Andy Roddick's retirement leaves a yawning gap in US men's tennis

He had just turned 21 and while his future looked bright, the present wasn't exactly shabby either. The youngest US Open winner since Pete Sampras' victory 13 years earlier, he was a booming server who was the natural heir to an American men's tennis dynasty which had produced a spate of grand slam champions such as Arthur Ashe, Stan Smith, Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, Andre Agassi, Jim Courier and, of course, Sampras.

They had combined to win 50 slams in the modern era and on that September day in 2003, few could have predicted the US was about to embark on a 0-32 run in the marquee tournaments. When the precocious Andy Roddick was crowned US Open champion that day, he was tied in career slams with a young Swiss player named Roger Federer at one. Federer has gone on to win 16 more slams while Roddick came to be defined not for who he was, but for who he wasn't. Timing is everything in sports; we don't pick our era, it picks us.

When Roddick announced during the past week that he would retire immediately after the US Open, there was a sense of greatness unfulfilled. But he was simply not as good as Federer, Rafael Nadal or even Novak Djokovic and because of that Roddick was denied transcendent greatness. He was also the tail end of an extraordinary era in American tennis.

"You know the burden," Roddick said of that legacy. "I understand the fact we come from a place which probably had more success than any other tennis country where there are certain expectations. I fell right back on the end of a golden generation, and so that was just the cards that were dealt. Someone who's got however many kids and is working two jobs to buy food - that's hard. What I had to deal with wasn't hard."

His career ended with a defeat in the round of 16 to Argentinian star Juan Martin del Potro. Game, set, and match for the 30-year-old who is seemingly the last American with any sort of charisma and even a whiff of greatness. With Roddick gone, there are only three Americans in the world's top 60 players with John Isner at number 10, Mardy Fish at 25 and Sam Querrey at 28. Fish is the same age as Roddick while the gangly Isner is 27 with five career victories and Querrey, at 24, has two. The ATP plays about 30 per cent of its tournaments in the US and how many people are going to come out to watch in places like Cincinnati and Houston when the top names in the field hail from Serbia, the Czech Republic and Ukraine? Roddick, even in his dwindling form, was the last bankable star from the United States. As such, he often garnered more publicity than his results merited.

He was comparable to Agassi in that he always had a unique insight on the game, and often life. There was so much bluster that it could smother the genius but the guy was refreshingly honest.

Last year at the US Open his form was not particularly good. He had been coming off a series of injuries and was playing what one announcer called "ugly tennis."

"I'm OK with having to defend another win," Roddick said in a post-match interview. "I'm pretty convinced I could be a tennis analyst when I'm done. It just doesn't take much thought. If I'm grinding and I'm winning you guys are like 'he's reinvented himself,' and if I'm playing like crap and pushing then it's 'he's horrible and needs to hit the ball'."

To me, this was Roddick at his finest. He went on to make it to the quarter-finals before being ruthlessly dispatched in straight sets by Nadal. But making it to the quarters in the US Open is no small feat; especially for a player whose form was suspect, and this was the irony of Roddick.

He had, by any standards, an enviable career. Over a nine-year period he was consistently ranked in the top 10 in the world and has earned more than US$20 million in prize money, along with millions more in endorsements, while marrying a stunning swimsuit model.

Roddick could also be a world-class jerk, particularly in his treatment of officials and the media. "You're an idiot," he said to an umpire at the Australian Open in 2008. "Stay in school kids or you'll end up being an umpire."

He was the best interview on the tour and he was the worst interview and to me that will be Roddick's most enduring legacy. But it's not like he's going to lose any sleep over what I think, which is one more reason to like him.