US OPEN

September 7, 2004

Andy Roddick

THE MODERATOR: Questions, please.

ANDY RODDICK: I thought I played pretty well. You know, I don't know how that would take up two hours of your time, but... (laughing). But, no, I played solid, you know. I'm serving well. I'm breaking a lot. I think I'm up to maybe over 50 percent, you know, breaking for the tournament, which is an extremely high number for me. So I'm pretty pleased with that right now.

ANDY RODDICK: I feel like I'm returning pretty well. I'm moving well. You know, I feel good right now. But the next match I play is going to be totally different than the four I've played so far, you know. It's going to be a lot of serving, you know. I don't know how much time is going to -- how much of the time is going to be spent at the baseline actually trading ground strokes.

ANDY RODDICK: No, no. I mean, last year's was last year. I feel like I'd rather look forward. I've looked back for an entire year when thinking about this tournament. So, you know, I choose to kind of look ahead.

ANDY RODDICK: I'm thinking that's the least of their worries at this point. But, no, I mean, you know, my heart goes out to those people. It's probably got to be a pretty helpless feeling, you know. I'm in touch with my roommates daily. Luckily, they've taken a pretty positive attitude about it. You know, I think people would be wise to kind of just be as positive as possible. I know that's a lot easier said than done, but, you know, I definitely can sympathize with that.

ANDY RODDICK: No, I didn't ask the question because I didn't want to know, you know. I haven't gotten any emergency calls so I'm assuming that's a good thing. But, you know, I haven't really been all over it too much.

ANDY RODDICK: Really?

ANDY RODDICK: Definitely not every time when someone thinks you have a bad call. But what is it, NFL, you get two challenges a game, a match? Sorry, I was about to turn that into a match. I mean, I don't see a whole lot of down side in that. Then the players, you know, if you get penalized something. If you're wrong, you know, you're going to see, you know. You're only going to do it if you're 100 percent sure. I don't see a lot of the down side in that, having maybe instant replay challenge. It probably would be pretty easy to have a monitor at the side of the court or, I mean, the referee's office is right inside the tunnel where we walk out. So, I mean, that's just an idea. I don't think you can do it every time because then it would just get ridiculous with people questioning calls, doing replay. It would become a circus. But if you have two over the span of a five-set match, that's not a whole lot of contention, I don't think.

ANDY RODDICK: From what I saw, I don't know if it was so much of an overrule, I don't know if any of you ever heard the term "correction used." You know, I think it was more of a -- maybe a scoring thing and then realizing it and, "Uh-oh, I better stick to my guns here." If you can go back and you hear an audible correction, then maybe that question is relevant. But I didn't hear that.

ANDY RODDICK: I grew up in both places, and, you know, I spent from 10 years old to, you know, just last year living in Florida. I always wanted a place in Austin, you know, so kind of treated myself after I won this tournament last year. So I am an extremely spoiled individual (smiling).

ANDY RODDICK: Yeah. I have residency in both places.

ANDY RODDICK: I think playing well rolls over, but I could have won every match so far in five sets and I'm still in the same place, you know, as I am right now. So, you know, the weird thing about tennis is it's a clean slate every match and kind of what you've done before really doesn't have a lot of bearing on it. But I feel like I've played pretty well so far, and that's the thing that I'll take out of it.

ANDY RODDICK: Oh, yeah. I've watched much worse matches this week than that one (smiling). For sure. I definitely might catch an early dinner, come back, and set it on court, get some popcorn, have a couple buddies over, check it out, definitely.

ANDY RODDICK: I don't know. It's going to be interesting to see how Roger comes out after not playing for four days. Andre is definitely fresh. So it's tough, you know. There's so many elements. I mean, it's going to be high electricity. Andre has been there before here. Obviously, the crowd is going to be going insane for Andre. So who knows. But Roger, he's Roger this year, you know. He's playing great. So it's a very tough one to handicap. I think a lot of it is going to depend on the first set. They're both really, really good front runners.

ANDY RODDICK: No. If it rains, it rains. If it doesn't, it doesn't. I'm not going to sit here and try to worry about it too much. Maybe it's a good sign if it starts raining again (smiling).