PARIS — Tuesday was a day of plenty of good and not-so-good news for Andy Roddick. He was at last back on court after seven weeks of either enjoying the bliss of a second honeymoon in Hawaii with his wife Brooklyn Decker or surviving the misery of three days in bed in Madrid with a stomach virus.
The bad news was that he was on the slow courts of Paris, where the clay gods press a kind of mute button on his power game. Plus, he had to play a crafty lefthander. The good news was that the southpaw wasn’t that Spaniard Rafa Nadal, but the crafty vet Finn Jarkko Nieminen, who once scored a devastating five-set win over Andre Agassi in Paris.
Some say that Roddick doesn’t really care about the clay season; that he’s all about winning Wimbledon. There is some truth there and he admits there’s a ceiling to what he can do on the surface. But he does care. After his illness in Madrid, he came right to Paris to work out with Mardy Fish in solitary bliss at Roland Garros for 12 days. Unfortunately, on clay, the man still looks a bit like a fish out of water —lurching, stretching, spraying shots that might usually be winners on hard courts or grass. But he’s still one of the best fighters in the game, no matter the surface.
The same cannot be said of poor Sam Querrey, who suffered a curious mix of burn-out, home-sickness and lack of professionalism. The still young and eminently likeable Californian fell into a funk en route to a dispiriting loss to fellow American Robbie Ginepri. Toasted by too many weeks away from home (winning the small Belgrade tournament, but seeing his ranking go nowhere), Querrey told the press that he was going to pull out of the doubles with his partner John Isner.
