A Survivor's Story

Bruce Emond ,  The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Sun, 07/05/2009 11:26 AM  |  Bookmark

There will always be the "what might have been" questions surrounding Monica Seles' tennis career. It is divided sharply into two parts, cleaved by the terrible, almost unthinkable events of a damp spring afternoon in Hamburg in 1993 when she was attacked by an obsessed fan of her great rival, Steffi Graf.

The pre-stabbing Seles rose quickly to the top of the sport, drubbing hapless opponents with her powerful strokes, hit two-handed off both sides. She appeared ruthless and machine-like on court, winning so easily that many tennis fans

took a dislike to her. Off the court, she was like most teenagers, obsessed with fashion, music, popular culture and herself, except that she was the number one tennis player in the world earning millions of dollars.

After the stabbing, when she was still only 19, Seles took a prolonged hiatus from the game; it was not, she writes in her new autobiography Getting a Grip, because of the physical injury, but due to the emotional trauma of seeing her world change in a split second. When she made her return to the tour, almost two years later, she fulfilled the fairy-tale comeback scenario by winning the tournament, reaching the 1995 US Open final and then taking the Australian Open in January 1996.

The initial euphoria was only masking the unhealed scars inside her, both from the stabbing and from her father's battle with cancer. He was the most important figure in her life, the man who introduced her to tennis, who steered her career and was always there for her, win or lose.

"We could clash like cats and dogs on the court over some technical issue, but the second we got off the court, one switch flicked on, and we were like two different people . my father was the only person who could make me laugh within seconds and turn my *negative* energy around ." Seles writes.

She numbed her emotional pain with food, going on late-night food hunts for chips and cookies that she would consume by herself. Her weight soared but Seles continued to play on as the sentimental favorite, still winning a few matches and tournaments on talent despite the extra 30 pounds she was carrying around with her.

Seles, who officially retired from the sport last year but had not played since 2003 due to a foot injury, is brutally honest about her life and career, about the difficulties she faced in overcoming her food addiction and in resolving the past. There are deeply tragic elements to her story (Seles was indignant about her attacker basically getting a slap on the wrist, handed a sentence of two years' probation, and refused to play in Germany again), but it is also one of hope and survival. Well-written and informative, it is an insider's view of the tennis tour, as well as a message of hope to those who have experienced the same despair as the tennis star.

Born in what was then Yugoslavia to ethnic Hungarian parents, she had learned the sport from her father, who, in a legendary story, tied pieces of string between cars in the car park outside their apartment so his young daughter could practice.

She had precocious talent and, most importantly, an intense love of the game. "I'd fallen head over heels for tennis and nothing - not even my beloved Barbies - could tear me away from it," Seles writes.

She quickly moved up in the junior rankings in her homeland, beating players much older than herself; at the age of 10, she was named Yugoslavia's sportswoman of the year. Two years later, she moved to the US to train with famed coach Nick Bolletieri at his tennis academy in Florida, and by the age of 15 had beaten former world number one Chris Evert to win her debut professional tournament.

She became the youngest champion of the French Open a year later and gradually gained the upper-hand in matches against Graf with her single-minded resolve to win, also winning the Australian and US Opens.

And then during a changeover in Hamburg her world was turned upside down by a German named Gunther Parche.

"I was stabbed. On the court. In front of ten thousand people," she writes. "The main thing people want to ask but usually don't is: Did it hurt. Yes, it hurt a lot. It was worse than any pain I could have ever imagined. Once I understood what had happened, I went into shock . the shock shielded me from having to handle my world falling apart. That would come later."

But she was quickly brought back to reality and, in a sense, stabbed in the back several more times.

A shocked Graf visited her in the hospital a day later, but quickly left to play the final of the tournament which, to Seles' disbelief, had continued despite the attack. "That was a harsh lesson in the business side of tennis: it really all is about making money over anything else," she says.

A week later, most of the top women's players voted against freezing Seles' world number one ranking while she recuperated (Gabriela Sabatini was the only one to abstain). She lost a major sponsorship deal to Graf, and again attributes it to the business focus of professional tennis.

"It wasn't personal . but it was hard to take when the wound in my back was still fresh," she says, a view she repeats later in analyzing the WTA Tour's decision to move the year-end championships to Germany in 2001.

Just three months after the attack, speculation was already rife that the 1.5-inch wound was healed and that Seles could play again but, as tennis commentator Mary Carillo viciously wrote, she was "milking" the situation for all it was worth. There were also rumors that she had gained a huge amount of weight; she hadn't at the time, but she was already falling into a cycle of gorging herself with empty calories.

"I'd never used food before . Maybe I was bored and I kept finding myself wandering into the kitchen, scanning the cupboards . maybe I was subconsciously reacting to Parche's angry comment that *women' shouldn't be as thin as a bone.' If I padded myself with extra weight, I'd be protected from being hurt again."

Seles reflects that she does not know the answer, except that she had already begun a decade-long tussle between her mind and body.

Others eventually would be enlisted to help fight Monica's battle of the bulge. Coaches would order hotels not to send up room service meals, she was put on grueling exercise regimens and given a food "minder" who sat with her at every meal (she would give him or her the slip by heading out to drive-thrus late at night). Seles writes of living her life in extremes - "seven-hour workouts followed by five-thousand-calorie-binges" - in which her moods were determined by whether the scale was up or down on a given day.

It was not about the food, of course, but the trauma she experienced, from the stabbing, her anger at the injustice of what happened afterward and her father's death. Seles writes that it was only when she was injured in 2003 that her life started to change.

Forced to stay at home, she went through all the old photos and news clippings of her career faithfully collected by her father, including ones of them together, and put them into albums.

It was a cathartic moving on for her, and she finally allowed herself to grieve for the most important man in her life. Without having to adhere to the daily practice-eat right-play schedule of the tour, she decided she would never diet again, and stop classifying foods as allowed or forbidden.

She was liberated from the baggage that had held her back for many years and the weight also began to come off.

"Once I let go of the things I couldn't control, an enormous amount of space opened up in my mind and the things I could control suddenly became clear," she writes. "How I chose to move my body, what I chose to put in my mouth, how I chose to view myself, and what I chose to do with the rest of my life were the things that I did have control over."

Freed from the diet-binge cycle, Seles, now 35, learned to live life to the fullest, from going skydiving to traveling to even an appearance on Dancing with the Stars. Her legacy in the sport of tennis is a great one: she launched the power game that now predominates in the women's ranks (as well as the high-pitched squeal that preceded today's cacophonous sound effect). She also was one of the pioneers among eastern European players heading to the US to develop their games and her stabbing also led to much stricter security measures in tennis and all sports.

She had won nine Grand Slams before the attack, but only won one more when she returned to the tour: in her absence Graf and Aranxta Sanchez Vicario rose to the top. It's a continuing matter of heated debate among fans of both Seles and Graf whether the German would have achieved her remarkable tally of 22 Grand Slams if Hamburg had not happened (Seles says she never felt any more emotion or anger playing Graf, because it was just another opponent).

For many years she also wondered about what might have been. Today, she has let go of the what ifs, and also the extra baggage that went along with them.

The reviewer, the editor of the WEEKENDER magazine, is the three-time winner of the national tennis journalism contest held in conjunction with the Commonwealth Bank Tennis Tournament.

Copyright © 2008 The Jakarta Post - PT Bina Media Tenggara. All Rights Reserved.