Andy Roddick Is Just Like You.

This article focuses on tennis player Andy Roddick of the United States. This is the rare premier athlete who lives not in a parallel universe but in our universe. So forgive the guy if he still thinks he might be hallucinating. Did Roddick really win the U.S. Open in September and upgrade his billing from the future of American tennis to its present? Is that really his name that keeps crawling across the bottom of the screen as he watches ESPN? Was he really hanging out in Las Vegas last month with Robin Williams? The singer-actress Mandy Moore, is she really his girlfriend of 15 months? "I'll be the first to admit it, the life I'm leading is basically a joke," says Roddick."I should probably be cooler about it, but I can't fake it, you know?" The Nebraska-born Roddick and his Everyman sensibilities may ultimately do just as much as the Williams sisters (Serena and Venus) have done to splinter the stereotypes that bedevil their sport. Put it this way: Although he turned it down, Roddick is the first tennis player ever to have fielded an endorsement offer from Red Bull. As for the notion that you can't make it as a tennis pro unless you learn the Western grip in the crib and sacrifice your adolescence at the altar of Bollettieri or at some other Florida hothouse: It wasn't all that long ago that Roddick was a scrawny kid in Austin taking group lessons with Chris Mihm and Drew Brees -- today a forward for the Cleveland Cavaliers and the quarterback of the San Diego Chargers, respectively.