Dent, Roddick Stay the Course

Sitting out a couple of months, gaining weight, not having a coach and needing a cortisone shot for an injured right ankle to compete is not the ideal way to get ready for Wimbledon.

But it’s a quick description of Taylor Dent’s route to a career-best, fourth-round spot here. Dent, of Newport Beach, has not always done things conventionally and came close to exiting the first day, needing five sets to beat qualifier Dick Norman of Belgium. However, his play has elevated appreciably since.

He lost his serve just once and served 18 aces, beating Tomas Berdych of the Czech Republic, 6-3, 7-6 (5), 6-3, in the third round Friday. Berdych appeared unnerved over a line call in the tiebreaker.

“Strange things always seem to happen,” Dent said. “I come in here with fairly low expectations, thinking, ‘Oh, my body feels terrible, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.’ You just eke through matches.”

Dent has been saying he’s afraid to look at the scale. He was asked if he was in the David Wells/John Daly school of athletes. “John Daly, God!” Dent said, to laughter in the interview room. But it wasn’t as though he was on the Krispy Kreme diet during his injury layoff after Miami in late March.

“I feel like I’m actually moving great,” he said. “I feel like I’m pretty springy out there, tracking down a lot of drop volleys and moving good. I guess that’s a good sign. So if I lose that extra, five, 10 pounds, I’ll be moving even faster.”

On Monday, Dent will play third-seeded Lleyton Hewitt of Australia, who beat 123rd-ranked Justin Gimelstob, 7-6 (5), 6-4, 7-5, in 2 hours 21 minutes, as Gimelstob went flying around Centre Court, hitting the turf nearly a dozen times.

“Spent more time on the ground than he did standing up, didn’t he?” Hewitt said. “Yeah, some of them I guess were pretty spectacular, but there were others he probably dived a little bit when he could have stood up and made a volley.”

With Gimelstob out, there are two Americans remaining in the men’s draw. Second-seeded Andy Roddick completed his second-round match, which had been stopped because of darkness on Thursday night, defeating 120th-ranked Daniele Bracciali of Italy in five sets.

Yes, five sets, no misprint: Roddick won, 7-5, 6-3, 6-7 (3), 4-6, 6-3, changing tactics in the fifth, moving off the baseline and charging the net.

“I wanted to prove something out there today,” said Roddick, who had 23 aces. “There was definitely a chip on my shoulder. It’s not totally turned around. But the more matches I win that are tough, in tougher circumstances, the more you remember what it’s like to do that. I think it was big to get through. It would have been a devastating loss.”

It was his first five-set victory since the semifinals of the 2003 U.S. Open. Roddick had lost five consecutive five-set matches, and he didn’t try to conceal it had been on his mind.

“I know all you guys were there with your stat books counting the last couple losses in five, all that nonsense,” he said.

Five could have been avoided had Roddick closed it out in three before it got too dark. But Roddick lost the final four points of the third-set tiebreaker and Bracciali gladly accepted the lifeline, though he wasn’t pleased the match was halted after the third, at 8:54 p.m., London time, noting others had kept going past 9. Although Greg Rusedski’s second-round match finished at 9:13 p.m. earlier in the week, the light was not as good Thursday night.

“I was asking why because it was earlier the other days,” Bracciali said through an interpreter, adding that Roddick had used a vulgarity that angered him.

Said Roddick: “I said a bad word. I don’t know if it was to Bracciali. I was walking off and he was throwing a fit. I’m not one to go at people. That’s not my style, OK? If he’s upset about it, he can come talk to me about it.”

This was at the end of an edgy back-and-forth with an Italian journalist, who was attempting to get Roddick’s side of the story, telling Roddick that Bracciali wasn’t happy when Roddick packed his bags and left Centre Court. Roddick told the journalist that he had nothing to do with the decision to stop the match and added, “I have a question for you. Would you try reading in the dark? Would you read a book in the dark?”

On Friday, the Roddick match finished just before another deluge of rain, which stopped play for the day, pushing a handful of matches over to today, but not before fifth-seeded Marat Safin of Russia was eliminated by Feliciano Lopez of Spain, 6-4, 7-6 (4), 6-3.

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Wimbledon: Day 5

Highlights at the All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club:

* Top men’s seeded winners: No. 2 Andy Roddick, No. 3 Lleyton Hewitt, No. 10 Mario Ancic.

* Top men’s seeded losers: No. 5 Marat Safin, No. 11 Joachim Johansson.

* Top women’s seeded winners: No. 3 Amelie Mauresmo, No. 5 Svetlana Kuznetsova, No. 6 Elena Dementieva, No. 9 Anastasia Myskina.

* Top women’s seeded losers: No. 17 Jelena Jankovic, No. 22 Silvia Farina Elia.

* Today’s men’s featured match: Roger Federer (1), Switzerland, vs. Nicolas Kiefer (25), Germany.

* Today’s women’s featured match: Venus Williams (14) vs. Daniela Hantuchova (20), Slovakia.