More on the hotel fire in Rome..........
Published Sunday
May 2, 2004
Rome hotel fire doesn't faze Roddick
COX NEWS SERVICE
The thing that struck Blanche Roddick, at home in Boca Raton, Fla., was how calm her son sounded. It was early Saturday morning in Rome, and Andy Roddick was standing on the balcony of his burning hotel, speaking into his cellphone and describing in a newsman's measured clip the chaos all around him.
Guests at the Grand Hotel Parco dei Principi were trying to escape the licking flames by jumping onto the wraparound balcony outside Roddick's sixth-floor suite. He heard screaming outside his door.
When Blanche, summoning the most soothing voice she could muster under the circumstances, suggested that Andy - in Rome to play in this week's Italian Open - wet some bathroom towels and stick them under his door, he corrected her.
"Mom," he said, "it's way beyond that."
Roddick, the reigning U.S. Open champion and the No. 2-ranked tennis player in the world, had awakened around 5 a.m. to an acrid smell. He padded to his front door, swung it open and was assaulted by billowy black smoke.
There were people in the hallway, groping for fresh air. Some of them were hysterical. Roddick, 21, pulled close to a dozen people into his spacious upgraded digs - the hotel management had insisted on opening its Royal Suite to him - and herded them onto the balcony.
There they huddled, awaiting help. Soot was falling from the sky. Bodies were landing like birds on Roddick's terrace.
Sjeng Schalken, a 6-foot-4 tennis player from the Netherlands, dropped like an albatross into Roddick's open arms. He had jumped from his room on the seventh floor.
Schalken's wife, Ricky, was another of the half-dozen people Roddick guided to a safe landing. In January at the Australian Open, the first Grand Slam event of the year, Roddick had faced Schalken in the quarterfinals and dispatched him in three breezy sets.
They had been fierce opponents then. But now Roddick and Schalken were comrades, banding together. As the heat grew more intense, the bodies on Roddick's balcony grew more dense. Roddick told his mother there were two dozen of them jumbled together, waiting to be rescued.
At one point, Roddick told his mother, "I have my head about me. It's amazing how calm I am."
Somebody had to be. A few people on the balcony grew more panicky with every passing minute. Roddick had to get in the faces of a couple of people who were easily twice his age and tell them in the nicest way possible to get a grip.
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