Andy Roddick: The Best Serve of His Generation
Asked to reflect on the 2009 Wimbledon final — four hours of tennis, 77 games, a fifth set that ran to 16–14, the longest men's major final ever played, in which he won 39 games, more than any losing finalist in history — Andy Roddick gave a two-word answer: "I lost." It is the most Roddick sentence available. He spent a decade inside the top ten, held the fastest serve on earth, and built a career that will be remembered largely for the man standing on the other side of the net.
Omaha
Andrew Stephen Roddick was born on 30 August 1982 in Omaha, Nebraska, to Blanche Corell, a schoolteacher, and Jerry Roddick, a businessman. His older brother John also played, and later coached him.
He finished 2000 as the world's top-ranked junior, having taken six junior singles titles and seven in doubles, including the junior championships at both the Australian Open and the US Open. He turned professional at eighteen in 2001 and beat Pete Sampras and Gustavo Kuerten in his first year, which was a fair notice of intent. Early on, when the results were not yet arriving, the coach Tarik Benhabiles talked him out of quitting.
2003
Everything happened at once. Roddick reached the semi-finals in Australia after surviving a quarter-final against Younes El Aynaoui, then won the US Open in September, beating Juan Carlos Ferrero in the final — he closed it, appropriately, with three straight aces. He finished the year ranked world number one at twenty-one, the first American to end a season at the top since Andre Agassi in 1999.
He also hosted *Saturday Night Live* that November, and remains the only male tennis player ever to do so. He was famous in a way tennis players in the United States had stopped being.
He held the number one ranking for thirteen weeks in total. That is the whole of it: 2003 was his summit and he reached it at twenty-one, before he had a complete game.
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Take the IQ test →The Federer Problem
From 2004 onward, Roger Federer was simply in the way. Roddick reached four more Grand Slam finals — Wimbledon in 2004, 2005 and 2009, the US Open in 2006 — and lost all four to Federer. The head-to-head finished 3–16.
The 2009 final at Wimbledon is the match that fixed his reputation, and it did so by losing. Roddick had spent the previous year working with Larry Stefanki, who had coached John McEnroe, and he simply declined to lose for more than four hours. Federer broke him once in the fifth set, at 15–14, and that was the championship. Years later Roddick was unexpectedly generous about it: "You might expect me to hate that match but I don't... I felt that at least there was a bit of general respect."
The Serve
His delivery was a genuinely historic shot. In a 2004 Davis Cup semi-final against Vladimir Voltchkov he hit a serve at 155 mph — 249.4 km/h — the fastest ever recorded at the time. He held the venue records at the US Open (152 mph) and Queen's Club (153 mph), and struck more than 9,000 aces in his career. It was the product of years of conditioning work rather than a natural quirk.
The full ledger: 32 ATP singles titles, five Masters titles, an overall record of 680–264 (612–213 in singles), and nine consecutive years finishing in the world's top ten from 2002 to 2010.
Davis Cup
He was a better player for his country than for himself. Across 25 ties between 2001 and 2011 he went 33–12 in singles, and was 12–0 in matches that clinched a tie. In 2007 he beat Dmitry Tursunov in the final against Russia to end a twelve-year American drought and win the Davis Cup.
He had a temper that never entirely left him. He called an umpire "a moron" at the 2001 US Open; at the 2008 Australian Open he told another, "You're an idiot! Stay in school, kids or you'll end up being an umpire"; he was docked points for ball abuse at Cincinnati as late as 2011.
Why Andy Is Called a Genius
The claim for Roddick is craft, not intellect, and it rests on one shot. The serve was the best of its era: 155 mph at its peak, more than 9,000 aces, venue records at multiple majors. The detail that matters is that it was manufactured. The Hall of Fame's citation notes that the technical execution "revealed years of rigorous conditioning work" — engineering applied to a body, not a gift unwrapped.
The second, less obvious claim is adaptability. Roddick worked through Benhabiles, Brad Gilbert, Jimmy Connors and Larry Stefanki, each hire an admission that what he had was not enough; the Hall of Fame describes a competitive appetite that "drove continuous refinement of every aspect of his game." The 2009 Wimbledon final is the proof. At twenty-six, having lost to the same man in three finals already, he came back and took him to 16–14 in a fifth set on grass. Very few athletes will keep dismantling a method that is already working well enough to pay them.
The counter-case is plain, and he would state it himself in two words. One major title. Thirteen weeks at number one. Three wins in nineteen matches against his defining rival. He was not a tactical innovator and never solved the problem standing in front of him. The fairest summary is that Roddick had one world-class weapon, an unusual willingness to rebuild around it, and the misfortune of peaking in the same decade as Roger Federer.
Legacy
He announced his retirement on 30 August 2012 — his thirtieth birthday, mid-tournament at the US Open — and played his last match four days later, losing to Juan Martín del Potro in the fourth round. The International Tennis Hall of Fame inducted him on 22 July 2017 alongside Kim Clijsters.
The Andy Roddick Foundation, which works with at-risk young people, has outlasted the playing career. He won the Arthur Ashe Humanitarian Award in 2004 for tsunami relief and UNICEF work, and in 2007 became the first male tennis player given the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health award. He married the model and actress Brooklyn Decker in Austin in April 2009, two months before the Wimbledon final; they have two children.
He has been on television or in headphones ever since — a syndicated sports radio show, *Fox Sports Live*, BBC punditry at Wimbledon from 2015, and since 2024 the *Served with Andy Roddick* podcast, where the analytical intelligence that never quite showed up in his tactics on court turns out to have been there the whole time.
