Indian Wells has started up and already there’s a casualty – Andy Roddick.<\/b><\/p>\n
Hello everyone. I\u2019m sitting in the Media Center overlooking the stadium court at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden. Carlos Moya<\/b> and Philipp Kohlschreiber<\/b> are warming up below. Fans and media are wandering right up to the edge of the practice courts where Richard Gasquet<\/b> and Feliciano Lopez<\/b> are warming up as you can see here.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s up with all the water management? I never saw anything this elaborate in the Northwest Pacific and that\u2019s a rain forest. Then I got it: flash floods.<\/p>\n
This is the Coachella Valley which is surrounded by those snow capped mountains and when the snow melts: lotsa water. It\u2019s a funny ecosystem because one day you\u2019ll get 90F (32C) and the next it\u2019ll be windy and cold. Andy Roddick<\/b> got a taste of it yesterday and he\u2019s now on his way home.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t just the wind, he also likened the court surface to sandpaper meaning that the ball grabbed the court and kicked up. Rafael Nadal<\/b> will be happy to hear that. More likely, though, the problem was Tommy Haas<\/b>. Haas attacked Roddick\u2019s backhand and then threw down some smack in the postmatch media session. Someone asked Haas if Roddick\u2019s backhand had improved over the last 18 months:<\/p>\n
Real improvements on his backhand or his game, I really don\u2019t see too much.<\/i><\/p>\n
Ouch. He wasn\u2019t even asked and he dissed Roddick\u2019s game while he was at it. It\u2019s a good question. Did Roddick\u2019s game improve while he was working with Jimmy Connors<\/b> 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.<\/p>\n
But his basic weaknesses are his basic weaknesses and there\u2019s another story here. Haas just started working with Andy\u2019s old coach, Dean Goldfine<\/b>, and there\u2019s little doubt that Haas\u2019 strategy reflects Goldfine\u2019s opinion of his former pupil\u2019s backhand. While the level of Andy\u2019s 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. \u201care begging to root for this guy,\u201d meaning that people would be rooting for him if the media wasn\u2019t so hard on him.<\/p>\n
I always thought Goldfine was too mild mannered for Andy. Andy may have had problems with Brad Gilbert<\/b> when he was his coach and that\u2019s hardly unique where Gilbert is concerned, but Andy\u2019s an emotional guy and I think he\u2019s needs that intensity in his box. Goldfine is never gonna take a swipe at the media but Gilbert wouldn\u2019t think twice about it.<\/p>\n
This is a critical point in Andy\u2019s 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\u2019s just come off a huge title in Dubai. So I\u2019m rooting for Andy when he gets to Miami. Jimmy, did you hear that?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Indian Wells has started up and already there’s a casualty – Andy Roddick. Hello everyone. I\u2019m 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=816"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/816\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}