The Chris Evert Raymond James Pro-Celebrity Tennis Classic kicks off the first weekend in November.
This is the event’s 20th year.
The event supports the fight against drug abuse and child neglect in South Florida and proceeds benefit the Ounce of Prevention Fund and the Drug Abuse Foundation of Palm Beach County.
Celebrities scheduled to participate this year include Matt Lauer, Jeffrey Donovan, Jon Lovitz, and Gavin Rossdale.
Tennis legends and starts ready to compete include Lindsay Davenport, Pam Shriver, Monica Seles, and Martina Navratilova.
Organizers say Greg Norman will no longer be participating in the event.
The Pro-Celebrity Tennis Classic takes place at the Boca Raton Resort & Club and the Delray Beach Tennis Center November 6th-8th.
The Gala Dinner Dance & Auction is at the Boca Resort on Saturday, November 7, with entertainment by Natalie Cole.
November 5th 2009:
Monica Seles attends the 2009 North Shore Animal League America’s 4th annual DogCatemy gala at Cipriani, Wall Street on November 5, 2009 in New York City.
The past, present and potential future of tennis were on display tonight in an entertaining exhibition match at the Rogers Cup.
Former stars Martina Navratilova and Monica Seles graced the stadium court at the Rexall Centre, joined by 2001 tournament champion Serena Williams and rising Canadian star Aleksandra Wozniak.
Navratilova and Williams earned a 6-3 victory over Seles and Wozniak in the one-set exhibition, in front of an enthusiastic crowd that enjoyed clear skies and balmy temperatures.
The match coincided with Seles’s induction into the Rogers Cup Hall of Fame, a fitting honour for the only woman in the last century to win four straight Canadian championships. After the quartet posed for post-match pictures, Seles was honoured on the court and fought back tears as she watched a video tribute highlighting her success in Canada.
She then posed for more photos in front of her Hall of Fame plaque.
“As soon as I got the invitation, I was like, `Yes, I have to do this,”‘ said Seles. “The amazing times that I had here in Toronto . . . I love playing here, so it holds a special place in my heart.”
Prior to the match, the four players met with the media to discuss a number of topics – including Williams’s book “On The Line,” due out Sept. 1. Williams, seeded second at the Rogers Cup, said she learned plenty while she wrote the book – mainly, how bad a sister she was.
“You’ll learn that … being the youngest child, I can’t always get my way, and I was a brat,” said Williams. “When I was writing the book, I didn’t realize how bratty and awful I was. It’s funny to see, as a six- or seven-year-old, all the terrible things I did to (older sister) Venus and all my sisters, and I’m so embarrassed, ’cause they reminded me of how awful I was.”
Navratilova had the most to say. She started by criticizing people who complain that there’s no clear-cut No. 1 in women’s tennis, pointing out that the men’s game used to face the same predicament.
“I find it sort of a double standard,” said Navratilova. “When Chris (Evert) and I were dominating, people were like, `Oh, it’s always Chris and Martina in the finals, we always know who’s going to be there . . . with the men, they have so much depth, you never know who’s going to win.’
“Now you’ve got (Rafael) Nadal, (Roger) Federer winning everything for five years, and the women have been going back and forth, different No. 1s. Now people say `Well with men, we’ve got Federer-Nadal, they’re so great, but with the women, nobody’s dominating.’ I find this double standard really annoying.”
Navratilova also said she’s enjoying her second career as a TV commentator – mostly because it’s easier on the body.
“I like doing the commentary now, seeing it from the other side,” said Navratilova. “It’s much easier talking about it than doing it.
“Also, you don’t have to stretch and warm up, you just show up five minutes before the match and you start talking. It’s very easy. You don’t have to warm down afterwards, either.”
Wozniak, the highest-ranked Canadian player and only singles competitor remaining, reiterated that she doesn’t feel added pressure in her home country.
“I’m definitely proud of being a Canadian, and whenever the time is right, I can win here at home,” said Wozniak. “I’m excited to play.
July 14th, 2009:
Monica Seles : Tennis Hall of Fame
July 11th, 2009:
Monica Seles : Tennis Hall of Fame
Tennis had never seen anyone quite like Monica Seles when she charged onto the scene 20 years ago. Part beguiling kitten, part snarling she-lynx, Seles was sweet-tempered off the court and fiercely businesslike on it. With eight Grand Slam titles to her name at age 19, there was little doubt she would wind up in the International Tennis Hall of Fame someday.
Then came the 1993 stabbing incident during a changeover in Hamburg, Germany, that literally cleaved her career into two acts, and the terrible aftershock of watching her father and original coach waste away with stomach cancer. Seles walked onto center court for the 1998 French Open championship match a few weeks after his death wearing black, his ring on a chain around her neck, looking resolute but humbled, her once cherubic expression shaded with grown-up sorrow. “I don’t think you are the one who deserved to lose today,” opponent Arantxa Sanchez Vicario said afterward.
But Seles did not win that day. Her odyssey from the country then known as Yugoslavia, via Nick Bollettieri’s Florida tennis academy, to the top of the game — at a time when teen phenoms were still allowed to take that rocket ride — is a storybook tale. The flip side of her journey is a very human and imperfect one.
Seles played for nine seasons after returning from the stabbing, but she absorbed other, more subtle losses out of public view, losses of control and identity. She battled depression that manifested itself in an eating disorder, painfully documented in a recent book, and said last spring that she had lived, traveled, loved and competed for years in a persistent “fog.” She faded from the scene after a foot injury forced her offstage and never came back for an encore, shunning closure for almost five full years. Seles had long self-medicated with food, but as she slowly shed physical and psychological weight, she had little appetite to be feted.
“The power,” King said almost reverently of her first impression of Seles, whose two-fisted shots off both sides were effective but not easily emulated. “She used to do this thing where she’d stand close to a wall, and start hitting the ball really hard, switching sides between shots. Whap! Whap! Whap! Whap! Whap! Whap! It was amazing. I’ve never seen anything like it. Ask her to do it for you sometime.In a recent conference call with reporters, Andre Agassi — whose wife, Steffi Graf, was Seles’ most formidable peer before the stabbing cruelly aborted what figured to be a top-shelf rivalry — reflected on Seles’ dual legacy.
“I grew up with Monica,” Agassi said. “I’ve known her since she was probably 10 years old at the [Bollettieri] academy. I always marveled at her game. I marveled more at her discipline and fighting spirit. Watching her grow up and becoming one of the best ever is a great journey to go on, from my perspective.
“Really, I think we would have seen much greater things had she not had to endure what she went through in Hamburg on the court. As a result of that, I think all players are left with that aftermath. We are all aware of the exposures out there. I think security across the world [is] tending to those possibilities more, and in a sense she’s made us better and she’s added to all of us in our own little way.
“I know the game pretty darned well, and I would argue that she would be one of the best of all time had she continued on the path she was. She was disciplined enough and she was focused enough and she certainly had enough shots to leave that kind of mark.”
The violent act that altered Seles’ trajectory had many unforeseen consequences. One of the more positive ripples was the seemingly unlikely friendship she forged with an African-American man nearly 50 years her senior, who will be beaming from the audience in Newport.
Former New York City mayor David Dinkins, a tennis devotee who still plays several times a week at age 81, wrote Seles a letter following the stabbing, and later sought her out at a charity event. He became a familiar, vocal presence at Seles’ U.S. Open matches. The two continue to keep in touch and dine together when schedules allow. “Monica is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met,” said Dinkins, who teaches part-time at Columbia University. “If you’re a tennis fan, you have to love Monica.”
Yet Seles didn’t win election to the Hall of Fame on a sympathy vote. Although she won just one more Grand Slam event after her comeback — the 1996 Australian Open — her credentials speak for themselves: nine Slam titles, 44 other tournament wins, twice ranked No. 1 at year’s end. It’s absolutely fine to feel compassion for her, as long as that never slides into pity. Seles recognizes the privileges that came with her talent and fame. She considers herself fortunate, not cursed.
“It’s a great way to cap a fantastic career,” Seles said of the upcoming ceremony. “More importantly, I’m just lucky I got to do something I love to do, and I’m hoping in my second life, as I call it, I can find something that I’m as passionate about as I was about tennis. It’s really that simple for me.”
This familiar American ritual of enshrining athletes in a brick-and-mortar pantheon is usually grounded in stats first and character second. It’s true that Seles’ induction has a deeper context, but that’s not simply because she was wounded. It’s because she showed the world how lengthy, difficult and ultimately gratifying the process of healing can be.
There is another interview with Monica Seles I could imagine having written. That’s the one in which, with the French Open playing on the TV in the background in her hotel room in Florida, we talked about the fact that she was the greatest female tennis player ever to pick up a racket; about the 20 grand slam titles she won before she bowed out of the game, eclipsing Martina Navratilova’s record. The one in which she described how she finally mastered Wimbledon, and could look back on her dominating rivalry with Steffi Graf who, beaten by her nemesis, never quite fulfilled her early promise. But that is not this interview …
This one dwells on the way that the life that Seles seemed to have ready and waiting for her – eight grand slam victories in her teens – ended violently in April 1993 when she was 19 and a deranged Graf fan ran on to the court at a tournament in Hamburg and stabbed her in the back with a nine-inch kitchen knife, changing her script for ever.
We are in Florida, and the French Open semi-final is playing in the background, but our talk is not of titles won and lost, of epic victories and narrow defeats – it is of the psychological trauma of that defining violent event, and of the decade of disappointment and despair that followed. A decade in which Seles looked everywhere for comfort, “always searching for the key to getting my old life back”, and found that comfort primarily in food, an obsession which brought with it many more problems.
Seles is 35, taller than you’d imagine from watching her on court, and much slimmer than in her later playing days. Her voice is still inflected with the giggly girlishness of the tennis prodigy, which makes what she has to say all the more poignant. She drinks black coffee and buzzes determinedly between subjects, just as she once used to chase down every lost cause on court. She has been retired now for five years; she lives alone in Tampa Bay with her four dogs, and she resolutely refuses to deal in “what ifs?” – “I would have gone crazy a long while ago,” she says, “if I had done that.” She would rather dwell on what she sees as the greatest victory of her life, the one she savours above all others – her triumph over her destructive eating habits and her weight, which is shorthand for her triumph over all of her demons.
She has written a book detailing that long campaign, Getting a Grip. It is a self-help manual and a sports autobiography, a “misery memoir” and the best kind of diet book (one that does not tell you what to eat, but how to live). From the perspective of her retirement Seles unravels all the extremes of her career, extremes that led her close to insanity. At the heart of it is a tale of lost innocence. What once seemed so natural to Seles – her life, her game – became, after the violence that interrupted her, something that she felt she had to make up as she went along.
“I knew I was a tennis player,” she writes, by way of introduction, “I knew I used to dominate the sport, and I knew I used to be a happy person, but for 10 years those identities eluded me.” She hopes and believes that the ways in which she put her self back together will have a universal application – and she proves the point as soon as she sits down by reading quickly from an emotional email she has just received from a young woman in Italy, a doctor who has been fighting all her life with an eating disorder after a childhood trauma. Seles has been the doctor’s inspiration. “I’m always a bit wary of getting involved in fan letters,” Seles says, “but this one I will.”
The lives of all professional tennis players are about focus, a narrowing down of the field of vision to a simple moving target that must be hit, and lines that must not be crossed. Invariably that focus begins very early (Andre Agassi’s father hung a tennis ball above his baby son’s cot and let him bat it around all day to improve his hand-eye coordination). Monica Seles was once the most focused five-year-old anyone had ever seen. Her story began, as nearly all tennis stories begin, with her watching her father. One morning on a family holiday on the Adriatic, Seles observed her father and her brother carefully packing a bag with tennis rackets. When she asked where they were going, her brother Zoltan answered: “To play tennis.” Seles recalls, she says, hearing only the word “play” from that sentence. It sounded like fun. Could she come and play too?
She never, for many years after that moment, really stopped playing, though it quickly ceased to be anything resembling fun. The Seles family lived in Novi Sad, in Serbian Yugoslavia. Monica’s father was a political cartoonist for various newspapers, but in his youth he had been a top athlete, a nationally ranked triple jumper who used to compete barefoot. He regretted that he had not been able to pursue his athletic career and was determined that his children should not have the same regrets. By the time Monica started playing, her brother Zoltan was the top-ranked junior in the country and competing with the young Boris Becker and Stefan Edberg in European events. She quickly developed the ambition of beating him, though he was eight years her senior.
Her father, she says, did not push her, but he did not discourage her either. There were arguments at home – her grandmother and mother would say that it was not natural for a girl to play so much tennis, not ladylike – but neither her father nor Monica would listen. “My dad,” she says, “as an artist, was aware of the dangers of too much structure; in particular he was very keen that I should not lose my childish imagination when I was playing.” Practice was built around make-believe. Monica was a great lover of TV cartoons, so her father would draw the face of Jerry the mouse on every tennis ball and Monica would be Tom, trying to whack him with her racket as he escaped. She would do this for many hours at a time. They lived in a flat, and children were not allowed at the local tennis club – even children as gifted as Seles – so her father strung a net between two cars in the car park next to their block for Monica to play there, hitting balls into boxes at the court’s corners. Sometimes her father would break off from his drawing board and shout down from their third-floor window to ask how she was doing. A hundred or 200 accurate balls into boxes, and she would come in for her supper.
Seles looks back on this as a golden time. The only fears in her life were those that attended losing. I’ve talked to a few tennis champions over the years – McEnroe, Borg, Agassi, Federer – and though immensely different in character, they were united by one thing: an overwhelming fear of the pain of defeat. It was always that, more than any desire for glory, that drove them on when they were young. Seles, too, was full of that feeling. She recently came across a photograph of herself, she says, aged seven. She had come third in a tournament for girls much older than her, but her face was set in a mask of pure self-loathing. She could not bear it.
By the time she was 13, Seles was the top-ranked under-18 player in the world. She had been spotted the year before at a tournament in the States by the legendary coach Nick Bolletieri and invited to join his academy in Florida. She moved originally with her brother, and later the whole family joined her. Before she went, she knew nothing of the world of tennis. The only match that was shown on TV in Yugoslavia was the French Open final – “Even at 11,” she says, “I had the feeling that the only two tennis players in the world were Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, and they played this one match against each other every year.” Her father had encouraged her to just play every point as though it was her last, without thinking of anything else. She was, she says, ignorant of the scoring system in tennis long after she arrived at Bolletieri’s school. Even among the single-minded generation there, she was something of a phenomenon. The future world number one, Jim Courier, refused to hit balls with her after one occasion when she had him chasing around the court’s four corners in the afternoon sun.
She recalls it now, though, as the beginning of some of her insecurity. “I left my parents and all my friends at 13. It’s an age when you are very unsure of your body and everything. I was allowed to call home once a month. I thought I spoke English but when I got to America I realised I didn’t really. I had, like, 20 words. I was on scholarship. The other girls could afford to pay to be there, had everything, but I was the only female that was really good. I was very shy. And at the end of the day you are a kid.”
Bolletieri spoke of her at the time as the brightest prospect he had ever seen. “She will not accept that she can’t do something,” he said, “and she’ll spend 40, 50, 70 hours working just to get one shot. I used to tell her: ‘Your boyfriend is your Prince ball machine’, she spent so much time with the thing. You can’t yell at her, and she’s stubborn; you have to do a lot of proving if she doesn’t agree with you. But I find it very difficult to pick out any weakness in her or her game.”
Her weaknesses were perhaps, however, beginning to show off court. At the same time as Bolletieri was singing her praises, Seles was suggesting to the New York Times: “As long as I love it, I’ll keep playing. Plus I’m still making straight As at school, as always. So now I just worry about my cholesterol. I don’t like salads: I like the strong food.
None of this anxiety showed on court at the time, however. Seles says she never really thought of herself as having the capacity to be a great player until she beat Steffi Graf in the final of the French Open in 1990 when she was 16 (Graf was five years her senior). After that initial victory over Graf she hardly looked back. I remember watching her then; it was like seeing someone who had rethought the rules of women’s tennis; she was so aggressive in her play, and so enclosed in her concentration, it seemed like nothing could get in her way.
For three years, little did. She won practically everything (except Wimbledon), but then the moment came that changed everything. In 1993, she had a realistic chance of winning all four grand slams. She was the Australian champion, and Paris was on the horizon. But as she was sitting with her back to the crowd at a changeover between games at a tournament in Hamburg, Gunther Parche, a 38-year-old who had stalked Steffi Graf for years and hated the fact that Seles had “stolen” the German’s number one ranking, changed tennis history by attacking her with a knife.
Seles can talk about the stabbing now, but she does not like to dwell on it too much “because it takes me back to a very dark place in my life”. The shock was one thing to cope with, and the physical damage to her shoulder was another – a centimetre to the left and she would have been paralysed for life. But really, she says, none of that was the worst of it: the hardest thing to cope with was the fact that the life she had put all her faith in had disappeared in an instant.
Looking back, Seles suggests, her peak years in tennis would likely have been between the ages of 19 and 22. As it turned out, she hardly picked up a racket at all in that time. The nightmare of her assault deepened almost immediately when she discovered as she lay in hospital that her beloved father had been diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer – he had missed the tournament in Hamburg in order to have tests. For her, the news and the timing could not have been worse. Her dad was her mentor and her best friend; it was to him that she would have turned to express her deepest fears about the horror of what she had experienced. But, she says, “I didn’t want to pile other worries on him – he had enough to think about.”
Lying in her hospital bed Seles also received a very brutal lesson about the world of tennis. “In terms of the game itself,” she says, “it was like the stabbing never occurred. One problem was that it happened in Germany and was ‘because’ of a German player. The German federation decided to continue the tournament as if nothing had happened, and everyone else seemed to follow on from that.”
Graf came to see Seles in hospital “for a minute or two” but there wasn’t much to say: they had always been rivals rather than friends. “It was one of those things,” she says now, “but it felt like everyone benefited from the stabbing except me.” The players were asked to vote on whether, in respect of the unique circumstances, Seles’s number one ranking should be retained until more was known about her condition. They voted unanimously against that idea (with one abstention: Gabriela Sabatini), and so everyone moved up a notch and the waters closed over the head of the recuperating champion. “They just wanted me to go away, it felt like,” she says. “I was 19 years old. Their money was tied up to the ranking system, and that was obviously an issue…”
Gunther Parche also haunted Seles. He eventually stood trial on a charge of wounding rather than attempted murder, and though he admitted the attack had been premeditated he escaped a prison sentence after psychological reports. “The trial kept going on and on,” Seles recalls. “One trial after another. Later I tried to sue the German Tennis Federation for lack of security and lost income, and I lost those cases, too. It was hard to cope with the fact that the guy was not even sent to prison. It did not feel like justice to me.”
Every time Seles tried to walk on a tennis court, as her injuries healed, she found she couldn’t face it and turned around. “I had grown up on a tennis court – it was where I felt most safe, most secure – and that day in Hamburg everything was taken away from me. My innocence. My rankings, all my income, endorsements – they were all cancelled. And the one person who could have comforted me really, who understood what it meant, my father, was of course facing this awful illness.”
Seles started eating. She had always enjoyed her food, never had to be told to clear her plate as a child, and now she did that, and more so. “And of course a plate of food in Florida is bigger than one in Europe.” After seeing her father go through chemotherapy and be unable to eat, after putting herself through Olympian fitness regimes in order to get back to playing, she would return at night to the fridge. “Potato chips were my downfall,” she says now, with a smile. “Just as I had been a champion tennis player, now I became a champion potato-chip eater.” On her 21st birthday, when she might have had the world at her feet, she stayed at home with a bag of cookies, and cried.
“The thing was,” she says, “when I thought of coming back I had no idea how I would feel sitting back down on the chair, knowing the person who had stabbed me had never been put in jail. There were so many ifs. In the end though, after two and a half years, I felt I just had to try. I came back in Toronto and the fans’ support was just amazing. I won that first tournament back, and that helped. It was like: ‘I am still pretty good at this.’”
In some ways though, her problems were only starting. She had worked hard to get into shape for that tournament, but even then she was nothing like the weight she had been at 19. It was then she started to hear the voices.
“I remember coming back to play Martina in an exhibition before the Toronto event and I was maybe 25lb heavier than I had been,” she recalls. “And I could hear the comments: ‘Oh my God! What happened to Seles? Did you see how big she was?’ I mean, I had been nearly stabbed to death. I had been out of the game for two years. My father was extremely sick. I was no longer a teenager. I turned to food for comfort. What did they expect?”
In some ways Seles was prepared for the scrutiny. She had suffered some of it before the stabbing, particularly on one occasion when she had cut her hair into a new style as part of an endorsement deal for a haircare company.
“I went to my first tournament with this new hair and this woman comes up to me. I’d never met her and she said: ‘What happened to you – you look like a boy, you look terrible!’”
The new hair had coincided with the controversy surrounding her “grunting” as she hit the ball on court. “Suddenly I was this aggressive boy grunting away.” Seles says she was never really aware of her grunting before the media picked up on it, though she had done it since she was a child. Things had come to a head at Wimbledon in 1992, when the papers made a controversy about the noise she made and the players started to complain – notably Martina Navratilova, who lost to Seles in the semi-final.
“I had grunted against those players countless times,” she says now. “Nobody ever told me to do it or not to do it. But going into that tournament I had lost one match all year. I think it was a purely a mental tactic, by Martina and others. You always look for something. With me I didn’t have a crazy father, I didn’t have a crazy personal life, there was just this grunting, so they went for that.”
Seles believes the controversy got to her. “It was on my mind a little in the final and I lost to Graf. I grew up a lot that day. And I decided never again would I listen to what people say. If they made grunting against the rules, then I would have to think about it, but otherwise I would do whatever helped me to play my best.”
Some of those doubts went through Seles’s mind again when she heard people commenting about her weight on her return to the game, but she tried to banish them. It was not easy. “My generation was the last when you were marketed really as a tennis player – Graf, Hingis. But when Anna Kournikova came along, there was this whole other thing – suddenly it was all about looks. Tennis is pretty unforgiving if you are carrying weight. You are expected to wear short skirts, and you are compared to all these 16- and 17-year-olds. Nobody needed to tell me – I only had to look in the mirror or try on my clothes. I tried so hard to lose weight. Every year began with a resolution – I would wake up in the morning thinking about my size, and go to bed at night staring at the ceiling, hungry. I tried this fad diet or that and I lost the weight and then two months later I would gain it back again and more.”
Seles won one more major title, the Australian Open in 1996, but though she still wanted to win as much as ever, she could not stop eating long enough to allow her to do so.
Wimbledon was always the lowest point of her year, she says. “I would have played the week before at Eastbourne, where it always rained every day, so there was nothing to do but watch the rain and eat. There was the pressure of playing on grass, which was not my favourite surface, and worse, the British press, which would always be on to me, first about my grunting then about my size.” The stress made her compulsion worse.
“There would be pictures of ‘Monica’s spare tyre’ – that would be the headline. I dreaded those fortnights. My heaviest ever was 1997 Wimbledon: my father was very sick, the outfit I had to wear that year didn’t help, I was 35lb overweight. You cannot carry that around a grass court. I was reading the articles before I went on court. And then if a player hit a drop shot or something I’d be thinking: ‘If I was skinnier I’d have got that ball’ and ‘Did she do that because of my size?’”
The cycle of seeing her picture in the papers and being alone with room service and a mini-bar did not help. “The British press was so unbelievably cruel. And then at press conferences I would have to sit there while these guys who had written about how fat I was asked me questions. And you know sports writers are not necessarily in the best shape themselves. These enormous guys, asking me if I could be in better shape – I mean, look at yourself in the mirror! Don’t be so brutal!”
Seles can laugh about it now, but at the time it was never a joke. She found it hard anyway to form relationships as a tennis player always on the road, but her problems with eating made it all the harder. She recounts some horrific tales in the book of romances that went wrong when her boyfriends took it upon themselves to comment on her size. One, in league with her fitness trainer, promised he would take her out for dinner if she won the Italian Open. She followed her diet all week on that promise, won the tournament, but then her date still voiced his disapproval as she tucked into her tiramisu. Another boyfriend had a habit of pinching at the spare flesh on her midriff and suggesting she needed to watch it.
“A guy would always end up mentioning my weight in some form or other,” she says. “They knew they should not go there; it was too painful for me. But they always did. It seemed so simple for them: stop eating, win grand slams, be happy.” But Seles knew it wasn’t so simple, and that it wasn’t just about food.
The question I’ve been wanting to ask her all through our conversation is whether she believes she would have encountered these problems had it not been for the stabbing. Does she think there was something in her obsessional focus as a young girl that would always have found an outlet in this kind of neurosis? After all, other comparable prodigies – Jennifer Capriati, Martina Hingis- had their share of angst.
She is not sure. “These days I am a great believer in keeping things in balance,” she says. “I was paying for that imbalance in my childhood maybe, who knows? Women I have talked to who have a similar problem with food say it is all about control. For me it was the opposite. Food was the one area of my life that was out of control. Everything else was looked after for me. How I did my workouts, what time I went to bed, everything. I had this mental strength on court, but off it I could not win.”
Seles kept most of this to herself. She never talked much about how she felt after the stabbing, or about her grief for her father who died in 1998, or about the life she had lost. Instead of therapists she turned to fitness gurus. One month she would have Carl Lewis’s trainer, the next Oprah Winfrey’s. But the harder she trained the harder she ate: “seven-hour workouts would be followed by 5,000-calorie binges”. In the end, as her book details, she had to find out the answer for herself.
It was a series of injuries that started her off – problems with the straining of feet and ankles that eventually brought a premature end to her career. In a period of enforced rest she took a holiday, to “celebrate” turning 30. To start with she read (again) every nutritional book on her shelf – injury invariably led to more weight problems. But this time, for once, she decided to do it differently: she would forget about diets and regimes, she would just try to relax. She booked herself into an eco lodge in Costa Rica, turned off her phone, forgot about tennis and might have beens, did some yoga, took long walks, and for the first time in a decade found herself, to her surprise, wanting to eat fruit rather than “dreaded carbs”.
When she got home she went through all of her photographs and clippings, relived every high and low of her life, and started to mourn not for her career but for her father. It was as if a light had come on. So deep had the idea of “no pain no gain” been ingrained in her that for a time the gentler regime she allowed herself in the weeks that followed seemed unnatural. She walked instead of running and “on those walks I slowly and sadly came to terms with my life. I lost my dad way too early and it was agonisingly awful. I missed him so much and I hated knowing that I could never again pick up the phone to tell him about my day”.
Seles came to realise that food had been her way of deflecting that pain; the grief that had cruelly coincided with her traumatic loss of innocence on court. She had kept it all in, she believed, but now she could see it for what it was. It was too late for her to go back to playing – her ankles saw to that, but she did begin to find a way to do that most difficult thing for ex-champions – to find a way to live outside the lines of the court. Money was not a problem – she had earned nearly $15 million on court alone (though, of course, without the interruption of her career, she may well have doubled or tripled that figure), but a sense of purpose was. Seles needed to defeat what she saw as the “toughest opponent of her career – her weight – once and for all”.
She kept walking. She started to be honest with herself about what she was eating. She stopped punishing herself for what she could not do. The walking put her back in touch with the sense of how her body had once been her ally, had done anything she wanted it to. Her father had always helped her find a way of beating any opponent, and now she could see a way of beating this one. She stopped worrying about the grand slams she had never won, and she started to be proud of those she had. The mystery about her eating was that there was no mystery.
“Once I became honest about what was really go on in my head and with my emotions, then I could see a way through it,” she says. “My mistake was to think there was an easy fix, a miracle diet. If I could sort out my weight, then everything would be all right again. I had it the wrong way round. It was not about what I was eating, but about what was eating me.” It wasn’t easy – it has taken all of the five years of her retirement for Seles to feel like she can face the world, but one thing she has been been used to is playing the long game. And like any great champion, she could always find a way to win.
IT: Congratulations. How does it sound, Monica Seles Hall of Famer?
MS: It’s so exciting. I worked on this book for nine months and now to be inducted into the Hall of Fame at the same time is fantastic. I look back, what a humble beginning. Then I started playing tennis and look where it took me – the joys, the sadness, I’ve felt all the emotions, but all along, my love for the game never changed. I have to pinch myself that I’m in there with all the other great names.
IT: These days there are so many problematic sports stars. Yet you hold a position as an inspiration. Billie Jean King said you were “one of the best souls” she’s ever known. In that terrible moment, when you were stabbed, you went from being this glamorous, A-list star to devastation. Virtually no other elite athlete has had to endure that.
MS: Tennis has been my life. It consumes. It’s your husband, your mother, your best friend, because on the road you can be so out of touch. My career is unique. Fortunately, what happened to me in Hamburg never has happened to any other athlete and I hope never will. But it definitely put a different twist on my career and how I view sports and life. It happened to me when I was only 19. And it altered a lot of things. When I came back at 21, I came back with a different attitude. I realized how fragile our lives are. Plus, I had to deal with my dad’s [fatal] illness. God, I wish it never happened. I had difficult times and struggled with my depression, but one thing that’s helped me through my difficult times, like when I was deciding whether to come back [to the tour] was knowing those things that happened were outside my own doing. What was it? Who knows? I can’t be a philosopher. I don’t think anybody knows. It is what it is. That’s the path I’ve been given and I try to make the best of it.
IT: In the book you talk about how in Hamburg, during the changeover just before the stabbing if you had drank your water a moment earlier, that it could have really changed things. You might have been paralyzed.
MS: It could have totally changed. But these are all unknowns.
IT: You said that right after the incident, when you were being taken to the hospital, you went into shock. Similarly, in those two-plus years after the stabbing, when you were off the circuit, was there an element of shock or trauma?
MS: It was a very difficult period. Suddenly, I was going from my fourth French Open, to watching others on TV winning the tournament. It was an ironic story. [A demented fan of her archrival Steffi Graf had stabbed her and then, just weeks later, Steffi triumphed at the French.] But it’s past. I almost don’t even remember it. Maybe there’s a purpose for that. Those aren’t happy times to look back to. One thing I’m happy about is that I came back. I didn’t have the same success I had before, and that’s a hard one to have to deal with. I wish I could have been in my prime, because in tennis the prime is really from 17 to 22. Tennis, unfortunately, for whatever reason, rewards youth.
IT: A lot of players have had careers interrupted by war, by accidents or by the old shamateur rules that cut out pros. But there’s been nothing like your situation. Around the press room we speculate, how many more majors could Seles have won if it weren’t for the stabbing. Three? Seven? How many?
MS: You can’t go back. I would love to go back and relive my first French Open, the first time that I had a sense of the feeling of “Oh, yes you can!” I look back at pictures and I’m, like, “Wow!” I didn’t even realize how cool all that was. I look at myself and wonder, “Was that really me with all that hair?” Twenty years from now I’m going to look at my hair now and think, “Oh, my God!”
IT: Early on as a kid, as you came out onto Roland Garr’s’ Court Centrale, you were handed some roses and tossed them to the crowd and gave some to Zina Garrison. There was such an innocence, but it wasn’t taken in that spirit.
MS: I learned my lesson at an early age. I had to grow up in the public eye. The biggest deal was when I cut my hair. All of a sudden people were commenting on how I looked. There I was, just a teen struggling with my own [self-worth] issues of how I looked. I didn’t need strangers telling me about it. But that comes with the territory, whoever’s No 1. Of course, every player wants to be No. 1. That’s why we play. If we weren’t competitive, we wouldn’t be where we are.
IT: Your fans recall many moments of joy – little Monica hitting against the apartment house wall; a teen dreaming about being an actress or giggling over shopping at Barneys. Talk about happiness. How has that evolved for you? You’ve gone through some wonderful and not so wonderful times.
MS: I look back and know it’s going to continue on for the rest of my life. As we grow older, we realize that’s life – we get highs and lows, and as the top player it’s all very public. I never had the option of having my teenage freak outs at home, or it would have been written about right away. But I didn’t have any scandals, so there really wasn’t much to write. I always thought it was funny when crazy [stories] were made up. Still, my highs and lows were different. I picked up a racket because I loved the sport. Now I go anywhere in the world and I have fans.
IT: But Dinara Safina just spoke about how you can’t really have friends on tour.
MS: It’s really hard. When I competed against Mary Joe [Fernandez] and there were [questionable] line calls, it was just tragic because here is your close friend. But to be at the top, you have to have that killer instinct where, no matter what, you just want to win. I had my two close friends – Betsy [Nagelson] and Mary Joe – and I said, “This is great. Its quality over quantity.” That’s okay.
IT: One other thing on the Hamburg incident: it was bad enough that this crazy guy stabbed you, but then 16 of the 17 players [all but Gabriella Sabatini] voted NOT to protect your No. 1 ranking, then the German justice system totally failed, and to top things off, the WTA moved their big year-end championships to Germany. All that had to be hard?
MS: Everything after the stabbing, I didn’t understand. I understood what happened to me. But the stabbing happened in front of all those people and it was on TV. Then there were confessions [in court] and yet the person who stabbed me [just] stayed the night in jail and the irony was that the player he backed went on to win the tournament. Then the players didn’t vote [for ranking protection]. I’ve learned this was out of my control. Monica can only do what she does when she steps out on court. Everything else I can’t control. I came to that after seeing my dad struggle. Of course, I wish I didn’t see that so early on because it made me look at life in a harder way. My innocence was gone. But even in his last days, my dad had his innocence. He told me, “Don’t let life get to you. Keep that childhood feeling.” And I’ve tried. I’ve had better years than others, but my dad was really right.
IT: Andy Murray went through a lot, too, [having survived a mass murder in his school when he was in fifth grade.] Do you ever reflect on what a great job he’s done dealing with that?
MS: Exactly. What I’ve noticed is his maturity. Wow! For a man, he’s so mature. He plays an all-court game, kind of like Federer. Roger is a genius at making it look very easy. Murray has that, too. He makes it look like it takes no effort. I’m amazed. Mentally, he’s very strong. That just blew me away. His and Nadal’s mental strength. Roger used to have that, but now he’s going through a little crisis.
IT: Much of your book reflects on your battle with overeating. So when I say Pop-Tarts or barbecue chips, does that…
MS: I’ve had such a love-hate relationship with food. When you’re traveling the pressure is always with you and you never have time to say, “Look, I’m going to focus on this now.” I never got a grip on it, even though I tried so hard with different trainers, because I knew if I could get that in control, my game would be better because … My strokes were always good, but my movement … The girls on tour got stronger and trained hard and then Venus arrived. Physically, she was in a different dimension. Unfortunately, I never got a handle on it because, emotionally, I couldn’t. I wasn’t ready. For whatever reason, that was my soft spot. I still haven’t figured that one out. That hurt me because I had more injuries. I was pretty good [when I came back], top five, but I thought, “God, why didn’t I just lose that weight.” But, again, it passed.
IT: You wrote that it wasn’t what you were eating, but what was eating you.
MS: That was one of the main reasons for writing my book. I never realized how many women struggled with this. Growing up on the tour, it was more that women wouldn’t eat, not that they would overeat. I never saw anyone deal with what. So when I finally came into the real world, I realized that a lot of women have this issue and they all want to know how I lost the weight.
IT: You said that the harder you tried to be the old Monica, the further you got away?
MS: I always looked for outside help, whether it was my coach, my trainer or trying to get a doubles player who was really fit. Instead of looking inside, I always thought they held the answer. If I hire them, I’m going to be like them and then I realized it takes a lot of work and discipline to be like that. That was my outlet with all the stress. That it just manifested itself in it.
IT: Eventually, on an eco-vacation in Costa Rica, you said to yourself that it’s okay to just lay in a hammock and just do nothing and to not make all those purposeful New Year’s resolutions you always made every year.
MS: I was tired of them. After three weeks, every one I made went out the door. [As Einstein asserted] repeating the same thing that fails is the definition of insanity, and I was definitely doing that for nine years. I know the exact years. I’m a very anal person. It just freaked me out. I just turned 30 and my foot was in a cast. If you are comfortable with it, there’s nothing wrong with being heavy. That’s fine, but I was miserable. And there was the fear of that. I knew my career was coming toward the end. It wasn’t like, “I’m 16 and have a life ahead of me.” I just didn’t want to be heavy. It was more a matter of being a woman than a tennis player. It was, like “Whoa, I’ve got to take charge of this.”
IT: Is weight gain a disorder or a disease?
MS: I don’t know. For me it was more emotional. Anytime you do something in excess it’s not good. Because I was so deprived, it was always you have to do this and do that. So I was constantly hungry. So that’s why I always say to women, don’t go on any diets because you’ll be hungry. You might lose the weight. For me I might have lost weight for the road, but afterwards you just gain it back because you can’t live on 1,200 calories a day for the rest of your life. One thing I hope comes through in my book is that this is a plan for the rest of your life. This is making your lifestyle choice, it’s not a quick ‘to do’ thing.
IT: To me, the most poignant quote in your book was when you said that you were pouring over photos of your dad and that was the key to unlocking the door to your grief after his death.
MS: The irony was that my father was passing away from stomach cancer. It was a really fast, seven-month fight, and here I was eating enough for five people. I realized my dad had such a great outlook, so I thought I better learn a little bit from this. He had a much better brain process than I do, and some of those days were as rough as any I hope to see. Even when he was really struggling, he still kept his sense of humor and I thought, “God, I wish I had a little bit of his cartoonist mentality.”
IT: Your perspective emphasizes accountability, a sense that “no one is going to take care of me and my problems, I’m the one.”
MS: Definitely. In tennis, you’re always surrounded by people that work for you, who are always saying yes. You live in a bubble. As a woman and having my personality as a caretaker, that always made me take care of everybody’s needs before my own were met. Then a light bulb went on. I learned that if I didn’t take care of myself, nobody would. I worked with trainers and figured out that there isn’t a magic pill. I’ve never taken a single pill in my life. I had to be selfish for once in my life.
IT: There was always a tremendous pressure on you …
MS: As with any of the top players. They all struggle with something. Some are more public than others, but from the inner circle, that’s just the reality. There’s no way not to. Even my friend who finished medical school, she struggles, and the other one that finished art school, she can’t find a job. There’s always something.
IT: You came to the realization that it was okay to be on your own, to have not won another Slam [after the ‘96 Aussie Open,] to accept injustice. It must have been a place of acceptance.
MS: It showed in my weight loss and my general happiness. I’m a happier person.
IT: You were incredible in taking the ball on the rise, creating angles, your disguise. You were one of the great fighters: 9 Slams, 178 weeks at No. 1. What are you most proud of on the court?
MS: It’s very simple, every single match I gave 110 percent. I never walked off a court. Sometimes it was to my own detriment, like in the Miami final against Martina [Hingis] in 2000, when I really shouldn’t have played. But the competitor in you decides you’ve got to play, even though you can’t move. I was very lucky to do something that I loved, not many of us get to do that.
IT: People also speak of your courage, your determination, your willingness to share. What quality are you most proud of away from the court?
MS: Being a great friend, a very loyal friend. If I say something, I’ll do it. Reliable would be the word, being a fair person. Everybody thinks I’m really competitive. I love tennis. But anywhere else — like any other game, ping pong or a card game – I’m not competitive, absolutely. My friends are, like “I can’t believe you were a top player. You’re so non-competitive.” Now when I play tennis, I’d rather hit middle to middle than play points.
IT: Ahh, if you only did that as a kid at Bollettieri’s, when you drove young Jim Courier nuts by running him side to side. He came off the court telling Nick that he never wanted to hit with you again.
MS: I was 13 years old. [Laughs] We always mention that when we see each other. It’s such a good laugh. I didn’t think I did anything wrong. He doesn’t want to run, well okay. Maybe it was inappropriate of me, but I thought, “Why waste time? Never hit middle-to-middle.”
IT: The surge in Serbian tennis is incredible. What in your heritage contributes to the person you are now?
MS: A part of my life is always there: my ancestors, grandparents, everything. I left home at nine and moved around a lot before coming to the U.S. at 13. I’m so proud when I see Jelena [Jankkovic], Ana [Ivanovic] and Novak [Djokovic], when I talk to them and they say how much I’ve done for them. It’s a wonderful feeling and I know it took them a lot of hard work to get to where they are.
IT: Do they ask for advice?
MS: A bit. But all you can do is support them because they have their own team. You just can’t come in off the cuff. But a few called and I shared the things that worked for me. But I know where my line is. It’s unbelievable, how fast Serbia’s risen and what a level the women achieved. I hope the U.S. will have that too and have someone after Serena and Venus.
IT: What’s holding the U.S. back?
MS: The players are not hungry enough. It’s that simple. The [lifestyle] situation [here in the U.S.] is just better. But you never know. You look at Serena and Venus and just how fantastic they’ve come up, how their family has given it their all and how close they’ve stayed. It’s fantastic. I hope they inspire kids to pick up their rackets just as I inspired them. Their story is wonderful.
IT: Yet some criticize their parents, but…
MS: I can’t imagine playing my sibling in the Wimbledon final, how difficult that is. It’s still your sister. It’s rough.
IT: You’ve had such great success. Yet, you have gone through so many challenges, whether it was the grunting brouhaha, the stabbing or your dad’s passing. In your book, you said you always felt you had a cloud over your head. Do you ever reflect on that?
MS: No, I like to be in the present. I’m not big on memories, I love looking at childhood photos, but I’ve maybe looked at them twice in 15 years.
IT: Actually, I was just looking at that picture of you running as a Kid in Dubrovnik. There’s such a determination.
MS: I always had it. All great champions have it. They all have something. You have to be a tough cookie because so many other people want that position. You’ve got to give that extra. In kids you can spot that right away.
IT: So Monica what was your sweetest moment on tour?
MS: When I won my first tournament, which was against Chris Evert in Houston. The first time you actually say, “Wow, I can really play with the big girls, I beat someone I grew up watching, who I’d only seen on TV. This is the greatest ever.” I couldn’t believe Chris was real. Plus, my first Grand Slam. Everybody said, “Oh, you’re going to be great,” but until you actually do it… And playing Fed Cup and learning from [coach] Billie Jean. I thought, “Wow, this is pretty heavenly” – magical moments.
IT: Did Billie try to get you to come to net?
MS: Of course. Of all people she said, “Your volleys are amazing.” But stupid Monica didn’t believe in herself.
IT: Speaking of magic, if you could actually say something to your dad as you went in the Hall…
MS: Thank you for nurturing my love of the game and being there through all the steps. And always making sure that I had fun, never putting an ounce of pressure on me and really worrying about me as a person rather than as a champ. He taught me so much when he applauded my opponents as much as for me. I don’t know if I could do that.
IT: He brought a tremendous love of laughter and joy.
MS: Definitely. I look at him and I just think, “Wow! I was really lucky. Will I see you at the Hall of fame induction?
IT: I’d love to, but I have two teenagers…
MS: Oh, God, you probably don’t have much hair left.
For twenty-eight years, I was known as a tennis player. It had been a long time since I played a professional match, but the thought of giving up the security of that label had terrified me. Tennis player. A short, easy description that everyone is familiar with. It’s who I was to the outside world and it’s what I’d been calling myself for as long as I could remember. But it was time to move forward. I was ready to leave the past behind.
On February 14, 2008, I announced my official retirement from tennis. I’d been playing in exhibitions here and there, but I was tired of waking up every morning wondering if today was the day my foot was going to self-destruct again. When it felt good, I could play the way I had when I was at the top of my game, but when it felt bad, I couldn’t walk on it. I spent years debating back and forth in my head whether I had it in me to make another run for the top. I didn’t want to do it anymore. I was tired of the debate. I waited so long to make it official because I wanted to be absolutely sure it was the right decision. I wanted it to be on my timetable and I wanted to claim complete ownership over the choice to close that chapter of my life. All the what-ifs about whether I could regain my former glory and win another Grand Slam began to fade away. My life was filling up with things other than tennis; I was feeling more content than ever before and the fear had left me. It took a long time to get to this point, but I knew that I didn’t need tennis to define who I was anymore.
At the time of the announcement, I didn’t think twice about the date. It just happened to be when my agent, Tony Godsick, released the statement. But it’s funny that on a day reserved for lovers, I declared my relationship with professional tennis to be over.
Tennis legend Monica Seles discusses life on and off the court, and her new book Getting a Grip: On My Body, My Mind, My Self.
April, 24th, 2009
Monica Seles Gets a Grip:
Monica Seles is a former number-one world professional tennis player who became the youngest-ever champion at the French Open in 1990, and went on to win nine Grand Slam singles titles, according to her publisher.
In her new book, Getting a Grip: On My Body, My Mind, My Self, Monica writes about her struggles with binge-eating and depression. She had dominated the tennis circuit for three years until a deranged fan stabbed her in the back on the court. She spent two years recovering from her injuries and training to make a comeback, but she descended into a depression, turning to food for comfort.
She sabotaged six-hour workouts by secretive late-night binges. Playing with an extra 30 pounds and devastated after losing her father (who was also her coach) to cancer, she never regained her former dominance on tour. Her memoir is about how she finally took control of her life and found the peace and balance.
“When I started on this journey, I had all the diet books, I knew what to do, I worked with the famous trainers,” Seles said in an interview with The Associated Press. “But yet I couldn’t get it.”
Although the book is a memoir, she hopes it can also teach readers a lesson about conquering demons about food without having to embark on an unhealthy diet fad.
“I’ve tried every single one of them; I could recite them for you sitting here,” Seles said. “But until I realized that I held that power — not my trainer, not my coach, not my family, but me — that’s when I think I started to shift in the way I thought.”
Monica Seles was an extraordinary athlete who lived for years with a very common problem — compulsive eating. But her personal drama played out on an international stage, beginning with the 1993 courtside stabbing that forever altered her precocious path.
The teenage dethroned No. 1 began to blunt her psychological distress with food after that trauma. That pattern escalated as she watched her father wither away with terminal cancer. Seles packed as much as 174 pounds on her 5-foot, 10-inch frame, drawing harsh comments from the media, onlookers and men she dated. Multiple regimens, trainers and even food “babysitters” didn’t help. Although Seles remained a top-10 player until her abbreviated final season, she never recaptured her early incandescence and now says she spent much of that time “living in a fog.”
Seles didn’t so much leave the scene as fade away, waiting nearly five years to formally retire following her last competitive match, in 2003 at Roland Garros. The nine-time Grand Slam winner kept a low profile before emerging as a contestant on “Dancing With The Stars” in 2008. Starting Tuesday, she’ll bare her soul instead of her legs with the release of her book, “Getting a Grip.”
It was only after Seles stopped playing, her future in limbo, that she began dealing with the root causes of her problem. She said the pounds began to melt away when she stopped counting calories and began taking a real account of her emotional health. The book germinated from talks Seles has given to women’s groups through the Women’s Sports Foundation. She drafted the manuscript herself, culling from old diary entries.
Now a willowy 35-year-old, Seles says she always will live with some regret about what could have been but that she’s at peace and, more importantly, at the helm of her life. She will be inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame this summer.
Seles spoke with ESPN.com’s Bonnie D. Ford on Monday in the Manhattan offices of her management company, IMG. The following are excerpts from that conversation.
ESPN.com: Do you think weight would have been an issue for you no matter what you did for a living?
Seles: I didn’t really have an issue with it until after my stabbing. Let’s put it this way: When I came back, I was 21 and I had been away from the tour for two and a half years and I was 20 pounds heavier. Then my father was diagnosed about a year afterward with what eventually killed him, stomach cancer, and I gained another 15 pounds. I think for me, food was a way for me to deal with emotional trouble. As a top player, you have to keep your emotions in check. You think you can control everything. I was playing all these great players. If you asked me who was my most difficult opponent, I can tell you, it wasn’t any of those players; it was my own battle with food because it was going on in my head while I would go out to play in front of 20,000 people.
ESPN.com: What was the turning point?
Seles: When I played my last tournament, my doctor said I had to go into a cast for four to five months. So I’m turning 30, which in tennis is kind of ancient, and my entire identity has been tennis. What am I going to do after tennis? What’s happening in my life? Maybe I’m meant to be overweight. It was not a happy period. For the first time in my life, I was without anybody to tell me what to do. My foot was in a cast, and I knew I did not want to gain another pound. I also knew whatever I was doing was not working and I needed a change. That was the “wow” moment, when I said, “Forget Monica the tennis player, the champion, the person that got stabbed, the youngest to win this or that; do this for Monica the person.
By RACHEL COHEN AP Sports Writer NEW YORK April 20, 2009 (AP)
Monica Seles figures she bought every self-help book on the market. She felt sure that if she just found the right diet, if she just hired the right trainer, she’d lose weight and reclaim her tennis career.
Instead Seles would gain it back as quickly as she dropped it, sneaking off on late-night supermarket runs and bingeing on junk food in secret. Seeking refuge from the pain and confusion of dual tragedies, she put on more than 35 pounds.
“When I started on this journey, I had all the diet books, I knew what to do, I worked with the famous trainers,” Seles said in an interview with The Associated Press on Monday. “But yet I couldn’t get it.”
Now the 35-year-old Seles has written a book of her own: “Getting a Grip on My Body, My Mind, My Self” will be released Tuesday. It’s technically a memoir, chronicling her rise from a tennis-loving kid in the former Yugoslavia to the No. 1 player in the world.
But she hopes it can also be the book she needed to read in her darkest days and never did, a lesson in conquering the demons of food without that dreaded word diet.
“I’ve tried every single one of them; I could recite them for you sitting here,” Seles said. “But until I realized that I held that power — not my trainer, not my coach, not my family, but me — that’s when I think I started to shift in the way I thought.”
Top tennis players have two ways to approach dating while on tour. First, you can date someone on your team – a coach, a therapist, a trainer – but mixing business and pleasure can be hazardous to your playing health. Or you can date a guy who understands that he comes second, third or sometimes fourth on your list of priorities.
Enzo, a dashing Italian, fell into the second option. Whenever I was in Europe he tried to meet up with me to watch my matches and take me out to dinner.
I met him at a restaurant a few hours after my plane had landed in Rome for the 2000 Italian Open. Dressed in my usual flowing outfit to hide my weight, I felt a little bit glamorous. Who cared about a few extra pounds around the waist?
Enzo looked good and smelt good. But when the antipasto arrived, my eyes darted from him to the dishes of meat and vegetables in olive oil. He spoke to the waiter and within moments a plate of salad was placed in front of me.
“Is this for me?” “Si, bella. I am under strict instructions not to let you indulge your appetite tonight.”
Strict instructions? The last time we’d gone out on the town he’d told me it was sexy that I loved food. But apparently he’d been given the nutritional smack-down by Chris, my “food warden”.
Pouring a minuscule refill of chianti into my wine glass, he said: “Let’s make an agreement. If you win the tournament, we will come back to this place and you will eat anything and everything you want.” Artichokes swimming in butter, hot crusty bread, cheese. My kind of agreement.
Seven days later, to my disbelief, I reached the final of the Italian Open. I’d been labelled a has-been by the media and “past her sell-by date”, but now they were running headlines like “Monica’s magic” and referring to my “return to former glory”. I was on the brink of my all-you-can-eat Roman buffet.
On the morning of the final, I stood in front of the mirror in my hotel room. I tucked my shirt into my tennis skirt and turned around, craning my neck to see what my backside looked like without a shirt-tail over it. Not the greatest.
With the shirt out, my backside looked even bigger. But I left it that way, hoping I wouldn’t have to hit any shots that would expose my far-from-toned stomach. could practically taste the lasagne. The only thing that stood in the way was Amélie Mauresmo, who at 20 had legs, muscles and reflexes that were six years younger than mine.
Amazingly, I beat her – and a few hours later I was sitting at the restaurant again with Enzo, digging into the warm bread basket. Bread is good, but bread drizzled with olive oil is heaven. I was pouring oil onto another slice before I’d finished the first. I’d played a hard match; I deserved this. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so happy.
Monica Seles is heading to New York City prepared to jump start your life.
Seles will return to SIRIUS XM Radio to host a five-week series on which she will share her personal experiences of success, struggle and triumph and inspire listeners to live happy and healthy lives—mentally, physically and emotionally.
The Monica Seles Challenge: 5 Weeks to Jump Start Your Life launches Wednesday, April 15 at 6 p.m. Eastern time and will air every Wednesday through May 13 from 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. on SIRIUS XM Stars, SIRIUS channel 102 and XM channel 155. Seles will host the show from SIRIUS XM Radio’s New York City studios. The Monica Seles Challenge marks the second time Seles has hosted a series on SIRIUS XM Radio.
On The Monica Seles Challenge Seles will draw upon her remarkable life experiences, speak candidly about issues she has faced and conquered and impart her valuable life lessons with listeners. In this tough economy when women are under more pressure than ever, Seles and her special guests will offer practical tips and advice to help people find the tools and strength to overcome the obstacles they face.
Over Seles’ tennis career, she earned nine Grand Slam titles and won 53 singles and six doubles tournaments. She first became No. 1 in the world in March 1991. Seles was No. 1 for 178 weeks during the next two years—the youngest No. 1 ever at the time—until tragedy struck in April 1993 when she was stabbed in the back by a deranged fan during a match in Germany. When she returned to tennis, she won hearts with her comeback win at the Canadian Open and then reached the US Open Final the following month. She won her ninth Grand Slam title at the Australian Open in January 1996.
Nine-time grand slam champion Monica Seles once ruled women’s tennis. At 16, Seles became the youngest woman ever to win the French Open and in a two-year stretch, she won seven out of nine grand slam tennis championships. Many thought she was destined to be the best women’s tennis player in history.
But her career came to a screeching halt on April 30, 1993, when she was stabbed by a deranged fan during a break in a match in Germany . Now, Seles has chronicled her long journey back in her new memoir, “Getting A Grip: On My Body, My Mind, My Self.“
On court Monica Seles was all but unbeatable; off court she was losing a battle with her weight. Now the tennis great tells Rebecca Johnson how she finally stopped obsessing.
Photographed by Marc Hispard.
It is bad enough to be a young woman struggling with your weight. Now imagine the eyes of the world on you as you do it. And oh, yes, the whole time they’re watching, you’re wearing a short white skirt that barely covers your bum.
Yugoslavian-born tennis phenomenon Monica Seles won eight Grand Slam titles before she turned 20, but what sticks in her mind about that time are the insults heaped on her by the press. “‘Big as Blimp,’ ‘Fatso,’” she reels them off from her home in Florida, where she now lives, having officially retired from the game last year. “I was ranked number three in the world, but all they would say about me was that I needed to lose weight and stop grunting.” In interviews Seles came off as a giggly teenager without a care, but on the inside she was hurting. “I’d like to tell you it didn’t bother me, but it did.”
Athlete memoirs tend to follow a certain arc: Junior is born to loving parents who recognize his extraordinary talent, make superhuman sacrifices, then watch as he works hard to become a champion (with some awesome endorsement contracts thrown in). As she writes in her often fearless and sometimes funny new autobiography, Getting a Grip: On My Body, My Mind, My Self, Monica Seles’s journey was not so different. Born to middle-class parents in post-Tito Yugoslavia, a wintry, soccer-mad country where tennis is an afterthought, Seles developed a passion for the game when she was six years old. Without the money to pay club fees, Seles’s father, a political cartoonist, improvised by fashioning a net from string tied to the cars in the parking lot of the family’s apartment building. This, he explained to his daughter, is our court. And this is how you hold a racket. (Years later, professional coaches would try to undo Seles’s unconventional two-handed forehand but eventually gave up. It may have looked odd, but it worked.)
When she was only twelve years old, legendary coach Nick Bollettieri spotted Seles at a tournament in Miami and promptly offered her a scholarship to his tennis academy in Bradenton, Florida. Moving to America was a shock on many levels. Seles had to save two weeks to afford a Häagen-Dazs ice cream while other students were being given things like BMW convertibles for their sixteenth birthdays. More important, none of the other girls wanted to play against her. At the time, she assumed it was because she wasn’t cool enough, but now she understands that they simply didn’t like losing. Even the boys would storm off the court in frustration when she refused to hit the ball to them during routine rallies. “If I was going to be out there,” she says, “I figured I may as well hit the ball like I meant it.”
With her trademark intensity and innate talent, Seles quickly became a force to be reckoned with, but she also began to discover the harsh truth all professional tennis players must eventually learn: Tennis may look glamorous to an outsider, but it’s a hard and lonely life. Today’s friend might be tomorrow’s competitor. If you want to be number one, tennis has to come first.
Looking back, Seles sees the seeds of her eventual eating disorder in that harsh reality. “I was taken out of the classroom when I was fourteen; I couldn’t make friends. In tennis, you travel eleven months out of the year. It’s like a roller coaster going, going, going. All those things got to me. I couldn’t cope.” To the public, Seles was an extraordinarily focused athlete with an iron will to win. The reality was far different. “I was always nervous,” she says. “I love to play tennis, but I hate that somebody has to win and somebody has to lose.” (Though if somebody had to lose, better her opponent, as evidenced by her then number-one ranking in the world.)
Teenage angst, however, was nothing compared with what happened to Seles on April 30, 1993, during an otherwise ordinary match against Magdalena Maleeva in Hamburg, Germany. On a changeover between sets, Seles paused for a drink of water. As she leaned over to bring the cup to her lips, she felt a sudden stabbing pain in her shoulder. She looked up to see a face filled with hatred and a nine-inch-long knife dripping with her blood. Her attacker, an obsessed Steffi Graf fan, had decided to eliminate his idol’s biggest competition. Millimeters to the left and he would have been permanently successful.
As Seles lay in a hospital, completely immobile, waiting to hear if she would ever be able to play tennis again, the top players of the world met to vote on whether to freeze her ranking during her recovery. Not a single player voted yes. As her attacker wished, Graf ascended to number one, taking all Seles’s paid endorsement contracts with her. “That,” she says, “is when I realized tennis really is just a business. Until then, a part of me thought we were playing the game because it was fun.”
It took more than two years before Seles set foot on a professional tennis court again. When she did, the sniping about her body reached a crescendo. Depressed by her father’s cancer diagnosis and panicked by her 25-pound weight gain, Seles hired a raft of personal trainers and nutritionists to travel the world with her. Despite their carefully planned menus of protein shakes and broiled chicken breasts, her weight ballooned to 177 pounds. She bought every diet book on the market, but Seles soon learned what millions of others already know: Diets don’t work, no matter how much discipline you may have in other arenas. “I was focused; that’s the irony,” she says. “As soon as I was told I couldn’t eat a cookie, I began to obsess on having a cookie.”
The math was inexorable. She might be burning 4,000 to 5,000 calories in her grueling daily workouts, but she was eating 5,000 to 6,000 calories during late-night binges on junk food like chocolate-covered pretzels. Bathing suits became instruments of torture. Boyfriends who mentioned her weight were summarily dumped.
Her (mostly) male trainers simply did not understand. To them, food was fuel. You ate it to perform well. Indeed, most of the other women on the tour couldn’t understand, either. “Their weight,” she says, “never varied by more than three or four pounds.” But to Seles, food was solace, especially after her beloved father died of the cancer he’d been battling for more than five years. “Looking back,” she says, “I can see I wasn’t dealing with the things that were bothering me. Other people relax by drinking or smoking. I would eat. Then I would think everything would be better if I could just lose 20 pounds.”
It didn’t help that women’s tennis at that time was being transformed into a beauty contest, thanks to a Russian hottie named Anna Kournikova. “When I started playing,” Seles recalls, “players didn’t even wear makeup.” Suddenly, a player’s looks were as important as her game. Today, Seles sometimes plays doubles with Kournikova and is still amazed by the Russian’s effect on men—“When Anna plays, all my male friends call me to see if they can get tickets.”
At 35, Seles herself is no slouch in the looks department. Every woman has an age that suits her best; for Monica, that age seems to be now. With the end of her career looming, she finally shed the weight once and (hopefully) for all. At five feet ten, she’s a svelte size 4, with a much healthier attitude toward food. “I don’t use food to cope with a problem. I know that eating fifteen cookies won’t solve it.” She has also adopted a decidedly relaxed workout schedule—she walks as much as she can and takes an exercise class twice a week. Her once-problematic “poodle” hair has been tamed by regular straightening—“If I have a regret in life, it’s that I wasn’t born with naturally straight hair.”
Despite everything, Seles is grateful for her life in tennis. “OK, I didn’t get to go to the prom,” she says, “but I did get to meet Nelson Mandela.” Her only real regret is that she didn’t get the overeating under control sooner. “It occupied so much of my brain! I wish I could get those years back.” In her post-tennis career, which includes a show for SIRIUS XM Radio, Seles travels the country talking to women’s groups and corporations. It was among real people that she heard firsthand how many women have struggled, like her, with the same issues. “They all wanted to know how I did it, which is why I wrote the book,” she says. “It’s not about dieting. It has to come from within.”
“Net Worth” has been edited for Vogue.com; the complete story appears in the April 2009 issue of Vogue
Just in time for her new book Getting A Grip, set to be released April 21, tennis icon Monica Seles will be taking your questions!
Fill out the form below to submit your question for consideration by March 30 and Monica will answer the best ones online at tennischannel.com next month.
March, 24th, 2009.
Monica Seles is a former World No. 1 professional tennis player and a member of the International Tennis Hall of Fame. The legendary Seles became the youngest-ever champion at the 1990 French Open at the age of 16.
Recently retired, Monica has changed her focus from serving tennis balls to tossing them to puppies to play fetch! As a good friend to cherished Animal League spokesperson, Beth Stern, Monica also shares a passion for animals and has joined in our mission to help shelter pets.
In 2008, Monica attended the Animal League’s DogCatemy Celebrity Gala in an effort to raise awareness to the plight of shelter pets everywhere, and just recently, during her visit she was bottle-feeding newborns and walking adult dogs at the Animal League.
We are happy to welcome Monica Seles as the newest member of our Animal League family.
If you’re hoping for a fun tell-all of the women’s pro tour, you’re not going to get it in Monica Seles’ new autobiography, Getting a Grip: On My Body, My Mind, My Self, which comes out on April 21. The book is being published by Avery, the Penguin group’s self-help imprint. So what you’re reading is part memoir, part personal-growth journal. Seles, it turns out, struggled for years with her weight, a horrible binge-eating habit and periods of severe depression. She wants to help others who suffer from similar issues because she knows how it feels “to want to give up.” If she can change her life, so can you.Are your kids ready to learn tennis? Monica Seles thinks so:
In more that 700 tennis facilities, recreation departments and community centers across the U.S. the first-ever national youth registration initiative for all spring and summer tennis programs will take place on Monday. The launch will also feature demonstrations for kids and parents.
National Youth Registration Night events serve as “opening day” for parents to sign up their kids for league and team tennis play, including USTA Jr. Team Tennis. Facilities and clubs across the country, will also be offering live viewing parties for the “BNP Paribas Showdown for the Billie Jean King Cup” to complement the kick-off of the 2009 tennis season.
Tennis participation in the U.S. has grown more than any other traditional sport since 2000. According to the annual research survey conducted for the Tennis Industry Association and the USTA by the Taylor Research Group, nearly 26.9 million people played tennis in 2008, the highest number of participants in 15 years. That marked a 7 percent increase over the prior year and an increase of more than 30 percent since 2000. In addition, the number of new tennis players increased by 3 percent last year to more than 5.9 million.
For more information on Tennis Night in America and to find out which facilities are hosting locally in Colorado, visit www.tennisnight.com
From the very first time she recalls swinging at a tennis ball, Monica Seles held her racquet with both hands as if embracing a long-lost family member she never wanted to let go. The hug from the heart for the sport that symbolizes family support remains within her.
She learned to play tennis in a parking lot belting balls bearing the image of the cartoon characters her cartoonist father, Karolj, drew on the felt sphere to make the game fun for her and she grew into one of the greatest players the sport has ever seen.
Seles always said nothing gave her greater joy than simply striking the ball. Today, Seles’ coronation as a champion for the ages became official as the International Tennis Hall of Fame announced Seles will lead the historic Hall’s Class of 2009, which will be inducted on Saturday, July 11th in Newport, Rhode Island.
The nine-time Grand Slam singles champion and former World No. 1 was elected to the Hall in the Recent Player Category. Joining her in the Master Player category is Andres Gimeno. Gimeno was one of Spain’s most prominent tennis players of the 1960s, who remains Roland Garros’ oldest singles champion, winning the coveted clay court title in 1972. Elected in the Contributor category are: Donald L. Dell, a former US Davis Cup player and an industry pioneer and leader in sports marketing, professional sports management and sports television and founder of ProServ and Dr. Robert “Whirlwind” Johnson, inducted posthumously, founder and director of the American Tennis Association (ATA) Junior Development Program, who worked tirelessly for decades assisting young African-American players (most notably Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe) in gaining admittance into previously segregated tournaments.
“I’m so excited and so honored to be inducted into the Hall of Fame alongside Andres Gimeno, Donald Dell and Dr. Johnson,” Seles told the media in a conference call today. “What a way for me to remember the amazing tennis career I had and hopefully inspire young girls around the world that dreams do come true. When I picked up the racquet for the first time, I could never imagine where that racquet will take you. And for me at age 35 with my tennis career behind me I can’t really put it into words what it means (to be inducted into the Hall of Fame).”
Singles is a solitary sport, but Seles was never alone on the court — she always felt accompanied by the father and family that introduced her to tennis and nurtured her love for the game.
“I will get very emotional when I talk about him in July because really without him I would have never nurtured my tennis,” Seles said of her dad. “Without my dad’s love for the game and really just making it fun for me… He never made it like it was something I had to do. He just made it fun — that helped me stay in the game so long and to keep my sanity. When you see a player out on center court you just see that person, but there are a lot of people behind them who took them there and in my case it was my family, especially my father.”
The two-handed titan captured nine Grand Slam championships and won 53 singles and six doubles tournaments, collecting $14,891,762 in career prize money in a professional career that began on February 13, 1989. She first became No. 1 in the world in March 1991. She was No. 1 for 178 weeks during the next two years — the youngest No. 1 ever at the time — until tragedy struck in April 1993, when she was stabbed in the back during a match in Hamburg, Germany by a madman, Gunter Parche, who emerged from the crowd and plunged the blade into her back just below her left shoulder blade. Parche never served prison time for a vicious attack, while Seles was left to pick up the pieces after a horrific attack that sidelined her for 27 months.
The attack literally cut her career as it approached its apex and while Seles said she tries not to wonder ”what if” the stabbing never occurred the attack can still haunt her head.
“I thought of that probably the day after my stabbing; (now) it comes and goes and there are days I don’t think about it,” Seles said. “Obviously now that I’m not playing I don’t think about it. It is one of those things. Unfortunately it really changed the career of mine and definitely Stefanie (Graf’s) career and that was out of my control and it was really up to me to take control and I decided to play. What could have been? Nobody knows. What could have been if I didn’t pick up a tennis racquet at seven? I try not to ask myself those questions because really there are no answers.”
She was not able to play again for more than two years. When she did return, she won even more hearts with her comeback win at the Canadian Open, then reached the U.S. Open final the following month. Remarkably, she then won her ninth Grand Slam title at the Australian Open in January 1996.
The owner of a 595-122 record, Seles concluded 1991 and 1992 as World No. 1. In a sustained span of dominance she won eight of the 11 Grand Slam tournaments she entered from 1989 to 1993. Seles was a force in Fed Cup competition posting a 17-2 record, including a 15-2 mark in singles matches. She inspired a legion of top players, including Venus Williams and Serena Williams, Ana Ivanovic and Jelena Jankovic.
In a past interview with Tennis Week, Hall of Famer Jimmy Connors said Seles’s fighting spirit, willingness to play even closer to the lines on pivotal points and her aggressive baseline style made her the player that most reminded him of himself.
“Who reminds me of me? Monica Seles is the player I think who played the game the way I tried to play it.” Connors told Tennis Week in a past interview. “She always played as hard as she could every single match and left it all on the court. I have tremendous respect for Seles.”
In her younger years, Seles revolutionized women’s tennis by playing a bold baseline game and producing power and short angles seldom seen in women’s tennis. The woman who took the ball so early it looked like she was hitting half volleys from the baseline, possessed perhaps the most lethal return of serve in the history of women’s tennis, and a stirring shriek that accompanied her stunning shots.
“The ball is being hit harder and harder, and the girls are much more complete players than they used to be, physically stronger,” Seles told Tennis Week in a past interview. “I think I probably was one of the earliest to start it. I brought in power with two hands from both sides. I was one of a few players that brought on this power game and they’ve taken it to a new level. Then the grunting part, everybody is now doing it. It’s like normal now. Seeing women play such aggressive tennis is really great.”
Though Seles has limited her competitive appearances to World TeamTennis and exhibition matches in recent years, she still plans to pursue her favorite tennis past-time with a passion: hitting. The simple act of hitting the ball over the net over and over again still brings genuine joy to one of the sharpest ball strikers in the sport’s history.
“I had a very unusual career, to say the least,” Seles told Tennis Week. “I had some highs and lows. But at the end of the day, I got to do something I loved to do. As a little girl, how I started playing tennis was very simple. That part, I’m proud to say, has never changed. To me, I get a great joy just hitting the ball.”
Technically, Seles’ trademark two-handed strokes were unconventional. Mentally, she was one of the strongest players ever to pick up a racquet, competing with fierce focus.
“You know when you saw Monica Seles at 12 years old, you know I told my friends I thought Monica would be the best player in the world,” Nick Bollettieri, who worked with Seles early in her career, told Tennis Week. “But when you looked at her natural physical ability as a strong athlete able to push the weights and all that, you know she didn’t have that. But what she had was hitting the ball early, great focus and determination and always competed well. And I thought she would be No. 1, but to look at her physically, then you said: ‘Well, you know I don’t think this girl has it to make it physically.’ But mentally, she was just off the charts.”
A stress fracture in her foot forced Seles to step away from the WTA Tour five years ago. She had not played a match since limping out of the French Open in a 6-4, 6-0 loss to Nadia Petrova in May of 2003. It was the first time in her storied career that Seles suffered a first-round loss in a Grand Slam.
Adjusting to life after tennis was not a smooth transition as she slipped into an emotional void. Seles gained nearly 25 pounds at the end of her career and stuggled to lose the weight and find her self-worth and come to terms with her own identity as a person rather than simply live with the label of being a life-long player. When the ball stopped bouncing, the woman capable of digging so deep down on the court had to work on herself and find her inner value away from the game.
“Leaving my home at a very early age on (you’re) giving up something for that, yet on the other end getting so many great things: the fame, financial freedom,” Seles said. “There were the tragedies and really at the end of the day it was discovering who Monica is and all the things that happened were outside of my hands. And during my last three or four years (on the WTA Tour) you could definitely see that in my weight. I look back at pictures and I can tell you I just was not a happy person inside. After I stopped playing tennis I had to give time to Monica and figure out what I wanted and who I was. I had to deal with certain things I really didn’t want to. My dad always said ‘Put one step in front of you’ but at the end of the day you realize how fragile life was. My self worth was in tennis, my weight was very high and I wasn’t the happiest person, let’s put it that way.”
That inner journey to self discovery has prompted Seles to write a book, which is scheduled for release this year.
“(The book is about) getting a grip on my body, my mind and myself: my journey from tennis, fame, the tragedy, my self-discovery and it will be a lot written toward women about the weight,” Seles said. “I lost a lot of weight since I stopped playing tennis, which is a big irony since in tennis you exercise so much. I work wtih pre-schoolers on fitness; (obesity) is one of my pet peeves because kids today are more sedentary.”
Though she seemed to play with a ruthlessness on court, Seles was the personification of graciousness off court.
“I was a normal person in some extraordinary circumstances,” Seles said. “I became No. 1 as a teenager, I battled rebellion in my own way yet it was on a world stage so if I cut my hair short it was big news. At 19 to get stabbed by Parche on a tennis court definitely was unusual — something that never happened before or since — and totally changed the course of my tennis career. Coming back to tennis at 21 was a big decision and a year later losing my father…it was lot of highs and a lot of lows. One thing that kept me going was I loved the game. Whenever I talk to kids today I tell them ‘You gotta love the game.’ If you don’t love the game, then in the long run it’s just not worth it. That love really kept me through the good times and the bad times. I loved playing tennis at my house in my backyard just as much as I did playing on the center court at the French Open or Wimbledon.”
January, 6th 2009
Monica Seles in Canada:
Tennis Canada’s tournament staffers are planning and innovating for 2009. The men’s event in Montreal is always strong and, regarding the women’s tournament in Toronto, efforts are being made to be creative in giving it added value. “We’re getting a good response already to our opening (Monday) night in Toronto,” Downey said. “We’re going to pick up on the WTA Tour’s ‘Looking for a hero’ concept and have a doubles match with past heroes and current heroes. We’re agreed with Monica Seles and Martina Navratilova and Serena Williams and Aleksandra Wozniak, and the four of them are going to play doubles.”
January, 1rst 2009
Happy New Year:
Happy new year to Monica Seles, i wish her a beautiful year and all the best for 2009. Also i wish you a a happy new year and all the best for 2009.
See you sonn.
December, 22th 2008
Merry Christmas:
Wishing you all the warmth and joy of the Holiday Season and a Merry Christmas. Wishing you all the best. And of couse a Merry Christmas to Monica Seles.
Monica, i wish you a happy birthday, i hope you will have a good day, and may all your wishes come true. I wish you all the best, and once again happy birthday.
November 10th, 2008
Our animals friends:
Monica Seles was on 6 November 2008 in New York for the annual gala organized by the North Shore Animal League America 400 celebrities participated in this evening. Monica Seles has never hidden her love for animals. Monica has sent an email to Beth Ostroky( a former top model) who ran a marathon for the North Shore Animal league earlier this month.
November 9th, 2008
Academy memories:
Monica Seles was present last Saturday at the Ritz-Carlton in Sarasota during the evening birthday, 30 years of tennis academy, the famous Nick Bollettieri. Near to Bradenton The Academy of Nick Bollettieri hosted many champions (Jim Courier, Andre Agassi, the Williams sisters, Maria Sharapova and Monica Seles …). Monica Seles came to Bradenton in 1986, accompanied by his brother (Zoltan SELES) and without her parents (for a period of 6months). Monica learnt a new language … Monica Seles will leave the academy in 1990, shortly after the tournament of Miami.The next we know… Monica Seles here with her former coach laughs, the littles mouse from Novid Sad to grow well, she is now a wonderful woman, and today she can smile on her fantastic career.
Unfortunately, I don’t speak French. So I hope everyone will be able to read this comment.
I want to compliment Ludo on this site. He’s done a beautiful job! I’ve been a Monica fan for MANY years, and it’s always nice to meet other people who appreciate her as much as I do. Keep up the good work!
Monica Seles: toute l'actualité de Monica Seles, photos, videos et les dernières news de la championne de tennis Monica Seles et des tournois du Grand Chelem.
In 2008, Monica attended the Animal League’s DogCatemy Celebrity Gala in an effort to raise awareness to the plight of shelter pets everywhere, and just recently, during her visit she was bottle-feeding newborns and walking adult dogs at the Animal League.
From the very first time she recalls swinging at a tennis ball, Monica Seles held her racquet with both hands as if embracing a long-lost family member she never wanted to let go. The hug from the heart for the sport that symbolizes family support remains within her.
2 décembre, 2008 à 14:47
Happy Birthday Monica
22 avril, 2009 à 17:51
Unfortunately, I don’t speak French. So I hope everyone will be able to read this comment.
I want to compliment Ludo on this site. He’s done a beautiful job! I’ve been a Monica fan for MANY years, and it’s always nice to meet other people who appreciate her as much as I do. Keep up the good work!
23 avril, 2009 à 11:14
Hello John thank you for your nice comment. See you soon on this space