Sport | Tennis
Roddick looks back on Wimbledon
His epic final against Federer this year was a very popular return to form for the American
- The Guardian
- Published: 00:00 November 16, 2009
- Andy Roddick
- Image Credit: AP
London: In the press conference after his Wimbledon final with Roger Federer in July, Andy Roddick was asked to describe the extraordinary events of the previous four hours, particularly the surreal fifth set in which he was forced to serve to stay in the championship nine times, before eventually losing the last of his cat's lives, and the set, 16-14.
"Can you tell us what just happened out there, Andy?" Roddick's interlocutor wondered, as if, like the rest of us, he still wasn't quite sure himself.
Roddick considered the question for only a moment, before answering, simply, bleakly, "I lost."
Not since the "I do" of his marriage a couple of months earlier had Roddick asked two words to carry such a weight of emotional understatement.
The greatest competitors (Connors, Becker, Borg) among whom Roddick now must be counted always talked of being spurred less by the joy of victory than by fear of defeat.
Watching Roddick on court after that final, there was in his eyes not a flicker of satisfaction at having just played the greatest tennis of his life; he had only, in his own mind, come up short once again.
Still raw
Time does not easily heal that hurt. When I ask the same question what happened out there, Andy? nearly five months later, his answer remains the same. "I lost. That's the fact of it for me," he says, on the phone from his home in Austin, Texas. "I mean, I can look back on the process of the tournament as a whole with some satisfaction, the semi, beating Andy Murray, but the final itself is tough for me to think about."
The most frustrating aspect of it all, I guess, must have been the role reversal that he and Federer underwent: for long periods of that match he outplayed, shot for shot, the greatest player ever to pick up a racket.
"It was odd," he agrees, "in that I felt like Roger was relying more on his serve, while I was doing better from the back of the court maybe, which is a little different to how it has gone in the past." He pauses. "But I still lost."
In July, a couple of weeks before his twins were born, I talked to Federer about how that match had felt from his side of the net, in particular the weirdness of that fifth set, in which neither player had seemed remotely likely to crack.
"I had a feeling at changeovers that we would be there all summer long," Federer suggested, "that they would close the roof, people would sleep all night and wake up and me and Andy would still be there, beards growing, holding serve. Honestly, that went through my mind. I knew he was not going to make a mistake, and I didn't feel that I was."
The enemy of tennis players is doubt. Did Roddick share that conviction?
"Well," he says, with a laugh, "it was certainly a different kind of match..."
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