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It was not a difficult search. In 2000, Roddick was ranked the top junior in the world after winning the junior singles title at the US Open and becoming the first American since 1959 to win the juniors event at the Australian Open. Soon after turning professional that year, he was invited to assist the US Davis Cup team as a hitting partner.

With his all-American demeanour, slash-and-burn game, “24/7” passion for music, scruff-cool wardrobe and popstar girlfriend, Mandy Moore, Roddick was the chosen one, the one with a following beyond the hardcore of tennis fans, the one to market.

When he was asked that irritating question about being the future of American tennis, Roddick used to trot out a programmed response. “I play for myself, my close friends and my family, and that’s it,” he would say. But he knew that much more was at stake. He was playing as America’s Great Hope, and since the treasure-laden edifice of the world professional game is built on American sponsorship, it wasn’t just American tennis but the worldwide game that was waiting and praying for Roddick to deliver.

Having delivered, he can now admit it. “Before I won the US title, there had been a lot of hype rather than substance,” he says. “I got a lot of it before it was deserved, so the win was almost like validation for me, proving that maybe I was there.”

THE triumph had been assumed in advance and heralded by all, with the curious exception of Roddick himself, who still finds it hard to believe. The reason for this lies in his boyhood, in the story of his early development as a tennis player and young man. It is this story that proves he is right to be amazed by his rise to the top, for it is a kind of miracle.

He was born in Omaha, Nebraska. The family moved to Austin, Texas, when Roddick, the youngest of three brothers, was four. “My mom played tennis at a local club, but my dad had given it up,” he says. “He played for about a year and then decided it wasn’t for him. But they both believed in what individual sports taught: self-reliance, responsibility and so on.

“My eldest brother, Lawrence, was a springboard diver, and a very good one. John, my other brother, went for tennis, and he was also very good. In fact, he was national junior champion. In those days, bumming around junior tennis in Austin, when I was eight, which is about the time I played my very first tournament, I was known as ‘Little Roddick’, because the real Roddick was my brother John.”

And he was small. In fact, Roddick, who now stands at 6ft 2in, did not exceed 5ft 2in until he was 14. Since he was so small, he had no choice but to play the small guy’s game, popping the ball into court on service and scrapping away from the baseline, with speed and tenacity his only weapons.

In the garage at home, he used to hit balls against a rebound net, springs making the ball bounce back. He imagined he was Ivan Lendl or Michael Chang, Boris Becker or Stefan Edberg, and when his mother asked him what he had been doing, he would say he had been beating the best players in the world.

The first full match he watched on television was in 1989, when Chang lost the first two sets against Lendl in the fourth round of the French Open and overcame cramp to win in more than 4Å hours. That was the kind of player Little Roddick was — small and indomitable. After watching Chang and Lendl, Roddick went out to the courts himself and played for three hours.

The next year, at Christmas, Roddick’s dreams were becoming grander. He presented each member of his family with the same present: a box containing a tennis ball that he had signed with a felt-tip pen. “Hang on to it,” he told them. “It might be valuable one day.”

That hardly seemed likely. When he was 10, his family moved to Florida. For several years he remained a gutsy, short and limited player, scratching away from the baseline. But from 1997 he began to grow, and once he had grown, he accidentally found what every player covets — a brilliant, cannonball service.