Challenge grasped with both hands

TENNIS: Johnny Watterson talks to Monica Seles, who is due in Dublin this week and still playing tennis because, as she says, she simply couldn't imagine doing anything else

Monica Seles is showing tennis some love. It's not fashionable. At 29 and with amassed prize money of $15 million, love is her energy, her muse. Life on the tour is tough, she says. But life without tennis would be tougher.

Even with her best season in the majors since 1996, Seles is not blind to the fading light on a career that has brought her nine Grand Slam wins and a little grief. But the heartbeat still quickens and the willingness to be alive to hitting the ball and running the lines in a game which has steadily mutated and accelerated since she first stepped on to a court at 14, remains.

A life without the game is a place Seles is not yet prepared to go. Showing tennis the love, going back to the womb and revisiting the first impulses of why she ever picked up a racquet is keeping the flame burning. Love is all, money is nothing.

Hallelujah.

Today Seles will leave her birthday presents and her home in Sarasota, Florida, and come to Dublin because she has never been, because she is interested. The purse is meaningless and her appearance fee will disappear into a wad so large that two years ago she was one of only five female athletes listed in the Forbes Magazine Power 100. The other four were also tennis players. This visit is quality time. It is curiosity. It is one of the best players in the world smelling the roses.

"When you're on the tour at the beginning everything is so new. I grew up on the tour. That's the only lifestyle I know," she says. "I think since 1995 when I came back to the game it has been mostly enjoyable. I find it's a very narrow, one-minded life you lead and there have been some rough years in there, but everybody has those. I'd two tough years recently where I couldn't play for six months and that really hurts you a lot when you get older and you're at a later stage in your career. You gotta' enjoy it, just enjoy.

"When you're young you're thinking, 10 years from now, la dee da dee da . . now I don't have that luxury. Every week, every day is critical. I wanna do stuff like Dublin that's fun as long as I enjoy it and it doesn't mess up my training schedule. You never know when you're going to get another chance."

Seles was a child prodigy. When she was nine she was, ludicrously, the world number one at under 18. Coaches looked at her hitting the ball with two hands off both sides and said no, no, no. Summit meetings, video analysis, coaching seminars and think-tanks agreed that prodigies should have one-handed backhands and maybe even approach the net with feathered volleys. Her father and coach Karolj told them to let his girl be. It wasn't the first time her father was right.

"Thank god for my dad. He said: ' No, this is how she picked up the racquet, this is how she's playing.' My dad was an artist and he said let me express myself. I'm so thankful for that because it's so cool. He was never like: 'Let's make her number one'. And that's what worries me now about kids who are only five or six years old. I think my dad's was a wonderful attitude to hold. I was so lucky."

At 15, Seles played her way to the semi-final of the French Open at Roland Garros, and at 16 she won it. The next year she won the Australian, French and US Opens and knocked Steffi Graf off the number one pedestal, becoming only the fifth player ever to occupy the position. She was also the youngest at 17 years and three months. At voting age she machine-gunned her way to three more Grand Slams and a Wimbledon final and declared herself an independent tennis republic.

Seles was recreating the tennis landscape, strafing the courts off both wings. Steffi Graf, with her dazzling athleticism and striking speed, Martina Navratilova and her unbreakable all-round excellence, Aranxta Sanchez-Vicario, the robust work-horse and Gabriela Sabatini's Latin verve all perished. Seles had arrived in the gentile tennis garden and had turned it into a place of civil unrest. Players in desperation complained about her grunting and noted the lack of beauty in one of the most lethal weapons in the game, her two-handed backhand.

She replied by hitting her way to 21 consecutive finals and in 1993 imperiously cast a long shadow at the very start of the season by sweeping up her third successive Australian Open. Three months later in Hamburg at change-over in a match against Magdelena Maleeva, a deranged Graf fan plunged a knife into her back, just below the left shoulder blade. The Graf-intoxicated Guenter Parche ultimately had his way. Graf returned as the world number, the German courts released Parche and Seles disappeared from the game. She didn't play again for two years and three months.

"When I got stabbed, I'd a couple of years away from tennis and perhaps I then saw everything in a different light. Obviously that changed my perspective on things quite a lot. Once I came back I decided that financially I don't have to do it any more. I'd won the titles.

"You'd Steffi and Gabby in those years and Navratilova and Arantxa. But now the depth is there. You have it from the first round on and you have power players so, you've got to play well both ends because the ball is coming so fast.

"Compare it to 1990 when the fastest serve was 95 mph. Now it's 128 mph. You look at (Andre) Agassi, I mean, he doesn't serve at 128. The girls now are stronger, they're more athletic and racquet technology has added to that. I've had to adjust throughout my career. I've been good at that because I realised I had to, otherwise I wasn't going to stay afloat.

"And look at the women players now. They're celebrities. They are on a par with rock singers and actors. Look at Anna (Kournikova). She's transcended the trade papers and the sports papers. Look at the Williams sisters. You've now maybe 10 players who people know by first names on a world basis. That's rare. Very few athletes have that. In the US and Europe you have football, baseball and soccer but in tennis, you go to China and they know you on a first name basis."

You see Agassi doing it year in year out, his younger bride, Graf, some years now retired. Pete Sampras did it this year at the US Open and with it torched a number of disbelieving tennis writers' reputations.

Age is in the mind, not in the legs. This year has been Seles's best in six. She's fought her way to three quarter-finals and one semi-final in Grand Slam events. Slow courts in Australia and Paris suit her game. In that nothing has changed. This year, she will look for another gear. It's there. The gear is the difference in getting into semi-finals and finals. Once that far, the gods pay their part.

"I can't tell you how much satisfaction I got from watching Pete win the US Open. I've known him over the years. Just for him to have a year like that and to win at this stage of his career, it has a resonance for me to see someone like that do it and prove everybody wrong. That's why we're still out there.

"I'd love to get past those quarter-finals and semi-finals and maybe win. I'm going to try and get ready for the Grand Slams rather than worry about my ranking. Roland Garros is where I won my first. For sure, the clay is my best chance to win a Grand Slam.

"But you know, every time a new number one comes along it's because they do something that makes them apart. Look at Serena (Williams). She's had an incredible year (won three of the four Grand Slam events) and the consequences of that is that next year the bar is going to be set even higher. That's cool. And even with me being part of it, I'm thinking how much further can this go?"

This day next year Seles will be 30, a year younger than Sampras is now. In the RDS over Thursday, Friday and Saturday, the crowds will flock to see the Williams sisters and Kournikova, and will judge Seles to be from a different era and, in that respect, a little faded rather than luminary. She won't mind. "I look forward to something like Dublin because I've never been. I go to other cities where I've been 30 times and think 'oh no'. At the end of the day, I play because I love it. To spend all those hours on court you have to. If you don't, at the end of it you are going to hate what you've done."

Her Yorkshire terrier Ariel is barking at the door. It's Thanksgiving day. She says Anna Kournikova is one of the hardest workers on the tour. Six hours on court every day. She'll cheerily talk for longer but on Thursday she plays the Russian in an evening match. There are eight years in the age difference. A tennis lifetime. She departs to her American Christmas, not jaded by tennis, still in love.