I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Hope I didn’t forget anybody…
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Monica Seles [YUG/USA]Born: 2 December 1973
Career: 1989-2003
Plays: Left-handed (two-handed forehand and backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1991)
Peak Elo rating: 2,563 (1st place, 1993)
Major singles titles: 9
Total singles titles: 53
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You know the story. You also know it’s where I have to start.
By the time Monica Seles turned 19 years old, she had cemented her status as the best player in the world. She won the 1993 Australian Open, her seventh title of the last eight majors she entered. At the 1992 season-ending Virginia Slims Championships, she straight-setted Martina Navratilova in the final.
“At her best,” said Martina, “she’s as good as anybody I’ve played in twenty years.”
Three tournaments into her 1993 season, Seles was laid low by a viral infection. She missed two months, spending much of that time in bed. She returned to the tour at the Citizen Cup in Hamburg. She showed little sign of any lingering illness, smiling and cruising through the early rounds as usual.
Then, during a changeover in her quarter-final against Magdalena Maleeva, Seles was attacked by a knife-wielding fan. The physical wounds proved to be minor; the mental toll was enormous. The attacker was an unstable Steffi Graf supporter who wanted the German to return to the top of the rankings. By terrorizing Monica into isolation, he got his wish.
Seles didn’t return to the tour for 27 months. She had her share of success when she did, reaching the final of the 1995 US Open and picking up the Australian title–her ninth career slam–in 1996. But she was never fully the same. Struggling with her weight, coping with injuries, haunted by the nightmare in Hamburg, she was unable to recapture the single-minded fearlessness that defined her teen years.
Along with Maureen Connolly, another all-timer whose career was stunted at 19, Seles is one of the game’s great what-ifs. We can only imagine how long she would’ve remained number one, how many slams she would’ve amassed.
But because Monica went to play eight post-comeback seasons, many fans think of her career as just a missed opportunity. Let me be absolutely clear about this: She’s the eleventh greatest tennis player of the last hundred years entirely because of what she did accomplish on court. There’s no adjustment for her time on the sidelines, however much she might deserve it.
Even before the attack, much of Seles’s press coverage centered on things other than her knack for blasting winners past helpless opponents. When reporters weren’t mocking the teen-inflected English she picked up as her third language, they wrote at great length about her grunt. Maybe the media would’ve moved on even without a brutal assault to change the narrative; we’ll never know.
Monica said later, “I don’t wish to be remembered as the ‘grunter’ or ‘giggler’ or even as the girl who got stabbed.” Those wishes will always be denied her, but we could at least do her the service of putting the spotlight back on the early 1990s, when she played some of the greatest tennis the world had ever seen.
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Seles defied comparison. If you insisted on explaining her in terms of her contemporaries on the WTA tour, you’d fail.
Her on-court grittiness was pure Jimmy Connors. Her regular-person physique evoked the unexpected athletic exploits of John McEnroe. Her hit-or-miss attempts at glamour and mystery made her the sport’s equivalent of Madonna.
The devastating double-handed groundstrokes were entirely original. You could point to Pancho Segura’s two-handed forehand bludgeon, but even Segura paired his primary weapon with a standard one-handed backhand. Monica didn’t change her grip at all. That was an unorthodox choice for a reason: It gave her less reach. She had to run that much more. The overall effect was that of a hyperactive squirrel occasionally stopping to hurl a grenade.
A typically unrestrained Seles forehand, at Wimbledon in 1990
Seles had her detractors. Many fans were put off by her grunting. Graf was an established champion with a substantial following; anyone who came along to dethrone her was bound to face an uphill battle to win the public’s affection. The tennis world is always clamoring for fresh new stars, but it has a tendency to harshly judge teenagers who don’t fit a narrow vision of how an up-and-comer ought to look and act.
One of the few tennis lifers who understood Monica from the get-go was Ted Tinling. The bald, six-foot, four-inch Tinling had been the unlikely face of women’s tennis for decades, most notably as a dress designer to the stars.
Tinling got his start in the 1920s as a teenager on the French Riviera, where he became Suzanne Lenglen’s personal umpire. He spent the rest of his life looking for–and trying to help bring about–an icon to equal La belle Suzanne. Three days before his death, he wrote to journalist John Feinstein:
She’s Doris Day. My God, she’s a normal person, the first one we’ve had in years. We’ve had the awkwardness of [Margaret] Court; the bitchiness of Billie Jean; the brown sugar of Chrissie; the butchness of Martina and the manic shyness of Graf. Now we shall have Seles and she will be wonderful.
On another occasion, he said simply, “Monica is the one.”
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Many of Seles’s opponents did not find her wonderful. At Wimbledon in 1990, she beat 98th-ranked Ann Henricksson, 6-1, 6-0, in 39 minutes.
“I think I can play a lot better,” said Seles. “What I would like to do is beat everybody in 30 minutes. Then I would be satisfied, I think.”
Her confidence was well-deserved. Henricksson marked Monica’s 36th straight victory, a streak that spanned seven tournaments, five countries, and three surfaces. She won the first 26 matches of the streak without dropping a single set. She dropped a bagel on Conchita Martínez. On clay. Twice.
Playing for the title in Rome, Seles beat Navratilova, 6-1, 6-1. “It was like being run over by a truck,” said Martina.
The streak included a title at Roland Garros, making Seles the youngest major champion since Lottie Dod in 1887. After she upset Graf in the final, the deposed champion said, “Seles isn’t a nightmare yet. I hope she isn’t going to become one.”
But she was already in Steffi’s head. After Monica beat her in Berlin, Graf could be seen on the French Open practice courts tinkering with a two-handed backhand. In the Roland Garros final, Graf took a 5-0 lead in the first set tiebreak, then earned four set points at 6-2. Seles won the next six points to steal the set. It was tough to say what best exemplified the new state of affairs: Steffi’s double fault on her fourth set point, or Monica’s down-the-line winner on her first.
When she wasn’t giggling through a post-match interview, Seles made it easy to forget just how young she was. She won the 1990 French Open six months after her 16th birthday. In less than two years, she had sprouted up five inches. Suddenly the racket felt lighter and the net looked lower.
Monica finished her season with a victory at the Virginia Slims Championships. The final was best-of-five, and she and Gabriela Sabatini went the distance. Sabatini led two sets to one when Seles ratcheted her game to an unimaginable level. Monica hit 28 winners against only six unforced errors in the final two sets to roar back to victory.
Sabatini hadn’t faced her in more than two years, since before the growth spurt. “I was surprised at the way she hit the ball,” the veteran said. “She hits the ball very, very hard.”
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In 1991, Seles won ten tournaments, including three of the four majors. (She skipped Wimbledon with shin splints.) She lost only six matches, all of them finals. Her prize money haul reached $2.45 million, a single-season record.
In March, she grabbed the number one ranking from Graf. Except for four weeks in August and September, she wouldn’t give it back for two years. Her Elo rating at the end of the season–2,459–was the third-highest mark in women’s tennis history to that point, behind only the peaks of Navratilova and Graf.
Graf had held the top spot on the WTA computer for a record 186 consecutive weeks, largely on the strength of a single shot that earned her the nickname Fräulein Forehand. Seles’s ground game was better.
“It’s Steffi’s forehand off both sides,” said Chris Evert. Players debated which side was weaker, then tried exploiting one or the other. Then they lost.
“About the only things Seles didn’t win,” according to Sports Illustrated, “were many hearts or minds.” Monica had gone incommunicado for weeks when she missed Wimbledon, then returned to action only to play an exhibition. She still grunted, and a typical teenage identity crisis left plenty to criticize. For months, it seemed as though she showed up for every match with a new haircut.
Veteran players, on the other hand, saw what Seles was doing right. Pam Shriver and Zina Garrison noticed that she was everything a tour could expect its leading light to be. “She’s not only outgoing, she’s approachable,” said Shriver. “Seles is exactly what we’ve been missing on the tour,” Garrison added.
And thanks to her few encounters with Tinling, Monica maintained a particularly un-teen-like interest in the game’s history. She read the complete works of Billie Jean King, and she spoke often of Lenglen as an inspiration.
A decade later, scribes would attribute Seles’s popularity to her resilience. Her struggles–the stabbing, her father’s death in 1998, her weight–made her unusually relatable for an elite athlete. But Tinling was right: Even as a sometimes kooky teen, she was a normal person. The public would have come around soon, even without the kick-start of tragedy.
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1992: Another 70 match wins, another three majors. Ho-hum.
Seles won her third straight French Open, the first time a woman took three straight since Hilde Sperling did it in the 1930s. This one wasn’t easy: Graf pushed her to 6-2, 3-6, 10-8 and saved five match points.
All those 6-1, 6-0 victories made it easy to forget Monica’s resolve when things got tight. Journalist Christopher Clarey once said, “The two greatest competitors I’ve ever seen in any sport: Michael Jordan and Monica Seles.”
The one blot on Seles’s 1992 season was the Wimbledon final, where she managed only three games against Steffi. The fracas over her grunting reached a new level: One London tabloid set up a “gruntometer” at her matches. In the semi-finals, Navratilova complained to the umpire, “She sounds like a stuck pig!”
Monica, like nearly all grunters before and since, didn’t do it on purpose. “I hate it,” she said. “I can’t help it.” After decades of petty, often sexist blather, we now know that grunting helps players hit harder. These days, more players grunt on every ball, and few of them would ever think to apologize for it.
But Seles reached her limit. She tried to stop on the sport’s biggest stage. “Without grunting,” wrote Curry Kirkpatrick, “she had no bounce, no pace on her shots. Without grunting, she was Rapunzel without the hair, Streisand without the nose.”
Seles and Graf met only one more time before Seles was attacked. In their final-round rematch at the 1993 Australian Open, Monica re-engaged her vocal cords and won in three.
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When Seles returned to the tour after 27 months away, she immediately gave a glimpse of what the tour had missed. At her first tournament back, in Toronto, she lost only 14 games in five matches.
When she won the Australian Open a few months later, her fellow champion Boris Becker said, “What she’s achieving right now is one of the amazing comebacks of all time.” She’d reach four major finals and another four semis in her second act. She remained in the top ten almost continuously until 2003.
More impressive than anything she achieved on court, she overcame the demons of that day in Hamburg. There was more than a little reclusiveness in the Seles family DNA. Her grandfather, Jakab, was tormented as a conscientious objector during World War I. Her father never forgot watching countrymen deported during the second continental conflagration. In Florida, the family chose to live at the end of a dead-end road in a gated community. Seles made hardly any public appearances in the two years after Hamburg.
Yet Monica, finally, went a different way. “As an athlete you have a choice to be as open or closed as you want,” she said in 2009. “I made a choice to be open.”
It is tempting to speculate just what Seles would have accomplished had her career gone on uninterrupted. She could have won 15 majors, perhaps 20, maybe even a record-setting 25. In that scenario, it’s hard to imagine her failing to win Wimbledon–the one trophy, she said in 1991, “missing from my collection.”
The hypothetical I find more thought-provoking is this: Ten majors or thirty, how long would it have taken before Seles became a truly beloved number one? Every year, more fans recognized in her what Ted Tinling saw so readily. At least we got a sort of answer to that question. Post-comeback, her popularity soared even as she struggled to remain in the top five.
We certainly can’t reach any conclusions by making comparisons with other players. Monica was one of a kind. Tinling had to wait sixty years for another Lenglen. We’d be lucky to get another Seles so soon.