March 2008

 

On Feb. 14, Monica Seles has at last announced her retirement. Here’s my remembrance:

 

iddy and giggly, the innocent, free teen strode onto Roland Garros’ fabled Court Centrale and flung roses to an adoring crowd. Never mind that her seasoned foe, Zina Garrison, seethed with anger and envy. The entry of young Monica Seles onto tennis’ main stages in the late ‘80s was a heady mix of unspoiled delight and fierce, unflinching triumphs.

Plus, the spindly teen’s backstory was quite the compelling tale. Of Hungarian heritage with an exotic dose of gypsy blood, she was born poor in communist Yugoslavia, where she learned the game in a parking lot and honed her distinctive double-barreled shots by hitting against the wall of her apartment house (which had to have the best neighbors in town). Soon enough, the kid who would win tournaments before she even knew how to score, set out on a trailblazing career where, time and again, she would create new paths.

Long before wide-eyed whiz kids and their pushy parents left Moscow basement apartments or the Siberian outback for power academies in Bradenton or Barcelona, and long before Serbians were regulars in the semis and finals of the game’s big tournaments, young Monica — who had just won the Orange Bowl and was the best prospect in Europe — left it all behind as she and her tight-as-can-be clan set sail for Bollettieri’s dream-maker boot camp. Her dad’s playful cartoons eased the pressure. Still, everyone knew that the family’s future, its very survival, weighed heavily on her slim shoulders.

But, not to worry, thin Monica was always much more than a savvy lefty with an out-sized will to win. Her legendary seven-hour hitting sessions brought squads of sparring partners to their knees - just ask Jim Courier. And, more to the point, her stunning, on-the-rise groundies set the table for Big Babe Tennis — the power-baseline game of the Williams sisters, Davenport, Capriati, Sharapova and every “ova” west of Minsk, who would come to rule the game.

Soon enough “The Balkan Basher,” who was tagged by Sally Jenkins as “a spooky little kid who turned out to have the game of a rattlesnake,” burst onto the scene. In ‘89 — a mere 5-foot-4 and only 15 — she took down the game’s stately queen and honored elder Chris Evert to win Houston’s WTA event. The next year, she became the youngest French Open champ and No. 1 ever. With little hesitation, she fearlessly crafted a Federer-like record, long before Roger “was Roger.” In ‘91, she won the Aussie, French and U.S. Open titles and in ‘92, she did it again, just for good measure. By the time she was 19, she had bagged 32 singles titles and won seven of the eight Slams she had played. Can you spell D-O-M-I-N-A-N-C-E?

The world was her delicious oyster. Bubbling and upbeat, she traded barbs with Letterman and giggled all the way to the bank. Buoyed by her life-is-a-breeze success, Seles, of course, made the requisite (but delusional) announcement that she would be going Hollywood. “By the time I’m 25,” she informed us, “I’ll become an actress. I’ll be another Grace Kelly or Marlene Dietrich, perhaps Julia Roberts or Michelle Pfeiffer.” She was, noted Bruce Jenkins, “the perennial giddy teenager at her first wedding reception on her third glass of champagne.” Many rushed to embrace the carefree winner.

“She’s Doris Day,” noted the late great Ted Tinling. “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. Completely wonderful.” Her mentor, Nick Bollettieri added that the 99-pounder was “a unique little human being. With time and patience, she has the potential to be not only a champion, but a great young lady.”

But just below the celebratory sizzle lurked an ample downside. Amidst chaos in ‘91, Seles abruptly skipped out, sans explanation, on hallowed Wimbledon. Just when the getting got good, she abruptly dumped her sponsor/protector Bollettieri without even awarding the generous fellow a gold watch or a tad of credit for all his “come be my guest” troubles. Plus, Monica — the focused young prodigy — had precious few friends.

While Kim Clijsters would later say she played the circuit to make friends, Monica asserted, “Top 10 players have no friends at their level. It isn’t done, because it isn’t smart tennis.” All the while, Seles played the game with a ruthless, over-the-top intensity and her viciously angled, impossible-to-read, pin-your-foe-in-the-corner groundies were far from pretty and hardly endearing. Few saw her as cozy. No one called her graceful.

Acidic “gotcha” critics, smelling blood in the water, headed right for the jugular. People plopped Monica onto its Worst Dressed list. Spy magazine put her on its Most Annoying list. Esquire said she “desperately wanted to be a bimbo, but will never be classy enough.” Australia’s Herald Sun piled on, calling her a “babbling airhead.” Even the London Times chimed in, saying Monica “scuttled along the baseline like a crab; [with] a face screwed up like a rodent’s...[as she hit strokes that were] a grotesque double-handed mirror of the other.”

Truth be told, the young Serbian-American turned overachieving Gypsy breadwinner was as Johnette Howard noted “a bundle of contradictions. She could be charming yet coy, good-hearted but peevish, publicity-loving and abruptly inaccessible. She cultivated an image as a glamorous enigma. Yet she often became hurt when, inevitably, she was misunderstood.”

Plus, there was one other little detail. Long before Sharapova and Serena pounded our eardrums, Monica established herself as the mother superior of all grunters. The woman who “made Jimmy Connors sound like Perry Como” had an imposing two-toned crescendo — ‘ooh-ahh’ or ‘ooh-eee’ — which not only drew jokes (“I pity the neighbors on her wedding night,” quipped Sir Peter Ustinov), but was fodder for Britain’s mean-spirited tabloids who created their infamous ‘grunt-o-meters’ and asked many a demeaning question: “Does it annoy you when they compare you to a locomotive train?” “Do you think it takes away the elegance or beauty of the game?” “Do you not think it’s unfeminine to have women grunting on the court?”

Worse yet, as Seles’ foes Natalie Tauziat and Martina Navratilova were losing to her at Wimbledon in ‘92, they complained about her not-exactly-benign sound effects. So Monica foolishly tried to muffle herself in the final and was crushed by her ace rival, Steffi Graf, whom she had twice before beaten in Grand Slam finals.

But Monica had her “you go, girl” defenders. The New York Times asserted, “Seles certainly should not have been shut up: not by the fuddy duddies at the All-England Club, not by losers Tauziat and Navratilova, and not by the jaundiced journalism of London tabloids. Certainly, the gagging of Seles was discriminatory since male players like Agassi, McEnroe and Connors were not similarly suppressed.” Reflecting on the big picture, the Times noted, “The whole point of women’s tennis in the last generation has been that women are free to be powerful, competitive sweaty, noisy jocks, just like the men.”

But in less than 10 months, the big picture in tennis would get a heck of a lot more ominous and the brouhaha about grunting would suddenly seem but a trite squabble. For on April 30 in Hamburg, a disheveled, unemployed East German lathe operator and obsessed Steffi Graf fan tilted sports history. Despite the presence of two (yes, awful things did happen before 9/11) security guards, Guenther Parche emerged out of the German Open stands and, during a changeover, stabbed the unsuspecting Seles in the back with a nine-inch serrated boning knife. Monica screamed and stumbled several steps, before gently falling into the arms of an official. “At first, everything seemed calm. Very calm,” said the WTA’s Toni Waters-Woods. “People were trying to figure out what it was. She jumped up and ran near the net, holding her back. You thought maybe it was a back spasm.”

Instead it was a half-inch puncture that came within inches of paralyzing her and left a devastating emotional scar that was slow to heal. Originally, it was said Monica would be sidelined for a month. But it would be more than two years before she would return. It didn’t help that women’s tennis was callous in its response as they hastily voted not to protect Seles’ No. 1 ranking. Monica wryly concluded that the game was “supportive of me the day I was stabbed, but by the next Monday they were already standing up to take my ranking away. Gaby (Sabatini) was the only person who thought of me as a human being and not as a ranking position they wanted to grab.” Seles’ outraged dad Karolj stated, “If I had been Steffi, I would not have played a tournament for a year. I would not have wanted to be a ‘Knife No. 1.’”

Sure, Seles had been known as the most fierce and unflinching fighter on tour. But the stabbing was different. Now she had to deal with a new bevy of flashbacks and haunting doubts, gnawing (“who’s got my back?”) fears and Nancy Kerrigan-like “What did I do to deserve this?” koans. Already self-contained and enigmatic, Seles became deeply reclusive for what she called “two years of hell. Battling depression, she had 120 sessions for posttraumatic stress disorder with a psychologist who said Seles talked “about herself as a bird in a cage. She is fearful, cries and feels very nervous. She is not sleeping well and has nightmares.”

To make matters worse, her court case soon became tennis’ equivalent of the O.J. Simpson trial. Sure, 7,000 folks saw the guy stab her. But the cops had concluded that Parche was merely trying to help Graf — his “dream creation” whose losses in the past had made him suicidal. So, puff, the assailant was let off scot-free. So much for justice. “What kind of message does this send to the world?” asked a miffed Monica. “Mr. Parche admitted that he stalked me, that he stabbed me...[but] he doesn’t have to go to jail for his premeditated crime. He gets to go back to his life, but I can’t because I’m still recovering from this attack, which could have killed me.” But Monica didn’t want “to be remembered just as someone who grunted and giggled...[or] the one with the knife in her back...I want to give something back... There was still a lot I wanted to accomplish.”

So, despite abundant doubts, she gingerly re-entered and easily won her first tournament, reached the U.S. final (where she fell to Graf in three classic sets) and then collected the ‘96 (Steffi-less) Aussie Open. Ahh, these were the good ol’ days all over again. Fans swarmed to stadiums to get their feel-good Monica fix. During press conferences, she chuckled so much that reporters had to ask, “What’s so funny?” She fearlessly immersed herself into jolly throngs to sign autographs and in Manhattan went hat-shopping at Barney’s, where she was greeted with a standing O. “I was trying the hats on,” she reported. “No one was around and Sinatra was playing on the loudspeakers and I felt like Audrey Hepburn.”

She even put a happy face on her forced retreat, contending, “In the long run, it definitely helped me to see that there is life outside of tennis...I could finally spend time with kids my own age and do stuff. If I wanted to go skiing, I didn’t have to worry about breaking my leg...I just lived a normal life. It was so good.”

Okay, but things were different now. Her ferocious edge, that torrid dominance, was gone forever. Stabbings can kind of bring you down. Now fans adjusted to a kinder, gentler, less-imposing Monica. This was no longer the relentless battler who methodically plucked the wings off of hapless foes. Rather, here was a reflective athlete who actually said 16-year-olds should just have fun and not be forced to go out on court. This was Mike Tyson singing Kumbaya or NFLer Ricky Williams going holistic. Once merciless Monica was now saying she wasn’t sure about this “I win, you lose” match thing. She confided that she preferred practice to matches and confessed, “I just hate the whole thought that one is better than the other. It drives me nuts.”

So it was not exactly shocking that she once lost three straight 6-0 sets to Martina Hingis and in ‘96 Graf swept to victory in each of the three Slams she played. After all, Seles hadn’t returned in great shape and soon enough shoulder-to-toe injuries hobbled her. Worse yet, her not-that-old father - the rock of her game, who was her coach, confidante, pal and inspiration — began to loose a heart-wrenching battle to cancer.

Plus, just to top things off, there were matters of that nasty little world out there that had always been such a part of her family’s fabric. Seles’ pacifist grandfather had been terrorized in WWI for his idealism. Her father’s childhood had been shaped by Nazi images and wretched times — bloody Serbia in WWII — and then the engineered harmony of Seles’ native Yugoslavia collapsed amidst the horror and dust of Civil War as her hometown, Novi Sad, became a magnet for NATO bombs. No wonder Seles told IT, “It’s just sad. Sometimes you wonder about the whole state of the world and where human beings are going. It’s really mind-boggling what we do to each other. I really believe we are all the same, and I hope the consciousness level of the entire world will come to that. But it is hard to see that.”

But, at least what we saw in Monica Seles was that, in facing death, she discovered new meaning in life; that the Madonna wannabe, “the spooky little kid who turned out to have the game of a rattlesnake” evolved before us into a giving woman of grace and gentle wisdom, who spoke with calm and joy of the gifts of tennis, the beauty of children, the need to take responsibility and the importance of the moment. The giggly girl now gave us insight. She conceded, “In my life, none of those [happy] storybook endings have happened yet. After all, defining events were out of my control. [So] you have two options: you either go crazy or you just go on and live life. I decided to go on and live life...The one thing I tell myself after this thing, is try to take this day and improve the next hour”

Not surprisingly, Monica told Barbara Walters that she would never look at her scar. “I have put it behind me and have tried to close the door on it. But I have the key if I need to open the door and have to deal with it. But right now I want to keep the door closed and move on.”

Athletes have always had to play the unsparing cards they’re dealt. An entire generation was disrupted by WWII. For decades, due to the snooty rules of amateurism, tennis pros couldn’t even play in the sport’s leading events and unkind injuries have derailed the careers of many a dreamer. But Seles’ problems were of a different, almost Biblical, nature. Once a reporter had the temerity to ask Monica if she had actually seen enough tough times to really understand reality. She responded, “Did that reporter know how it felt to leave Yugoslavia and my family at 12 and try to survive in a place where I didn’t know the language or the people? To leave my home with no guarantee that I was doing the right thing? To take my parents away from their friends and relatives, from their livelihoods, knowing that the family finances now rested on my 12-year-old shoulders? Had that reporter ever heard the words, ‘Monica, don’t panic, but they found another cancer and I have to go into surgery tomorrow.’ Had he ever felt a slice of burning agony bolt down his back and turned to see his attacker raise both arms [ready] to strike again?”

We would guess not.

For what we saw with Monica’s career is what we always see when crazed men have the conceit to step into history. Madmen and assassins always rob us: rob us of peace, rob us of destiny, rob us of answers. We will never know how the promise of Seles’ once-shimmering career would have played out or how arguably the second-greatest woman’s rivalry in tennis (Seles vs. Graf) would have evolved. Navratilova recently noted, “People talk about Graf or me as the greatest in history. But if it hadn’t been for that deranged maniac, who never spent a day in jail, we might have been talking about Monica as the greatest player.”

Rather, in the end, we must note that in all of sports there has never been a career that has been so cruelly cut short by an act of such cowardice; an act that violated Monica’s outer refuge and inner being and left our game wondering what “woulda, coulda, shoulda” have happened if one of the most captivating young talents to ever gleefully descend on tennis to toss roses to us all, had not been cut down by a delusional soul with a serrated knife on a warm, too fateful afternoon in Hamburg.