Roddick Has Announced His Arrival Ahead of Schedule

Andy Roddick is 18 years old and it’s easy to forget that.

It’s easy to forget when he is winding up and blasting a tennis serve that travels at over 140 miles per hour, and which once almost knocked a hole through the chest of Pete Sampras. You send the world’s most feared player staggering backward with a serve, you aren’t 18 years old any more.

But Roddick is still a kid, so tracking him down can be an adventure.

He was arriving in Los Angeles sometime this weekend to play in the Mercedes-Benz Cup, which begins Monday at UCLA. But when and where, that was hard to pin down.

A phone call from young Mr. Roddick was expected at 4 p.m., but no phone call. None at 5 or 6 either. Finally, at 7 p.m. the phone rings and it is America’s next great tennis star.

In the background are the sounds of summer frolic. There is laughing and shouting and maybe even the noise of burgers sizzling on the grill. Roddick is in the middle of a croquet game at the family home of Bob and Mike Bryan, the projected U.S. Davis Cup doubles team.

Roddick has never played croquet before. Where he grew up, in Nebraska and then Florida, lawn croquet was not the game of choice. But Roddick is excited.

“My partner and I, we’re winning,” Roddick says. Guffaws are heard and Roddick says, “No, really, we are.” It turns out that Roddick and his partner are winning because his partner has hit every shot but one. “I blew the first shot,” Roddick says. He interrupts the conversation to hit another ball. “I blew that one too,” Roddick reports.

It’s probably unfair to expect an on-time phone call from an 18-year-old when he has a day off in Southern California.

After all, we’ve had a big debate about whether 18-year-old male basketball players should be allowed to join the NBA. Roddick is traveling the world, accompanied only by a coach and the coach’s wife.

And there was no debate about whether Roddick should have joined the ATP circuit 18 months ago.

As Roddick says, no one could have made the decision for him but him. The failure will be his, Roddick says. The success will be his. Why should anyone else care? And if he fails to make a phone call on a sunny Saturday afternoon in Southern California, that’s not a shock.

But it is worth tracking Roddick. He is a teenager but he is also a phenom. He is a heartthrob who makes girls swoon. He bought 250 tickets to the final for fans who sat out a long rain delay and stayed till nearly midnight to cheer Roddick to a semifinal victory at a Houston tournament last spring. Roddick paid for the tickets out of his first-place prize money.

That was his second straight tournament title and it was an announcement that Roddick was not just a product of wishful thinking by U.S. tennis fans.

After that, Roddick went to the French Open and created a sensation. He beat Michael Chang in five sets, surviving bad cramps to get the win. He lost the next match to Lleyton Hewitt when, after splitting the first two sets with Hewitt, Roddick had to retire with a pulled muscle. The young American was furious about this but the French fans loved his enthusiasm.

At Wimbledon, on Center Court, Roddick won a second-round match over Thomas Johansson, an experienced Swede who had won a grass-court tournament a week before, then lost in the next round to eventual champion Goran Ivanisevic.

The loss seemed a surprise at the time. Ivanisevic hadn’t won anything in years. Turns out, Roddick played Ivanisevic as tough as anybody at Wimbledon with the possible exception of Pat Rafter, whom Ivanisevic defeated in a five-set final.

And now Roddick starts his summer hard-court season here. He is ranked No. 34 in the world and must play defending U.S. Open champion Marat Safin in the first round.

The coach who travels with Roddick is Algerian-born Tarik Benhabiles. Benhabiles is not a coach for prima donnas who want to take an easy way out.

It was Benhabiles who told Roddick and Roddick’s parents that the best thing for the son was to play some ATP and Grand Slam events, but also to spend a portion of his first year as a professional playing the smaller challenger tournaments.

Roddick could have accepted wild-card invitations to many U.S. tournaments. Those are the free passes into the main draw that tournament directors have at their disposal to offer players who might not be ranked high enough, or who decide to play at the last minute.

As the most promising young American to show up and raise his hand as a potential successor to Sampras and Andre Agassi at the top of the rankings, Roddick would have been welcomed to those passes.

But the wild cards often turn into first-round losses to higher-ranked players, and not much experience.

That’s what happened to Alexandra Stevenson, the teenager who made it to the semis of Wimbledon two years ago in a stunning Grand Slam debut. Stevenson accepted as many wild-card invites as possible, lost in the first round time after time and has improved her game almost not at all.

“I wanted to earn ranking points and also earn my way into the main draws,” Roddick says. “You learn to play the game by playing matches.”

After last year’s U.S. Open, Roddick spent seven weeks on the road in places like San Antonio, Austin, Texas, and Knoxville, Tenn. He earned respect and ranking points in equal measure. And the chance to work on his croquet game.

*

Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com