The eyes are sad eyes, wounded eyes, old eyes, all the bright, frivolous innocence is gone from her eyes.
Monica Seles, fame’s poster victim, has just lost another tennis match, but her eyes cannot be so full of sorrow from losing, even in the Wimbledon quarterfinals, even if, most likely, the Wimbledon quarters are as near as the happiest child tennis ever ruined will get to the only Grand Slam title she never has won.
She is only 24 and yet seems the oldest player in tennis.
Seles so used to chase the light, and now she hugs the shadows. She tucks her hair where it will go and doesn’t bother with cosmetics. On a chain around her neck she wears the wedding ring of her dead father, as if she is the widow and not the daughter.
More Top Picks Best Portable Handheld Fans
She dresses in careless camouflage, her dresses designed to hide her indifference to the superficial, that is to say, a figure with a waist.
Still, she squeals and grunts when smacking the tennis ball, a habit that once annoyed a world as caught up in the shallow as she was. They used to have a Monica-meter here to measure the decibels.
“I think 1991 was the worst for that,” said Seles, saying it flatly, providing information, not regret, not caprice. The girl that was could be another person.
After losing to the seldom adequate Natasha Zvereva, Seles stiffed NBC, not turning up for an agreed interview, the feeding of her celebrity no longer of any significance. She once patterned herself after Madonna, exulting in attention, any kind of attention.
She plays tennis because she is a tennis player, but without the least bit of joy. The game may be more therapy than even vocation, a way of dealing with the twin tragedies of her life, the attack on her by an idiot fan of Steffi Graf’s and then the lingering death of her father.
“My dad always told me that when I went on the court, to play for myself,” she said, “that it was just for me. I think of him every day, but it is just a tennis tournament.”
The sentiment borders on pity for Seles these days, not that she does not deserve the good wishes of strangers. She always has.
Someone offers the suggestion that, what with all that has happened to her, maybe fate would switch to her side of the court again.
“Oh, I don’t think God is going to favor a tennis match or a tennis player to win it,” she said. “I think that’s like . . .”
She would not bother to complete the image. Her non-stop rat-a-tat gibberish is now full of pauses and dead ends.
She talks of “the stabbing” without quotes, just another label in her life. She speaks of her father, who died of cancer just before the French Open, without public emotion.
What once was bubbling drivel is now numb recitation, polite and functional, like her tennis, as dull as a metronome.
“The last five years have been very difficult in terms of walking on the court,” she said before the tournament. “Before I only had to worry about winning or losing the match. The five years have been totally different.
“Unfortunately, those things were not by my choice, what was happening. Hopefully nothing will happen beyond my control in the next few years, so I can really focus on my tennis career and give it the best shot that I have left.”
On this day, other than Martina Hingis, it was the tennis generation even beyond Seles’ that made its way into the semifinals of Wimbledon, Graf’s generation, though Graf herself was gone before Seles.
Nathalie Tauziat is 30 and Zvereva is 27. Jana Novotna, who eliminated American teenager Venus Williams, is 29, same age as Graf. Is there a message being sent from Graf’s generation to the kids?
“You mean telepathically?” Zvereva said.
No, I mean, ironically. When Gunther Parche stuck a knife into Seles’ back, here all these years later, it is clear that he did not have enough weapons.
“I think it is going to be tough for her to come back to the level she was,” Seles said. “Obviously.”
Seles was talking about Graf. She was talking about herself.
Obviously. The eyes say so.
More Top Picks Best Smartwatches With Sleep Apnea Detection