Veteran Seles Reaches Back for Something Extra

Monica Seles has six more years of experience, six more Grand Slam tennis titles and roughly $6 million more in prize money than her opponent in today’s Acura Classic final at La Costa.

But if you are a close follower of women’s tennis, you could easily find a half-dozen reasons why Venus Williams will be the favorite to repeat as champion here.

It is impressive that Seles, now a 27-year-old veteran, took out the Nos. 1 and 2 players in the world on successive days here, following her straight-set rout of Jennifer Capriati on Friday with a similar mugging of No. 1 Martina Hingis in Saturday’s day semifinal. Her 6-3, 6-4 out-muscling of Hingis featured 31 winners and took an hour and eight minutes, just a few minutes more than it took her to beat up on Capriati the day before.

Her one-two punchout of the WTA’s one-two players also had lots of people talking here about the rebirth of the old Seles, the one who used to dominate in the early ‘90s, who won nine Grand Slam event titles--including the Australian, French and U.S. Opens in both ’91 and ‘92--and who dominated tennis in those days with Steffi Graf.

The feisty groundstrokes, bombing into the corners with an explosive quality nearly as noticeable as the combination screech/grunt preceding them, were vintage Seles. So were the bizarre angles that she creates with her two-handed attack from both sides, an attack that, when it is working on all cylinders as it has been here this week, makes both opponent and fan lose track of which side is the forehand and which the backhand.

“I’m keeping the level of my game high here,” she said Saturday.

Which meant that the grunts and the groundstrokes were in sync.

But the shots that frequently drove Graf crazy and probably contributed to driving the likes of Chris Evert into retirement may not have the same impact on one of the leaders of the new generation of women’s tennis stars, namely Venus Williams.

Williams got into her second straight Acura final opposite Seles by doing some blasting of her own in a 6-2, 7-5 victory over Lindsay Davenport. Williams, 21, and the reigning Wimbledon champion to go with her Wimbledon and U.S. titles last year, cranked out 27 winners of her own and eventually outdid the powerful Davenport from the baseline.

Also, significantly, she served six aces and, in a first set in which she was almost untouchable, cranked one of 117 and another of 121 past Davenport.

And there, perhaps, lies the key for those with thoughts about today’s final.

Davenport, who serves big herself and who served Seles off the court in a straight-setter last week at the tournament in the Bay Area, said Saturday night, as diplomatically as she could, “Monica is playing great, but it will be interesting tomorrow to see how she returns serve.”

The translation is that Seles, as wonderful a player as she has been and still is, is now facing an entirely new dimension of huge serving players the likes of Davenport and the Williams sisters, whose high-speed, big-kicking offerings are especially difficult for somebody who severely limits her reach by playing two-handed on both sides.

Williams was much less specific, as usual, in her assessment of her final.

“Monica is playing very well,” she said. “She is hitting the ball with a good attitude, kind of all or nothing, going for it. She wants to win another Grand Slam, but hopefully, I can hold her off.”

A statistical look at what Seles faced as she awaited Saturday night’s Davenport-Williams outcome may be revealing: Seles is 0-5 against Williams, 2-8 against Davenport, and has lost the last 13 matches she has played against the two. You have to go back to Manhattan Beach in 1997 to find a Seles win over Davenport.

Davenport indirectly also pointed to another aspect of today’s final, when, in comparing herself to Williams, said that “Venus is the better athlete.” Seles, a marvelous athlete in her own right, probably would finish behind Williams in a similar comparison.

Seles may be giving away only six years, but as she herself admits freely, she is old in terms of tennis years. She started playing in 1988, at 15, and she has been through a great deal in her career, including the terrifying stabbing incident in Germany in 1993 that affected her deeply enough to keep her off the tour for 2 1/2 years.

Williams was asked about the old Seles, about her memories of those years when Seles beat just about everybody and won just about everything.

“Oh, yes, I remember,” Williams said. “I was just a little girl back then, watching on TV.”

Perhaps time will roll back today. Perhaps the likely heavy fan support for a Seles win and a flashback to the good old days will push her to a win. Perhaps all that experience and all those years of know-how will win out against 120-mph serves and the lightning-fast 6-foot-1 opponent who was once a little girl, just watching on TV.

Perhaps.

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Today’s Final

What: Monica Seles vs. Venus Williams for the championship of the Acura Classic in Carlsbad.

TV: Channels 11, 6, at noon.