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Few players have hit tennis balls with as much relish as Monica Seles. Unlike
many who have traipsed the tennis circuit, I never gave a thought to what
Seles might've achieved, had someone NOT handed her a tennis racket in childhood.
Like many truly great players, Monica Seles was primarily the product of her
father Karoly's endeavour and influence, and her strokes were fully formed
by the time others saw the benefits of being associated with such a rare talent.
In fact, had they been given the opportunity, many coaches and purveyors of
orthodoxy would've imposed the shallowness of their own vision on a young
Seles, and the human ball machine would've been immeasurably less of a presence
in the history of tennis, by being forced into a technical pigeon hole.
Fortunately, no formulaic influences found their way into Seles game until
her two handed groundstrokes were fully formed.
When she was hitting full tilt from the baseline, there was a sort of mechanical
perpetual motion about Seles. She looked like a cross between a combine harvester
on speed and something from War of the Worlds; a mobile gun unit, perhaps,
that had just been dropped out of the Mothership to pound the natives into
submission with noisy, tennis ball missiles.
Like her contemporary Steffi Graf, Monica Seles could shift the racket head through the air as quickly as anyone in the game: in Monica's case, it was the extra hand on her forehand that helped her to whip a late preparation into what was arguably the most powerful forehand in the history of women's tennis.
It isn't surprising that after the stabbing incident in Hamburg,
Monica was never quite the same. Although her strokes didn't change, the tunnel
of her vision was less focused and she no longer seemed able to hit tennis
balls to the exclusion of all else, which, in different circumstances, would
be no bad thing.
Whilst she may have lost the total focus necessary to
rule the world from the confines of the court, Monica never lost a love of
the game of tennis. I suppose this would put her in a minority group, of those
tennis players fostered by parental influence who were thankful for what they
were doing. This suggests that Eszster and Karoly balanced their parenting
and technical nurturing to perfection.
