Before the pandemic hit, Andy Roddick and Brooklyn Decker sold their sprawling 15-acre Austin estate. The plan was to split their time between an apartment/condo in downtown Austin and a house in Decker’s hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina. The couple had been living together in the ATX for 11 years and Decker thought it would be nice to spend more time with her family.
Then, the pandemic hit. This, of course, affected the couple’s ability to travel back and forth. They eventually cancelled the contract on their new place downtown and embraced life on the East Coast.
Now, they’re pretty settled in North Carolina, though they still both consider Austin home. “This is home,” Decker told us on the red carpet at the Andy Roddick Foundation annual fundraising gala. “This is where we got married, this is where we had our babies.”
Though Roddick travels back to Austin about once a month for work with the foundation, Decker has not had a lot of time to return to the city – especially since she was wrapping up production on the Netflix series Grace and Frankie.
The final episodes of the comedy series air on April 29. That means Decker is done with that project. So, what’s next? “It’s complicated,” she said. “I can no longer do anything in Los Angeles because I have children who are starting school. I’m not doing that. So we’ll see.”
We don’t know if that means we’ll see them both back in the ATX more, though we’re hoping for holidays or school breaks, at least. But here’s what we do know – they both miss Austin!
What do Brooklyn Decker and Andy Roddick miss most about Austin?
For Brooklyn, it’s Town Lake, the food, the friendliness and the intellectual diversity. Roddick also misses the food, as well as the diversity of industry and of thought.
When asked about his views on all the changes in the city, the 30 year resident says, “Listen, a lot of people complain about it. But the roads are paved and it’s thriving. You miss certain things about it from before but overall I think it’s a good thing.”
And he definitely knows something about change. The Andy Roddick Foundation creates new chances for children in low-income communities of Central Texas to grow in literacy, STEM, art, sports and social and emotional learning. Traditionally, that has been done through in person learning and activities. In 2020, however, they realized there was a real opportunity to scale. So the organization put together a great virtual learning platform and made it available outside our community, which helped the group grow and become even stronger.
“We chose to view it (the pandemic) as an opportunity,” the Grand Slam champ explained. “We’re excited to get back to our kids in person but we still have a strong virtual learning platform. I feel like we did as well as we could.”
It looks like ARF will be doing even more this year! The fundraising total for gala came in at almost a million dollars! We can’t wait to see how much good all that dough will do.
