Nine Days Later, Roddick Takes Gambill Again

Right about the time Andy Roddick was retooling his junior game en route to becoming ITF Junior World Champion in 2000, Jan-Michael Gambill was a young American on the rise, using Indian Wells for his breakthrough when he upset Andre Agassi in the 1998 quarterfinals. Roddick, of course, is now top dog among American men, as he further proved Sunday in his 7-6(3), 6-2 victory against Gambill in the second round of the Pacific Life Open.

Roddick is now staring down a possible rematch of his Australian Open quarterfinal against Marat Safin. Safin, who defeated Roddick Down Under, is to play Jan Hernych of the Czech Republic in a late afternoon match.

“Obviously, I don’t think it’s a great draw for me,” Roddick said, “but at the same time, it’s probably not a good draw for him either.”

While Roddick is winless against Safin thus far in their two-match history, his victory against Gambill evened their head-to-head at 2-2. In fact, the 94-minute victory came just nine days after Roddick defeated Gambill for the first time, winning 6-7(4), 6-4, 6-3 in the quarterfinals at Scottsdale.

As with the Scottsdale match, Gambill never broke Roddick. In fact, Gambill had only three break points on Roddick’s serve the entire match. His first was in the first game of the match, but he won only four points on Roddick’s serve the rest of the set. Gambill’s other break opportunity came in the second game of the second set when he attacked a 100 mph Roddick second serve, forcing the reigning U.S. Open champion into a forehand cross court error. Roddick came back with a service winner, but found himself down break point again when Gambill jumped on his serve again, this time a 138 mph blast up the “T” that Gambill blocked back authoritatively, pinning Roddick to the baseline and allowing Gambill to come in for a forehand volley winner. Roddick saved that break point with an error-enducing service blast, then won the game two points later with a 114 mph ace, one of 21 he had in the match.

“I felt like I was getting into his serving games a lot more than he was getting into mine,” said Roddick, who saw 21 Gambill aces blow by him in Scottsdale, but only seven on Sunday at the Pacific Life Open. “I had break points in at least three of his service games in the first set. (Roddick had a total of eight break point opportunities in four Gambill service games before the first set tie-break.) I was returning a little bit better (than in Scottsdale).”

In the second set, Roddick broke Gambill at love in the third game and breezed to victory thereafter, losing only three points on his serve the rest of the match.

Though Gambill defeated Roddick in straight sets in their first two encounters (2001 San Jose second round and 2002 Los Angeles semifinals), it would be unfair to infer from this that Gambill, ranked No. 82, far from his career-best No. 14 in June 2001, is a has been, with Roddick, Mardy Fish, Robby Ginepri and James Blake having surged ahead of him. A better way of looking at it would be to say that someone in pre-TiVo times pressed the pause button during Gambill’s ascension. Now, he’s having to play catch up without benefit of being able to skip commercials.

“A lot of it is just between the ears,” Roddick said, when asked to hypothesize how he and the other young Americans managed to catch and pass Gambill. “He has a big serve. He returns well. He hits a penetrating ball from the baseline. I can think of a lot of people I’d rather play who are ahead of him (in ranking).”

Safin, however, is probably not one of those people.