Andy Roddick on What’s ‘Bullshit’ About Modern Tennis

Shortly before my interview with Andy Roddick last week, I learned it was his 42nd birthday. ‭Roddick isn’t big on birthdays, he declared, and after our interview he planned on having a low-key dinner with his wife, the model and actor Brooklyn Decker. “I certainly don’t expect any fanfare,” said the former world No. 1 in his characteristically self-effacing manner. But this one had some particular arithmetical significance: Exactly half his lifetime ago, at the tender age of 21, Roddick won the U.S. Open. He remains the last American man to win a Grand Slam, an accomplishment that looms large over the bloc of restless young American players who’ve cropped up in the last decade desperate to end the drought. With an impending semifinal match between Taylor Fritz and Frances Tiafoe, we’re guaranteed the country’s first male Slam finalist since 2009, and the first at the Open since 2006. Roddick was the last to do both, but one gets the sense that he is somewhat uncomfortable with the distinction. “There were way more accomplished American players,” he told me. “I just happened to be the last one.”

Though Roddick stayed away from the sport in the years following his retirement, he’s reemerged recently as one of the more insightful and plainspoken figures in the world of tennis commentary. Between his podcast, Served With Andy Roddick, and his chatty presence on Tennis Twitter, he brings a shrewd, engaging, and thoroughly analytically minded voice to a domain too often predominated by the sport’s stodgy elder statesmen. Last week, at around the midway point of the U.S. Open, Roddick joined me to discuss a number of hot-button topics in tennis, including a slew of recent officiating controversies, the players’ widespread sense of grievance over the demanding length of the season, and, yes, the state of American tennis.

There have been a spate of upsets at this year’s U.S. Open. Carlos Alcaraz was the betting favorite to win, for example, and he lost in the second round. What did you make of that?
It’s tough to be that good that often. I think we underestimate what the last two years of his life have looked like. I always think that whenever you’re worried about a three-hour moment in time, it’s best to zoom out. I’m pretty sure two years ago, he would’ve taken four Slams in the next couple years — two Wimbledons, the French Open, and the U.S. Open. So, obviously, it’s a shocking loss, but you also see some weird shit during Olympic summers, where you’re going from grass to clay to hard. He went on a boat ride for three days after the Olympics and thought that was recharging the batteries. Credit to him, because we’re supposed to teach ourselves to be masters of denial sometimes. A shocking loss but, circumstantially, it’s certainly understandable that mentally maybe he was less than his best.

Carlos has been joined by a lot of players on the tour in speaking quite frankly about the psychological toll of the circuit, especially in the age of social media. I’m sure you saw Caroline Garcia sharing some of the cruel messages she’s received online. While that specifically wasn’t something you had to deal with in your day, you do intimately understand the pressures of being a sort of young wunderkind on the tour. Do you wish there was a similar candor about these things when you played, a culture where players spoke openly about mental health?
The factors change. Tennis is specific, too, because you’re not spreading the hate over an entire team. It’s not “the Yankees suck.” It’s “You suck,” which feels a little bit more targeted. It’s just so easy for every Joe Blow with Twitter to send something off with a nameless, faceless account to someone who is a real person. The stuff that Caro posted was disgusting. To your point, I was dealing with people who had to say it to me. I feel like people inevitably get 1,000 percent worse than what they would actually ever say on a real day to a real person than online. The internet, sometimes, opens up the nastiest parts of us.

You’re pretty active on what we call Tennis Twitter. And, of course, you’ve got one of the best podcasts in the sport. So I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the particular manner in which you’ve stayed engaged with the game. The man you beat in the 2003 U.S. Open finals, Juan Carlos Ferrero, coaches Alcaraz. Is that something you’d like to do?
I’ve found a nice, sweet spot for myself. And I wasn’t involved at all from when I retired until COVID. I wasn’t on air; I didn’t commentate at all. I think people weirdly think I’ve been doing this from the second I stopped, and that’s just not the case. Listen, I get to watch, analyze, and digest the sport I love, and I also get to control my geography, which is a rarity if you want to be involved in tennis on a larger scale. I’m lucky. The Tennis Channel let me come on air when there was nothing live going on on earth. I think the idea was for me to read the Yellow Pages for an hour a day and see if we could maintain some viewership. Then, when that stopped, I expected to just go back to whatever it was, other business ventures that I was doing before, but they seemed fine with what I was offering. And I just felt like the tennis fandom was underserved unless it was around live events. There was no place to consume analysis on an average Tuesday, and a lot of the stuff was timed. For any broadcaster, the opening is six minutes, even if there’s a conversation that warrants an hour.

Me and my producer, we didn’t know what would come of it. We figured the pod area would be there for the taking, but I don’t know that we imagined over a million monthly viewers six months in. It’s gotten bigger than I thought it would. I’m certainly thankful, and I’m really enjoying it. It’s the first job since I retired that I haven’t had to learn from scratch.

One thing I love about the podcast is what an analytics nerd you are. I wonder if you think we’re in the midst of a data revolution in tennis. There is a kind of rigor and specificity to statistics that hasn’t been the case in my lifetime.
I’m the kind of person who will always choose more information as opposed to less information in order to inform an opinion. That being said, I think the real revolution has taken place with fitness — timing breaths, being able to actually measure strength in different areas. It’s away from the court where the game has just gotten crazy. I’ve been watching behind the scenes. I sauntered by the warm-up area the other day just because I had to see it, because it was something that didn’t exist 12 years ago. You would see people go outside, shake out their legs and stuff, but this full-on dynamic band work, that’s something that’s just gotten way more intense, and it’s all tracked. How quickly you’re moving side to side, leg strength, you can actually know your body backward as opposed to it just being feelings.

But one thing that’s not going to ever be accounted for in a stat readout is watching how someone hits the ball. There are all these things that you need to be able to watch and see. The other thing is instincts. I knew someone would hit a certain serve a bunch, but then, when the chips were down, I knew 80 percent of the time where they wanted to hit it. Rafa Nadal is a great example. He would hit that slice serve, slice serve, slice serve, slice serve, and then on a break point, he would actually go to the forehand more often than he normally would. There are little intricacies that I don’t think will ever be fully replaced by data, but the data on fitness, your body, recovery times, all that stuff is just crazy.

And yet, despite all the ways in which this sport is rapidly modernizing, you have very publicly railed against a litany of pretty consequential mistakes made recently by umpires. Alexander Zverev in the French Open final, and a fiasco involving Felix Auger-Aliassime and Jack Draper in Cincinnati. For all the ways tennis is a global, thoroughly advanced sport, it remains kind of antiquated in some respects.
Well, I just can’t imagine a live scenario where you have all the answers and choose not to use them. When an umpire comes down and is preaching to the player — they’re fine at what they do, but to give someone a speech on the way the ball landed and then all of a sudden, we have a review and you were wrong? Give me a break. People go, “Well, the players get it wrong.” No, the players try to sell you something. There’s a difference. There’s a benefit to trying to convince someone that you’re right in the moment. So, I think tennis does a real disservice.

If you’re going to do a review and you’re going to have automatic line calling, everything should be reviewable if you can see it. They’re like, “Oh, well, it takes time.” I’m like, “It takes longer to argue for five minutes than it does to wait a minute for the review.” That’s naïve to me, and I just get frustrated. It’s weird, too, because it doesn’t get attention unless it’s on a big court on a big point. With Auger-Aliassime and Draper, neither one of those guys knows what the hell’s going on as far as what rule applies and when and how. I don’t know — I feel like we have meetings about meetings and come up with stupid rulings.

Iga Swiatek has spoken rather candidly about the ridiculous length of the tennis season, which is simply not very player-friendly as it’s currently constructed. I’m not sure you would want to be in charge of the ATP or the WTA for even a day, but I’m curious what you make of the schedule these days. As it stands, we’ve got an 11.5-month-long tour.
It’s so stupid, honestly. And until the players actually unionize, then they’re doing themselves a disservice. They have no negotiating power. They can just complain and ask for things to get fixed but, at the end of the day, someone’s going to acquire a tournament and want to make more money for having acquired that tournament. The biggest thing I’ve seen recently that is just absurd to me is adding weeks to all of the Masters 1000s. Now, all of a sudden, you’ve added five weeks to the calendar. Then, having some tournament director tell you, “Well, you have more days off during the tournament.” You would rather have those days off at the end of a year, have a month to recover, to train how you’d like, to actually choose where and when you have those off days, because an off day on the road is not the same as an off day at home. You’re not going to go lift nonstop for a week straight if you’re also in a tournament. It makes no sense. It’s complete bullshit.

You brought up the players’ lack of negotiating power. Novak Djokovic has been pretty active on this front, with what’s called the Professional Tennis Players Association. I suppose it’s his attempt to find strength in numbers, even if they’re not calling it a union per se. I wonder what you make of it.
I would ask you to give me the top-three accomplishments of that initiative.

Well, it doesn’t seem to be catching on.
One, everything I say about Novak gets taken out of context. This isn’t a dig at Novak, because there’s no chance that you can be in pursuit of 25 Grand Slams and also run a players’ union. It’s just impossible. I’ve had board members text me, and I said, “If you had to list your three accomplishments, what would it be?” It’s like, “I don’t know — press releases?” There was an email that went out. It was like, “We have professional photo shoots available for the players.” But I don’t know what the goals are. My thing is, pointing out problems is easy, but the solutions are tougher. Novak obviously can’t actively run it. I think he’s well intentioned, I think he means well, and I think you never really have to second-guess if what he says is what he means, and I respect that in a massive way. I also don’t know what they would tell you their list of accomplishments are.

You make a good point. Let’s switch gears a little bit before I let you enjoy your birthday. Last week, I spoke to Ben Shelton. The young American guys are asked ad nauseam when this drought of American men’s Slam champions will end. Obviously, your name is often invoked as the yardstick in those conversations. How does that make you feel?
Listen, there were way more accomplished American players. I just happened to be the last one. So, therefore, I’m going to be the answer to the Jeopardy! question until I’m not. I hate that they get asked about it all the time. It’s not something that I enjoy at this point. I will be happy when it’s not the case anymore. And if I’m watching something and they get asked about it, I cringe a little bit. I don’t think they have to answer for my lack of winning another one or anyone else in the last 20 years, which is seemingly the question they’re answering. Asking Ben Shelton when the drought’s going to break when he’s been on tour for two years, I don’t really understand that. You’re asking him to answer for ghosts of careers past. But it is what it is. It’s going to get broken at some point. I don’t know how these guys would be able to predict when. I hope they believe it and I hope they do it. I’ll be there cheering them on, and I’ll be one of the happiest people in the stadium when it does happen. I also just hate that they have to answer for it all the time.

When it happens, I’m sure you’ll be flown out to present them with the trophy.
I just hope they win it closer to home.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.