The future has arrived

Tennis/Wimbledon 2004: It had been a tournament where oilskins were as prevalent as T-Shirts. Officials had spent the final days sloshing water off the courts and into the drains. All week in Arthur Ashe Stadium players and fans had come and gone with the rain as the weather's war of attrition with the organisers threw the 2003 US Open schedule into chaos.

On court on the final day Juan Carlos Ferrero, the 23-year-old Spaniard blessed with the slight, wiry frame of a cyclist, faced the brattish American strong man Andy Roddick. It was Ferrero's fourth match in four days, the first time in the 35-year Open era that any player was asked to play so many matches on successive days in a major.

Roddick, over six feet tall, stood at the baseline two sets ahead and a break up in the third to lead 5-3. Three points from what would be his first Grand Slam title he lurched into his violent serving action, whipping his wrist and shoulders into the delivery. Ace.

Moving across to the other side of the court, the same aggressive attack at the French Open champion produced the same result, a second ace. Match point and Roddick tugged idiosyncratically at his shirt and adjusted his baseball cap; then the biggest server in the world unleashed his last ball of the match. Ace. Roddick had stepped into new territory.

"No more 'What's it like to be the future of American tennis?'," he warned the press after the win. Over the course of one tournament, the 21-year-old had converted potential into realisation. He had delivered. America was satisfied and the sport rested easy.

As if to drive home the point that Roddick had stepped up to shoulder the burden of being the perennial US hope, two weeks previously in a ceremony on the same court Pete Sampras had officially retired with his record 14 Grand Slam titles. A weary Pistol Pete had finally passed on the crown to the whippersnapper called Arod.

This week, Andre Agassi's twilight career also hastened towards the darker end when he departed from Wimbledon with a hip injury, possibly never to return. Looking around the draw now it is difficult to see where Roddick can look to relieve the pressure that will now come to bear on him every time he steps on to court. Never has an American player been so isolated and never has the game so much needed a Roddick to sustain US interest in tennis.

Ranked at number one in the world but seeded at two this week behind last year's champion Roger Federer, Arod will be expected by Wimbledon to climb well into the second week of the competition and keep the US-dollar eyes glued to the East Coast's Breakfast at Wimbledon. In truth the tennis world would feel more comfortable if the American could win the title, to reseed the US networks with his image and push tennis up the scale in broadcasting priority in what is the most important and largest market in the world for the sport.

In the current tennis order of merit, or, ATP Race, Roddick stands fourth behind Wimbledon champion Federer, Roland Garros finalist Guillermo Coria and Spain's Carlos Moya. The next American is Agassi at 13 followed by Vince Spadea at 18. The rest are on the horizon but almost out of sight, Mardy Fish at 31 and James Blake at 47. In total just five American players have played their way into the top 50. Spain has 10 players, Argentina seven.

Roddick knew what he was doing last year when, disconsolate, he boarded his flight out of Paris following a dispiriting loss in the first round of the French Open. He immediately joined forces with Brad Gilbert, Agassi's old coach, and straight away began winning tournaments at a startling rate.

For almost six months last year he could do little to convince people he was anything other than a credible successor to Sampras and Agassi. He won at Queen's, where he held on to his title last week, again at Indianapolis, then won the Masters Series titles in Montreal and Cincinnati. "We were lucky that we clicked so fast," said Roddick of his coach. "I wasn't expecting that. I was expecting almost like a rebuilding process and then things just started happening right away and we just kind of went with it.

"Brad's thought was 'let's not focus so much on your deficiencies' as opposed to 'what you can do with your game now and take it to your opponents' weaknesses'. And so that kind of made things fresh in my mind and really excited me."

The recent win at the Queen's tournament, aided by the readjustment of his old world serving record to 153 m.p.h., was Roddick's 15th victory from his last 16 grass-court matches and while it hardly helped that his compatriot Fish was being routed 6-0, 6-3 by Federer at the same time on the grass in Halle, Roddick goes into Wimbledon with his game intact, his limber body even more powerful than before and his blonde starlet girlfriend, Mandy, in toe.

The scheduling may also help. Aside from the drive to become champion, another incentive for the American would be the date of the men's final on July 4th - American Independence Day. The last three times the final has been played on that date an American has won the title. Sampras won on Centre Court in 1999 and 1993 while 11 years before, Jimmy Connors became the 1982 champion.

If the serve holds, as it did against Ferrero in the US Open, Roddick will be frightening to meet. Reports from the various camps last September in New York were of Ferrero on the practice court at Flushing Meadow two and a half hours before the Open final with his hitting partner serving at him from three feet inside the baseline. He was, as it transpired hopelessly, trying to replicate the type of serves Roddick would use to persecute him. Meanwhile Roddick loosened up by using his racquet like a baseball bat taking monstrous cuts at the balls in an effort to hit them over the stadium fence.

His big game and the presence of the master tactician Gilbert in his corner doubtlessly give Roddick the weapons he requires to win over the next two weeks. He has also adjusted his net game and comes in more to shorten the rallies. That alone demonstrates a willingness to work in areas that are not instinctive. He's an emotional fish too, televisual, quotable and a pin-up. Tabloid fodder. He's what the Americans call a package. More of an outgoing Agassi than a lugubrious Sampras. Time and the Stars and Stripes are with him.