"Ever since the day he was born, he's been a fighter, a competitor. Maybe that's why he likes life so much," says Lawrence Roddick about his younger brother Andy on ESPN Classic's SportsCentury series.

Growing up, Andy Roddick didn't have a single idol in tennis. He had a handful of them. Every week, as he watched tennis broadcasts, the budding teenager would become enthralled by Andre Agassi or Pete Sampras, Michael Chang or Jim Courier. Roddick would then emulate his hero de jour until one of the star's countrymen in that wildly gifted generation knocked him off the following week.

Today, a kid in Roddick's shoes would have nothing like those options: Roddick, who has been ranked No. 1 in the world - but holds just one Grand Slam title (U.S. Open, 2003) - is easily the best U.S. player of his generation. In fact, he is the only impact player of his generation.

Roddick is the raw-boned paragon of power tennis. The 6-foot-2, 190-pounder may have saved American tennis from going over a cliff (and taking a good deal of the sport's visibility with it) and he provides the sport with more bang for the buck than anyone since the young Agassi.

For one thing, the lineage of Roddick's Big Game, which draws on an explosive serve (Roddick set the speed record with a 154-mph delivery in 2004), a punishing forehand, and a restless, aggressive game, is red, white and blue-blooded. For another, he is planted firmly in the American cultural mainstream; Nebraska-born, he's a gregarious, intelligent, unpretentious, refreshingly frank and good-natured kid who wears his heart on his sleeve and his baseball cap backwards. Roddick dates pop-culture stars (including singer/actress Mandy Moore for a year and a half) and knows hip-hop. He loves cars, revels in slang, and remains irrationally loyal to the Nebraska football team. Roddick is Jimmy Connors, declawed. John McEnroe without the bullying streak. Sampras without the remoteness and Agassi without the complications. The adjectives that best describe Roddick form a curious triangle of personality: intense, boyish and self-aware.

"Andy has a lot of charisma, a big personality and a healthy appetite for life," says Patrick McEnroe, Roddick's Davis Cup captain. "He's outgoing and fun-loving, but you always have to keep in mind that this is also a guy who hates to lose. Even if he's just warming up for practice, playing a game to seven, he wants to win. He has this great innate competitiveness and it's something he uses well."

Roddick loves the smoke and din of the battlefield, too. He competes with his whole being, unabashedly and unapologetically. Asked if he felt "badly" about beating players he once lionized, Roddick replied: "No. And I think they respect me more for taking no pity, because they were once in my shoes."

He was born on Aug. 30, 1982, in Omaha, Neb., the third son of Jerry and Blanche Roddick. It was a difficult birth as the chord was wrapped three times around the baby's neck and the doctor wasn't certain if Andy was going to make it. Fortunately, Blanche dilated up at the last minute and Andy's head came down, enabling the doctor to deliver him.

In 1986, the family moved to Austin Tex., to enable John, a budding tennis star at age nine, to receive better instruction in the sport. Six years later, another move - again for the sake of John's game - to Boca Raton, Fla. Andy, although small at the time (he was 10), took to the game so easily that two years later he went 100-0 in junior tournaments. While at Boca Prep, he suddenly grew more than half-a-foot and found his huge serve.

At 18, Roddick won his first title as a pro (Atlanta in April 2001) to become the first American teenager since Chang to win a tour event. The telling stat in that breakout performance was his run of 42 straight service games held. Given that the event was on clay, the serving streak was a harbinger of the weapon taking shape in his right arm.

That year, Roddick reeled off a series of performances that catapulted him into the upper echelon of the game, and by the end of 2002 the 20-year-old was a sensation: the youngest U.S. player to make the world's Top 10 since Chang. But despite his brilliant play and burgeoning celebrity, Roddick was either snake-bit (mostly, by virtue of injury) or insufficiently confident to make major statements at major tournaments.

Although Roddick finished 2001 at No. 14, he didn't survive the third round at a Grand Slam event until he reached the quarterfinals at the 2002 U.S. Open, where he pushed Lleyton Hewitt, the defending champion, to five sets before losing.

Roddick hinted at a transformation early in 2003, when he reached his first-ever Grand Slam semifinal via a five-set win over Younes El Aynaoui at the Australian Open quarterfinals. The match featured a Grand Slam record 21-19 fifth set and was frequently cited as the match of the year.

Then, following a disappointing first-round loss at the French Open, Roddick made a significant move. He fired his coach of 4½ years, Tarik Benhabiles, and hired the mastermind of Agassi's late-career makeover, Brad Gilbert.

Although Roddick was frustrated at Wimbledon by a semifinal loss to Roger Federer, Gilbert's acumen began to pay big dividends during the hard-court season as Roddick went 27-1. He came from two sets down to defeat David Nalbandian in the semifinals of the U.S. Open and then routed Juan Carlos Ferraro in the final to capture his first major. In November, he became - at 21 - the youngest American to be ranked No. 1 in the world since ATP rankings started in 1973.

Roddick ultimately surrendered that ranking just a few months later to the man most often dubbed his main rival, Federer. Indeed, the contrast between the soft-spoken, introspective Swiss star and the brash Roddick is refreshing and intriguing. For it embodies the age-old conflict in sports between power and guile, between the virtues of finesse and straightforward aggression.

At Wimbledon in 2004, guile and finesse again won as Federer defeated Roddick in four sets in the final. In December, Roddick fired Gilbert and replaced him with Dean Goldfine, an assistant coach on the U.S. Davis Cup team. But the move didn't help Roddick in the 2005 Wimbledon final as he again lost to Federer, this time in straight sets.

At this stage of his career, Roddick is far from a finished product. The developing subtext is that Federer's pre-eminence will force Roddick to cultivate and maximize every potential tool in his repertoire. This is an ongoing process: It seems like only yesterday that Roddick didn't even have a backhand that he could rely on in pressure situations, much less one that he could deploy as a weapon.

In the long run, though, it's hard to imagine Roddick straying far afield from a straightforward, power-based game. He's the equivalent of a baseball power pitcher. He goes straight at people and mows them down.

Contemplating the way variety and finesses have come to rule the game, Roddick said: "If you check out the Top 10, I'm pretty much the only guy you'd look at and say, 'He's a banger' - a guy who steps up and tries to enforce his power on people. The game kind of took a left turn from where people said it was going five years ago, when everyone was talking about power ruling the day."

Roddick has returned the power to the game. He hammers people, but he does it with infectious enthusiasm and conspicuous joie de vivre. The crowds respond to those qualities in Roddick, and that has a lot to do with his growing status as a star. His game is as American as apple pie and baseball - and so is his personality and world view.

"It's great to be liked," Roddick said, "but I don't try to be someone the crowd relates to. If being calm and showing no emotion worked better for me, that's how I'd be. I just like to express my emotions."

It isn't easy, carrying the game for an entire generation. But Roddick sometimes makes it look that way.