She Turns Grunting Into Gold

Jack Dempsey had his crouch. Stan Musial had his coil. Joe Montana licks his fingers. Mike Tyson has his lunge. Some guys talk to themselves. Arnold Palmer used to hitch up his pants.

Every champion has a mannerism, a quirk, something that helps him tend to business, get in a winning mood. It’s part of the arsenal.

And the world’s second-best--or, maybe the best--women’s tennis player has this trademark ploy to keep the game in gear.

She grunts. Monica Seles may not quite be the world’s best tennis player yet. But she’s the world’s best grunter.

Nor are her grunts the stifled kind of a guy lifting an office safe or the concert grand piano.

Her grunts hit high C. Her grunts are so high-pitched they fall somewhere between the howl of a coyote and the sound a cat makes when it gets its tail caught in the screen door. These grunts can make your scalp prickle if you’re the one on the other side of the net.

Now, a grunt coming out of a Hulk Hogan is one thing. But this grunt comes out of a 115-pound, blue-eyed blonde who looks as if she should be attending a soph hop somewhere.

Lots of players have two-handed backhands. Monica has a two-handed forehand. But she backs it up with this full-voice grunt that she thinks makes her shot harder.

It’s for sure it makes it louder. You know Monica is on her game when center court sounds like feeding time at the zoo. It could haunt a house.

Jimmy Connors used to grunt forcefully when he was on set point. But Monica makes Jimmy sound as if he was only clearing his throat. Monica’s grunts come from the heart and reach decibels operatic tenors only hope for.

Grunts have not historically been thought of as necessary to a solid hit. I mean, no one knows if Babe Ruth grunted. No one ever heard Joe Louis grunt. But Monica’s grunts are almost a bellow. To Monica, the grunt is as important to her game as the lob or the drop volley.

Helen Wills probably never grunted in her life. Nice girls didn’t grunt in those days. They didn’t scowl. They wore skirts and stockings and visors and got unladylike only when the score reached deuce or they had to scramble to return a serve.

Tennis may be the only game in which the women’s version is as popular as--not to say more than--the men’s. The cigarette company that sponsors the tournament down here this week at Bono’s Racquet Club has the slogan “You’ve come a long way, baby.” But, in women’s tennis, the facts are they didn’t have a long way to go.

As far back as the turn of the century, the women’s game was the equal of the men’s. May Bundy was as big a star as any man who played the game. Helen Wills, Suzanne Lenglen, Helen Jacobs made bigger headlines than Donald Budge, Fred Perry or Sidney Wood. Billie Jean King, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova sold more tickets in their time than Bjorn Borg, Ilie Nastase or Ivan Lendl or any of the great Australians.

Monica Seles is the latest in the line of female tennis players who look as if they should be arriving by tricycle but they scatter the competition. Barely 17, Monica had already made a million dollars on court by the time she was barely 16 1/2.

She burst on the scene out of that recent incubator of tennis champions--Central Europe. Of Hungarian descent, she is Yugoslav by birth and Floridian by residence. She learned to play tennis because her father, a cartoonist, used to put stuffed toys in the corners of the court for her to practice her passing shots, and he used to decorate the tennis balls with characters from Tom and Jerry cartoons.

“But I really wanted to learn to play because my brother, Zoltan, used to come home with these trophies and I wanted them for my dresser.”

A leggy blonde with the indefatigable energy of the teen-ager everywhere, Monica endured the skepticism of teachers who looked dubiously at her two-handed style from both sides of the court. “She’ll never get enough power that way,” they predicted.

They reckoned without the grunt. Monica disagrees anyway. “You have more control of the racquet, you can hide the shots better and it increases stamina.”

As if to underscore the last point, Monica won the first five-set battle in women’s tennis in 89 years when she bested Gabriela Sabatini, 6-4, 5-7, 3-6, 6-4, 6-2, to win the Virginia Slims Championships in New York last November.

But it is her grunts that will carry Monica Seles to her fame. She has huffed her way through two major championships this past year--the French Open and the Australian. She beat Steffi Graf, no less, to win the French Open (Seles had already beaten her to win the Italian Open), and she defeated Martina Navratilova three consecutive times last year. If she beats her again this week here to win the Virginia Slims of Palm Springs, she makes No. 1 in the world on the computer rankings. “I feel I will deserve it,” Monica insists. “I have come to feel I belong on the court with these champions. I would find myself losing to them by only a point or two over three sets, and felt I could make those up--and I did.”

She hopes to improve her serve--the only shot she doesn’t use two hands on. But the major part of her game is in fine midseason form. Her grunt has never been better. It’s ready for Wimbledon right now. If she wins there, kids with tennis racquets all over the world will be practicing, not their ground strokes, but their grunts. If your tennis is weak, don’t despair. Work on your grunt.