The magic of her game, with her extraordinary sense of anticipation with both fundamentals played with two hands, that magic that allowed her to win – still a teenager – eight Grand Slam titles from 1990 to 1993 and to get to the top of the rankings, had disappeared. She had already came close to her ninth Grand Slam title in the final of the US Open played some months earlier and lost in the decisive set against Steffi Graf. Monica Seles had just won her ninth Slam, only few months later having got back to competitions, after the aggression suffered in the spring of ’93 in Hamburg and the forced stop of more than two years. The January of 1996, when in Melbourne it looked like the magic of her game had suddenly came back. But to fans, especially to Monica’s fans, what comes back to mind in this period of the year, even more than that match played in NY, is what happened in the January of some years later. It was the first women’s final that lasted five sets since the 1901 US Open final (that at the time were called US Championships) won by home player Elisabeth Moore. The exhibition in New York is a rematch of the one played between the two players 25 years ago in the same city: the WTA Championship final of 1990 that Seles won in 5 sets (6-4, 5-7, 3-6, 6-4, 6-2). On the occasion of the New York match, Ubitennis went to see where the career of the champion born in former Yugoslavia started, paying homage to an outstanding player that would have probably rewritten women’s tennis history, if fate hadn’t decided otherwise. Monica Seles is back on court : she played in the Madison Square Garden, in an exhibition against her great friend and former rival Gabriela Sabatini.
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