Those of us that follow the tennis world have long since given up trying to figure out Andy Roddick.  The man simply disappoints when you expect greatness, and then displays brilliance when you write him off.  So I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that Andy knocked off two top five players in the same tournament for the first time in his career, in the same week that he announced that his coach left him.

No doubt, Roddick is a strange bird.  He's always seemed to want to do his own thing more than what his coaches wanted him to do.  He had a successful run with his first coach, Tarik Benhabiles, but dumped him in 2003 to work with Brad Gilbert, undoubtedly one of the great tennis minds of this generation.  Gilbert took Roddick to the #2 world ranking, but suddenly fired him at the end of 2004 in favor of the venerable Dr. Dean Goldfine.  Now, granted, Gilbert has always struck me as one of those tennis obsessed control freaks that would call you up at 3 a.m. with a strategy he just came up with for your second round match, but you can't argue with the results.

Hall of Fame player and commentator John McEnroe used to say about Austrian great Thomas Muster, "Muster has two plans going into a match: Plan A, hit the ball hard; Plan B, if Plan A doesn't work, hit the ball harder.  Under Goldfine's tutelage, Roddick's game pretty much deteriorated into that sort of strategy.  Roddick failed to reach the quarterfinals in five of his next seven grand slam tournaments, and his world ranking briefly fell below #10.  Things pretty much hit rock bottom at Wimbledon of 2006, when during a 3rd round loss to Scotsman Andy Murray, where McEnroe basically gave a blistering commentary for two hours about everything that had gone wrong for him, and what he needed to do to get back on top of his game.

So when, in the late summer of 2006, Roddick announced that he had hired Jimmy Connors to be his new coach, all of us were stunned.  Connors?  The man who had wanted almost nothing to do with tennis since his retirement (unless there was a big paycheck involved)?  The man with no coaching experience of any sort?  Yep, this was going to be the turnaround point for Andy.  And for a time, things did get better.  Roddick won in Cincinnati, made the finals of the U.S. Open and the semis of the Australian Open, but then things started to level off.

Connors seemed to take only a passing interest in Andy's development at times, only occassionally showing up to his tournaments.  This arrangement seemed to suit Andy just fine; he often talked about how he learned more from Connors over a beer or a poker game than he did from on-court practice sessions, and he could continue to do his thing on court. 

Roddick touts that Connors significantly improved his backhand; this is true, it's a much more powerful weapon than it was in the years before.  What Connors was not able to do was to improve his horrendous service return game (Andy is still consistently one of the bottom 2-3 of the top 50 players on tour in return points and games won), improve his match strategy (displayed most clearly in his Wimbledon quarterfinal loss to Richard Gasquet, when he blew a two set lead by continuing to go to Gasquet's backhand, his clear strong suit), or help his get over his pre-occupation with Roger Federer (who has owned him to the tune of a 15-1 record).  And now, 18 months later, Connors decided that he'd had enough of the coaching thing.

So now Andy is acting as his own coach, and maybe that's best for him.  Almost no one has been able to ever get through to him in a way that makes him an elite player, and those that have he brushes aside when they get on his nerves, which probably explains why he owns such a horrendous record against top 10 players over his career.

The career of a tennis player ends early; most peak around 26-27 - heck, Roger Federer is 26, and may be six months into the downside of his career.  At 25, Roddick still has time to right what is clearly one of the more underachieving careers in tennis history.  He's got $1 million tools, but until someone gets into that ten cent head and turns things around, people are going to continue to wonder what could have been.