Roddick can't beat the rain
By Art Spander
NEW YORK -- What a great headline: "ROBINSON CANNOT." It was in the Post, an allusion to the Yankees' Robinson Cano, who didn't dive for a ground ball out of his reach. That was Monday. On Tuesday, it was A-Rod who could not, the other A-Rod now in this town, Andy Roddick.
Somehow, some way, it always rains here around Labor Day, during the U.S. Open tennis championships. One year it's a storm from off the coast. Another year it's the remnants of a hurricane. If you can slog it here, you can slog it anywhere.
Unless you're playing tennis, outdoors, which is what Roddick and Juan Martin del Potro did for a while, as Roddick, in his farewell, battled into the second week and the fourth round. ESPN was all over the match, Chris Fowler, John McEnroe, the Bay Area's Brad Gilbert.
Would it be the last hurrah for the 30-year-old Roddick, Open champion in 2003, who stunningly announced on his birthday, last Thursday, that when he's out of this tournament he's out of competitive tennis? Or would Roddick continue the 130-mph serves and the drama going into the fifth round?
Neither, it turned out. An hour into the Tuesday night match, which started late, play was suspended by rain, with the match at 6-6 in the first set and Roddick ahead, 1-0, in the tiebreak.
The plan was to restart Wednesday, but thunderstorms are forecast. In the previous four years, the Open has finished on a Monday, a probability this time. When Roddick will finish is anybody's guess. He's not supposed to get past Del Potro, the No. 7 seed – Roddick, once the world's No. 1, is seeded No. 20. And should Andy defy logic, almost surely the great Novak Djokovic would be his next opponent.
But Roddick is enjoying these moments. He knows the end is near, and he is at peace with the player and the person he has become.
In this town, he's the other A-Rod, along with the Yanks' Alex Rodriguez, and that puts him in an esteemed class. The Post, the Daily News and Newsday are tabloids, the few, the proud, with sports headlines on the back page no less powerful or meaningful than those news headlines on the front page.
There’s an intensity fueled by those headlines. Every day, all 365 of them, there has to be a subject to get the fans excited, even when in truth there's nothing. The Mark Sanchez-Tim Tebow issue is the stuff of dreams for the tabs. The other day in the Post, Sanchez was on the back cover and, because he apparently is dating Eva Longoria, additionally on the front. Hey, it was a holiday weekend and killings and political corruption just weren't that important.
Rodriguez, coming back to the Yankees after rehab – he had not played with New York since breaking his hand on July 24 – took the Post back cover. "IT'S UP TO A-ROD," according to the headline.
In a way, at the U.S. Open across the East River, that was also the situation. If it were not for Roddick and the awesome Serena Williams, who Monday beat the Czech brewer's daughter, Andrea Hlavackova, 6-0, 6-0 – the double-bagel as it's known – American tennis would be absent from the American Open.
Roddick, certainly, is as much a curiosity as a personality. How long can he last? Even Kim Clijsters of Belgium, who previous to Andy announced this would be her last competitive event, was in a prime seat at Arthur Ashe Stadium, where early most of the seats in the 23,000-capacity arena – prime or not – were empty.
The weather had been bad throughout the day. Maria Sharapova and Marion Bartoli only made it through four games (all of them won by Bartoli) before that match was postponed. So spectators properly were hesitant to show up, arriving late as they do for dinner in Manhattan.
The crowd was decidedly pro-Roddick, understandably when he was a homeboy against the Argentine Del Potro, and when Andy broke serve in the sixth game to lead 4-2, the biased cheers were apparent.
So was the oppressive weather, 77 degrees with 86 percent humidity, a dampness that had Del Potro – the 2009 champion – grumbling to the umpire, contending the court was slippery and then grabbing a towel to wipe the lines for emphasis.
Del Potro broke back, and so they were in a tiebreaker, but not for long as the rain returned. One point, to Roddick, and that was it.
Top-seed Roger Federer, who on Monday reached his 34th consecutive quarterfinal in a Grand Slam tournament, said of Roddick: "I’m thankful for everything he's done for the game, especially here for tennis in America.
"It's not been easy after Agassi and Sampras, Courier, Chang, Connors, McEnroe, you name it."
It hasn't been easy, but what is easy in New York, a town where Cano cannot but both A-Rods still are trying to show they can.