Seles Wins, but Cuts Off Talk of Slam

She is older, taller, her hair is shorter and her racket is different than the last time she was here, but there are two things about Monica Seles that have remained the same.

She is still loud and she still knows how to win the French Open. Seles, who won her first Grand Slam title last year at Roland Garros at 16, grunted, groaned and rolled past Arantxa Sanchez Vicario, 6-3, 6-4, Saturday to claim a second French Open championship.

Seles’ third Grand Slam title--she also won the Australian Open in January--not only made sure she would keep her No. 1 ranking, but also put her halfway to a possible Grand Slam with Wimbledon and the U.S. Open to come.

But Seles can’t see it happening.

“I think it’s impossible for me to do this year,” Seles said.

And for a while Saturday, it looked as if Seles’ chance of successfully defending her title were going to disappear as quickly as her long hair, which was shorn last month in what seemed to be a controversial move.

For the past two weeks, Seles has answered questions about her new short hair, why she cut it, why it is so short and whether she can run faster now.

Certainly she is as noisy as ever. When Seles grunts as she pounds out ground strokes, she still sounds like a car with carburetor problems. So when Seles came back from 1-4 to serve for the match at 5-4, the decibel level was raised considerably.

Seles won the first two points, then looked down at her hands.

“They were shaking,” she said. “If it’s 5-all, the match is back, anything can happen.”

As it turned out, the 10th game of the second set was like a match in itself.

It lasted 12 minutes and went to deuce seven times. Sanchez Vicario held four break points to even the match at 5-5 and stared down three match points before finally knocking a backhand into the net to end it.

Seles threw her racket high into the air and put a hand to her head. Sanchez Vicario bent over from the waist and rested her arms on her knees.

Later, she knew she had missed her best opportunity. “If I win the last game, everything will change,” said Sanchez Vicario, who was probably right.

Seles said she wasn’t particularly looking forward to dropping her serve at that particular moment.

“I mean, it was almost 5-all and starting all over again,” she said. “We both missed balls we didn’t miss the whole match because of the tightness.”

When Seles made her first French Open appearance in 1989, she was 15 years old, five inches shorter at 5 feet 5 and lost to Steffi Graf in the semifinals. But even then, Seles believed that Roland Garros would be a great place for her some day.

“I always felt the first time I had a chance to win it,” she said. “Then I came back the next year and I did win.

“I always felt that at the French Open, I always play great tennis. Not just what people say you can do, what you do yourself. When you actually do it, you gain so much confidence.”

However, such confidence does not extend to Wimbledon, although Seles indicated she is contemplating a major change in style to try to change her luck on grass.

Seles lost in the fourth round of Wimbledon in 1989 and in the quarterfinals last year.

“I don’t want to stay all my life on the baseline,” Seles said. “I really want to volley and come to the net. I just got to cut the cake somewhere and this is it for me.”

It is a decision Seles does not take lightly and when she actually makes it, the change will be duly noted. Just don’t expect her to stop grunting.

French Open Notes

John Fitzgerald and Anders Jarryd won the men’s doubles title with a 6-0, 7-6 (7-2) victory over Rick Leach and Jim Pugh. Fitzgerald ended the match in the tiebreaker with a winner off Pugh’s forehead. “I was ducking,” Pugh said. “I just couldn’t get out of the way.” Leach and Pugh, who had never advanced further than the third round of the French Open, said they never got on track in the best-of-three-set final, a format changed from best-of-five two years ago, the year they lost in the first round. “It was all new to us,” Leach said. Next for Leach and Pugh, the defending Wimbledon doubles champions, is Davis Cup next weekend against Spain on grass in Newport, R.I. “If we can do so well on our worst surface, I think we’ll play really well on our best,” Leach said.