddick: After realizing that he was caught between Sampras and Federer, it would have been easy for him to coast. He could have kept playing on autopilot, reaching semi-finals, picking up endorsement checks, and going home every night to his bikini-model wife.

But he didn’t. Roddick worked as hard as anyone on tour. After he realized that he couldn’t beat Federer, he remade his game at least three different times: First bulking up for power; then turning to serve-and-volley; and finally shedding weight for speed. None of these theories of victory ever panned out—he was 3-21 against Federer lifetime, 0-8 at majors. But the point is that Roddick never took a day off. He’d fight like hell and then go back to the drawing board when it didn’t work out and try to find some other way to beat the guy who was already considered the GOAT.

Here’s the big thing about Roddick: He cared.

He cared about winning and losing, but not because it made much material difference to him. Truth is, Roddick wouldn’t be any better off today if he’d won three or four more slams. He cared because he respected the sport. Roddick wasn’t a glamour boy with one eye on Hollywood or his designer clothing lines. He took tennis seriously. Like it was his job. Like a man.

And his dedication gave the sport some truly great moments. In 2007 he met Federer in the quarterfinals at U.S. Open. It was a night match and Roddick came out of the chute like a bull. (Treat yourself to 12 minutes of highlights here; you won’t be sorry.) He went at Federer with a ferocity I’d never seen on a tennis court, before or since. Federer won in straight sets, 7-6, 7-6, 6-2–this was during the stretch when he was simply untouchable, winning 11 of 16 majors. But it was one of the closest matches I’ve ever seen, akin to the legendary 2001 U.S. Open quarterfinal where Sampras beat Agassi 6-7, 7-6, 7-6, 7-6.

At the 2009 Wimbledon final Roddick tried desperately to keep Federer from breaking Pete Sampras’ major record, taking the Swiss to 16-14 in a fifth set that went on for hours. Roddick could have folded with dignity at any time in that final set. No one would have blamed him. Everyone would have said that he acquitted himself well. But Roddick fought like he was the last man at the Alamo.

One of the more revealing Roddick moments came in a post-match interview after he was blown off the court by Federer in the semifinals of the 2007 Australian Open. Go watch it, it’s only three minutes and the kind of thing you rarely see from professional athletes. It’s funny, sure. Roddick is a smart guy, and charming. But it’s real. It’s candid. It’s manly.

That Maslow’s hierarchy I mentioned for tennis players? You’ll notice that manliness and guts weren’t on it. That’s because, strictly speaking, even a great tennis player doesn’t need them. No one ever accused Ivan Lendl of having a yard of guts.

But the grit is why we care. It’s what makes tennis such a good metaphor for life. It’s why Nick Kyrgios is a cautionary tale and despite what the record says about his slams, Andy Roddick is one of the all-time greats.