Retired tennis star Andy Roddick walks briskly through the casual West Austin eatery.
A cap masks his searching eyes and sun-seared forehead. The best American male player of his generation — and one of Austin’s most celebrated citizens — then raises his head, folds his long legs under a table and orders eagerly.
In August — on his 30th birthday — Roddick announced his retirement. Since then, he’s fielded questions from fans about his plans, post-pro-circuit.
“I retired from tennis, not from life,” says Roddick, dressed in a zipped-up Davis Cup jacket. “People think I take a lot of naps.”
In fact, he still plays tennis, mostly exhibition matches.
“You don’t have to be prepared,” he admits. “Just show up.”
Roddick also works out, travels, makes endorsements and spends time in Los Angeles, the career base for wife, actress and swimsuit model Brooklyn Decker.
“It’s new territory,” says Roddick, who sounds more worldly, reflective these days. “Every day that I’d woken up, before last September, I knew what I was going to do that day.”
His critical focus is the Andy Roddick Foundation, which, after years of throwing glamorous concert-galas, will stage its first golf tournament and attendant “Bogey Down” party on April 14-15.
While celebrated athletes such as Roger Clemens, Jim Courier, Trey Hardee and Vince Young are confirmed for play with small groups, the public also is invited to the Bogey Down dinner and party at the Darrell Royal Ballroom at Barton Creek Country Club on Sunday night ($250 a ticket).
“We traditionally did one blow-out event a year,” says Roddick, who drafted friends such as Sir Elton John to perform for those galas. “We want to do other events to create continuity. Where you don’t have to buy a $50,000 table. If you are not into golf, there’s the party. If you are not into the party, there’s the golf.”
Wait a sec: How did Roddick get to know the Sir anyway?
“In 2002, I got a phone call from PR person — this is completely out of the blue — saying Elton John wanted to interview me for Interview magazine,” Roddick recalls. “‘He’s going to call you in 20 minutes,” they said. Around this time, we had this prank war going on. So when he called and said: ‘Andy ,this is Elton John,” I said: ‘Awesome. This is Paul McCartney.”
“Pretty soon I realized: ‘Oh, this is really Elton John.’
The social link between the two was tennis great Billie Jean King, whose AIDS benefit both celebrities had supported.
“He’s an extremely generous person,” Roddick says about the rock star. “It all happened in about 35 minutes. When he wants to do something, it happens fast.”
Golf has long been a part of Roddick’s life. After grueling hours of practices, workouts and matches, a little time on the course helped him unwind. He also knows his way around Austin’s courses.
“This is my home,” he says. “It’s nice have something familiar here.”
Before retirement, Roddick had already decided to put a fine edge on his foundation. Instead of distributing cash exclusively to existing children’s charities, he drafted boyhood friend Jeff Lau — who had carved out a career of his own in the U.S. Army and on Wall Street — to blaze a trail for teaching character through tennis.
“I wanted to transition into something stable and permanent,” Roddick says. “So I convinced Jeff to come down and put together the framework. We plan to have it up and running by the last quarter of the year.”
Lau made sure that the foundation didn’t just jump into new activities at its renovated East Austin campus.
“We wanted to think very deeply about the programs,” Lau says. “Schools focus well on the cognitive process. We can focus on the noncognitive.”
After an exacting search, Lau hired Mary Riggs, whose background includes social work, business, youth activities and government, to direct the programs. The Roddick team sees that schools are getting better about placing needy kids in college, but those same students are not always making it to graduation.
“We are trying to build resilience, grit, optimism, delayed gratification,” Lau says.
“There’s been a certain disconnect between old school values and what we have now,” Roddick agrees. “The one thing that my father said: ‘It’s what you put into a day.’ There are a lot of things you can’t control. If I lose one game, I could quit, or think: ‘I hit a 100 serves a day. I need to hit 150.’”