I've always liked Andy Roddick. Not his tennis - that herky-jerky power game - but his dealings with the media, which are generally free of cliches and often quite funny.
But Monday, during his press conference after his loss to Yen-Hsun Lu, his usually refreshing bluntness turned caustic. When a reporter asked about his serve, he fired back in a harsh, scolding tone that the problem had been his return of serve. He lashed out at another who asked him to speculate on how he might feel when he woke up the next morning. Like a bitter, frustrated schoolmaster, he looked out over the assembled writers and mocked them for not being able to come up with anything better than that.
Of course he was transferring his criticism of his own performance onto theirs. But it was still absurd, a man who hits a fuzzy ball for a living abusing people who work with their brains. An athlete can create beauty, but because it's physical, it's evanescent; a writer's aesthetic triumphs live forever. I hope the tennis writers told themselves that as they filed, chastised, out of the press room.
