Roddick Has Become a Most Lovable Loser

Andy Roddick is the teenage son who wrecks your car and, as you place your hands on his neck in the strangle position, tells you he was on his way to buy flowers for his mom. He’s the golden retriever who chews a hole in your easy chair and then follows you to the garage, licking your ankle as you get the belt.

He is a tennis player by trade, the third best in the world among male players, according to the mathematicians who calculate such things. He has won more than $10 million doing this, and he is only 23 years old. He even won a major title, the 2003 U.S. Open, and reached the final of the last two Wimbledons.

He is also the great American hope, now that Pete Sampras has gone golfing and isn’t coming back and Andre Agassi is close to doing the same. He is the cornerstone of the U.S. Davis Cup team, the darling of every promoter in this country who holds a tournament and expects to sell lots of tickets to people who want to root for “our Andy.”

Then, our Andy shows up and, more often than not lately, blows a gasket early and leaves the American tennis fan no choice but to figure out who Janko Tipsarevik is.

That’s pretty much what happened Wednesday in the fourth round of the Pacific Life Open at Indian Wells, where, in a three-set loss, Roddick managed to make Russian Igor Andreev look like Rod Laver.

Not only did Roddick lose, but he went out in a blaze of un-glory, getting himself to within one point of match disqualification with two warnings from the umpire’s chair. First, he offered an obscenity as an analysis of his own performance, and did so within earshot of the chair. Then, he reacted to another stupid shot by testing the springiness of the court surface with his racket. The court won. The racket looked like spaghetti.

So, as chronicler of such things, you go to hear what he has to say after all this, and you go with a degree of indignation. The questions all come down to one: What’s the matter with you? With all this talent comes a responsibility to use it, to maximize it, to keep your head and not act, nor play, like a punk.

News conferences in such situations can be confrontational, even ugly. The guy who bought a ticket and sat in the stands, or the guy at home watching on TV and being bombarded by deodorant commercials deserves to know, and you are his pipeline.

And then Roddick disarms you. He makes no alibis, no excuses. He played like a jerk and says so. Most of the time you go listen to some guy who has a degree in boredom yammer on about not winning because of the (a) wind, (b) rain, (c) sun, (d) unfair draw, or (e) lousy lines calls. Not Roddick. You go to his news conference, you get Jon Stewart.

He called it his “funeral press conference.” He said it was the pits because when we break something in anger, only “the wife and kids” see it. When he does it, “there are people watching.”

He said that, at a crucial time in third set, he just “went on walkabout.” He said he “went mental” at the end when he smashed his racket, but it wasn’t significant because, “You know, I could have reached Gandhi-like peace of mind and it wouldn’t have mattered at 5-1.”

He was asked a question that implied his opponent had kept his poise better, to which Roddick replied that Andreev had slammed his racket on the net at one point.

“Judging from the way he went and attacked the net in the middle of the tiebreaker, went Sideshow Bob on it, I don’t know,” Roddick said.

“Sideshow Bob,” you find out, is a character in “The Simpsons” whose nature is to go ballistic at all times.

Roddick was angry with himself, both sincere and clever about how he expressed it, and introspective about what might get him going again. Soon, you realize that you, the media, are not the enemy, but his therapists.

So you leave unsure of lots of things, but certainly not as angry as you had been. You theorize that Andy Roddick might be a better celebrity now than he is a tennis player. You wonder if he is overrated or an under-achiever. You hate his game, but you love how he deals with you hating his game.

You decide he isn’t even a top 10 player now, but you are certain that he is the world’s No. 1 at holding a disarming news conference.