Connors steps up Roddick project
HOLLYWOOD, Calif. – Jimmy Connors will be back in 2007 to coach Andy Roddick, which is not big news.
But he’s going to just about double the time he spends with Roddick on the road, and that is.
Connors intends to travel with Roddick as much as 16 or 17 weeks and, when you consider that Roddick was on the road for ATP tournaments only 19 weeks this season, that’s just about full-time.
“It’s weird,” Roddick said Tuesday. “I think it’s getting inside him. He started off saying he’d coach me about eight weeks a year. Now he’s calling me saying, ‘We ought to get together, do some more practicing.’ His competitive juices are flowing.”
Flowing so strongly that he and Roddick will begin training for next season in South Florida this week, earlier than I can remember Roddick starting his off-season preparation.
“I can’t wait,” Roddick said as he sat at a poker table inside the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, where he’s putting on a poker tournament this weekend to help raise money for his charity.
When the Roddick-Connors gig crystallized after Wimbledon this year, Connors made it clear he’d be honored to try to get Roddick’s confidence and game back to the top. But he was heavily committed to his family in Santa Barbara, Calif., and he wasn’t planning to make this a full-time coaching relationship.
They’d work together between tournaments at Connors’ convenience, and he would show up at the Grand Slams.
Suddenly, Connors is having a better time than he thought he could have and is expanding his role.
Roddick hadn’t been to a final all year when, in his first event with Connors peering down from the coach’s box, he reached the final at Indianapolis, won Cincinnati a month later, finished runner-up to Roger Federer at the U.S. Open and had three match points before losing to Federer at the Masters Cup in Shanghai in early November.
More than anything, that near-win over Federer has lit a bonfire under these two men, and it’s Roddick’s powerful commitment to more efficient and compulsive attacking tennis that has made the difference.
In the Masters Cup loss to Federer, Roddick, who finished the year at No. 6, played 108 service points and was at net 59 times – either by serving and volleying or attacking from the baseline on the shorter returns.
That’s the main plan for 2007: attack, attack, attack. Not just against Federer, said Roddick, but every time out.
“For the first time in three years, I feel like the gap between me and Roger is going my way, not his,” said Roddick, who is 1-12 vs. Federer. “I was the better player that day for two sets, and I don’t know if I’ve ever been able to say that before.”
There are spinoff effects to Roddick’s stepped-up net attacks.
Federer can no longer count on blocking back Roddick’s 140-mph serves. With Roddick coming to net more often behind his serve, those blocks are going to be hanging curve balls.
Connors has squared away a few volleying technique problems Roddick had and the rest of his net improvement has come through repetition.
Roddick has gone to his volley before, most notably at the 2005 Wimbledon.
But when he started poorly this year, his forays to the net slowed, too. “It was a confidence thing. It’s tough to do something that is still a little foreign to you when you’re short on confidence,” he said.
Right now, Roddick’s confidence is as high as it was when he won the U.S. Open three years ago.