Now Hear This: Seles Pulls Upset

Monica Seles pulled off the upset of the tennis tournament here Friday in the Acura Classic, and she did it by turning up her game and the volume.

Seles, the oft-injured 27-year-old veteran, who has won nine grand slam events but none since the 1996 Australian Open, clicked off an impressive 6-3, 6-3 quarterfinal shocker over the current hottest player on the women’s tour, Jennifer Capriati. Seles, seeded seventh, had won eight of their 12 matches coming into the match, but it was third-seeded Capriati, with her No. 2 world ranking and her two Grand Slam tournament titles this year at the Australian and French, who was expected to waltz through this one.

In fact, with Seles returning from a foot injury that sidelined her for five months before last week’s event at Stanford, Capriati’s game plan was obvious: Get a spot in today’s semifinals with a day of grunt work.

Little did she know. Little did anybody know that the aftermath of this fairly routine match, upset or not, would turn weird.

Capriati, it was soon learned, was upset by the grunting of Seles during the match, so much so that she said she complained to the chair umpire about it.

“She was the loudest she has ever been,” Capriati said. “It made it very difficult out there to play. I know that everybody grunts. I grunt. But I absolutely don’t scream when I hit the ball.”

Capriati tried to go out of her way to say that Seles had played an excellent match and tried her best to not use Seles’ grunting as a direct excuse for losing, but it certainly added up to a major issue when she spent 90% of her news conference talking about it, frequently without prompting.

“I didn’t say anything to Monica out on the court,” Capriati admitted, “but my mom said afterward that’s what I should have done. I figure that’s what the judges are there for.”

Capriati said that, as far as she knew, no official took any action at all on her complaint.

For Seles, the grunting issue is an old one. Years ago, when she was winning everything she entered and was ranked No. 1, much was written about it. But since she has slid a bit down in the rankings and out of the spotlight, so too the debate about her decibels has declined.

Friday, when asked about Capriati’s statements, Seles took the high road.

“As I am sure everyone knows from my personality and style of play, I would never do anything deliberately to distract my opponent,” she said. “I changed nothing. I believe I have nothing to defend.”

Seles also said she considered Capriati a friend and was sorry if she thought she had done anything to purposely upset her.

So, during a day session in which second-seeded Venus Williams and fourth-seeded Lindsay Davenport also advanced to the semifinals, the subject at hand was not as much tennis as it was noise, or “decimals,” as Capriati called them.

Williams took out an overmatched Nathalie Tauziat of France, 6-2, 6-2, and will play Davenport in a semifinal tonight. Davenport, breezing along with a set and a service break up in the second set, had to dig hard all the way to the finish line in a 6-2, 5-7, 7-6 (5) dogfight over Sandrine Testud of France that took 2 hours 18 minutes and ended with Testud’s ground stroke missing the baseline by perhaps an inch.

In the day semifinal, Seles will play top-seeded Martina Hingis, who was a 6-3, 6-4 winner over Ai Sugiyama.

Hingis joined Davenport, Williams and Tauziat in commenting on Grunt Gate.

“Sometimes it’s a problem,” Hingis said, “if there is a really big grunt and behind it the ball is barely coming over the net. But otherwise, does it bother me? Probably no. My record is usually winning.”

In fact Hingis has a 12-2 record against Seles and hasn’t lost to her since 1998.

Said Davenport: “I never thought I lost a match because of somebody’s grunting.”

Said Williams: “I don’t hear any grunting out there. I just look at the ball. I’m playing the ball. It’s really not an issue. It’s not in the rule book.”

And said Tauziat: “Seles has a right to grunt, and Capriati has the right to complain about it.”

Davenport may have had the best summary.

“It didn’t seem like the match was that close for it to make a difference anyway,” she said.

Perhaps the real measure of Seles’ performance against Capriati was that she broke Capriati’s serve three times in a row, at love. . . . After Seles won, the camera operators swooped in. One of them, wearing a photo vest just like the pros and straining for the best angle shot of Seles, was a man named Richard Williams, whose daughters also play quite well. . . . Testud’s frustration over her three-set defeat to Davenport was intensified by the fact that she led in the third-set tiebreaker, 4-1. . . . The fund total raised at the Thursday night Andrea Jaeger dinner was adjusted Friday to $206,370. The organizers’ original figure of $232,000 had factored in twice a large donation from San Diego Padre owner John Moores. The total was still by far the largest raised in the five years of the event.

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Featured Matches

1 P.M.

* Martina Hingis vs. Monica Seles

7 P.M.

* Venus Williams vs. Lindsay Davenport