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Perseverance paying off for Michael Russell
By Greg Garber | ESPN.com
Playing golf for the first time in four years, Michael Russell is spraying his 3-wood all over the Horseshoe Bay Resort course just west of Austin, Texas. It’s a best-ball competition with Andy Roddick — who is finding most of the fairways with 300-yard drives — and two buddies on a drizzly day in mid-July. Somehow, Russell is in position to win the match with a 5-foot putt for par on the 18th hole. But he misses, barely, to the left, and must pay off the lost wager. “I owe him an hour of my time. That was the deal,” Russell explains. “If Andy wants a box of rubber bands, I’ll have to drive to Staples and get it.”
You might not have heard of Michael Russell, Andy Roddick’s temporary errand boy, but his meandering 10-year journey through the world of professional tennis has been marked by a string of bullet-point highs unimaginable to most of us.
• Practicing with in-his-prime, 14-time Grand Slam champion Pete Sampras as a 17-year-old at the Saddlebrook Tennis Academy in Florida.
• Holding match point against three-time (and eventual) champion Gustavo Kuerten in the fourth round of the 2001 French Open.
• Leading Lleyton Hewitt, two sets to love, on center court in the first round of the 2007 Australian Open.
• Hitting balls with the U.S. Davis Cup team in the Czech Republic in February.
• Facing No. 1-ranked Roger Federer three months later in the first round of the French Open.
• Flying with Andy Roddick in a private jet to a summer tournament in Indianapolis.
All of this, leavened by a frustrating series of less-than-stellar results and a run of sometimes-unfathomable bad fortune.
• Serving to Andre Agassi during a 1997 practice session in North Carolina and suffering a spiral fracture of the humerus bone in his right arm.
• Undergoing three knee surgeries in 2003 and 2004 to resolve a long-undiagnosed condition in which bone and cartilage separated from the rest of the knee.
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