After Andy Roddick’s heartbreaking loss last year to Roger Federer at Wimbledon, an anxious U.S. Davis Cup captain Patrick McEnroe visited the London house where Roddick’s camp mourned.  He asked Roddick about playing in the U.S. team’s quarterfinal match with Croatia the next weekend, a grueling task on red clay. Roddick, “hemmed and hawed,” and McEnroe knew then that Roddick had “pretty much made up his mind not to play.”

McEnroe writes:

          So I gave him an out, saying ‘You know it really looked like you tweaked your hip out there in that fourth set.’

          Myerson (Roddick’s agent) immediately looked at me and silently mouthed the words: Thank you.

          Given all Andy has done for Davis Cup, it was the least I could do.

Roddick’s announcement came the next day that he had a hip flexor injury and would miss the match with Croatia.  This incident where McEnroe developed an injury excuse for his star is one of the more candid and surprising looks behind the scenes in McEnroe’s new book Hardcourt Confidential: Tales from Twenty Years in the Pro Tennis Trenches. Written with Tennis magazine’s Peter Bodo, McEnroe also delves into the Grand Slams, the USTA’s player development program, as well as his own career as a player, coach and broadcaster.  

 McEnroe at one point acknowledges the obvious conflict of interest he has of serving two masters – the USTA, as Davis Cup captain and head of the nation’s player development, and ESPN, where he fulfills the role of broadcaster.  He also addresses a life lived partially in the shadow of his temperamental tennis legend sibling — the advantages (lots of wild cards when he was playing) and the disadvantages (the frequent “professional brother” accusation).  The most interesting part of his relationship to John is the story of their match in the singles final at Chicago in 1991 that John won 6-4 in the third set, a match Patrick wasn’t as determined to win as his brother. “I just know I was thinking, Do I really want to win this? It would be such a hard pill for John to swallow.”

The final score on this book is that it is chock full of entertaining and well-crafted tennis stories, especially about life on the U.S. Davis Cup team, and the 2007 road to victory where the U.S. won its first cup in 12 years.  For fans of Davis Cup, American tennis, the Grand Slams and the McEnroes, it’s a must read – a true tennis nut’s book, not simply a self-absorbed memoir.

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