Indian Wells has started up and already there’s a casualty – Andy Roddick.

Hello everyone. I’m sitting in the Media Center overlooking the stadium court at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden. Carlos Moya and Philipp Kohlschreiber are warming up below. Fans and media are wandering right up to the edge of the practice courts where Richard Gasquet and Feliciano Lopez are warming up as you can see here.

Off in the distance you can also see the snow capped San Jacinto Mountains. Yesterday I was walking through a lush green park which had six large grates for water drainage at its edge and a tunnel from the field running underneath the adjacent road. This is the middle of the desert, I thought to myself, what’s up with all the water management? I never saw anything this elaborate in the Northwest Pacific and that’s a rain forest. Then I got it: flash floods.

This is the Coachella Valley which is surrounded by those snow capped mountains and when the snow melts: lotsa water. It’s a funny ecosystem because one day you’ll get 90F (32C) and the next it’ll be windy and cold. Andy Roddick got a taste of it yesterday and he’s now on his way home.

It wasn’t just the wind, he also likened the court surface to sandpaper meaning that the ball grabbed the court and kicked up. Rafael Nadal will be happy to hear that. More likely, though, the problem was Tommy Haas. Haas attacked Roddick’s backhand and then threw down some smack in the postmatch media session. Someone asked Haas if Roddick’s backhand had improved over the last 18 months:

Real improvements on his backhand or his game, I really don’t see too much.

Ouch. He wasn’t even asked and he dissed Roddick’s game while he was at it. It’s a good question. Did Roddick’s game improve while he was working with Jimmy Connors or was it just his state of mind and level of confidence that improved? For sure his return of serve improved because Jimmy moved him closer to the baseline on the return and Andy certainly attacked the net more.

But his basic weaknesses are his basic weaknesses and there’s another story here. Haas just started working with Andy’s old coach, Dean Goldfine, and there’s little doubt that Haas’ strategy reflects Goldfine’s opinion of his former pupil’s backhand. While the level of Andy’s game has risen since working with Jimmy, the thing that helped him most was having the fiery iconoclast in his corner. While the media was pouring it on Andy for being a one-slam wonder, Jimmy had his back. In his best fatherly manner, he called him kid and said that people in the U.S. “are begging to root for this guy,” meaning that people would be rooting for him if the media wasn’t so hard on him.

I always thought Goldfine was too mild mannered for Andy. Andy may have had problems with Brad Gilbert when he was his coach and that’s hardly unique where Gilbert is concerned, but Andy’s an emotional guy and I think he’s needs that intensity in his box. Goldfine is never gonna take a swipe at the media but Gilbert wouldn’t think twice about it.

This is a critical point in Andy’s career. A Wimbledon or U.S. Open title is there to take – we don’t know who to pick when we sit down and look at the draw – and he’s just come off a huge title in Dubai. So I’m rooting for Andy when he gets to Miami. Jimmy, did you hear that?