Injuries in tandem with fits of self-destructive behavior cut short
Martina Hingis' career twice.

It left tennis fans lamenting what the one-time Swiss miss whiz, a
Wimbledon champion at 16 and five-time Grand Slam winner before she
had turned 20, might have accomplished on the court with a better game
plan for her life.

Hingis was an elegant, crafty player, the likes of which we have
rarely seen for almost a generation.

By the time Hingis arrived on the scene, the vanguard of the modern
power game, Monica Seles, had redefined how women played. The
Serbian-born Seles tried to break tennis balls in two when she hit
them, and the effort produced indelicate sounds.

But her grip-it-and-grunt style worked magnificently. A first-time
tour winner in Houston at 15, she won the French Open at 16, then
collected seven more major titles in less than three years, a reign of
Roger Federer-esque proportions.

But now, Seles is officially a former player as well, ending nearly
four years in limbo Thursday with the long inevitable announcement of
her retirement.

Hingis quit for good last fall, after a modestly successful two-year
comeback, because of a failed drug test. The substance in question,
cocaine, which she insists she did not take, is intended to let one
party harder, not play tennis better. Seles quit because a chronic
foot problem left her too immobile to battle toe-to-toe with the
current bashers, a genre she spawned.

One feels sad for Hingis — but very, very sorry for Seles, even if she
always has overcome the urge to do likewise.

Seles escaped the former Yugoslavia with her family before the country
blew apart, tumbling into the Amerian dream. But a deranged German
"fan," infatuated with Steffi Graf and angry that Seles had passed her
in the rankings, took it all away with a single jab of a knife during
a changeover in Hamburg in 1993.

The wound was largely superficial. But the psychological gash stopped
Seles dead in her tracks. She couldn't make herself walk back onto a
court for two years and, when she did return, she wasn't the same
player she had been, notwithstanding a stirring, emotional run to the
U.S. Open final — against Graf — in 1995.

Graf beat her that day, adding to what became a prodigious Open
era-record 22 major championships, six were won with Seles on the
sidelines.

Had the attack never happened, Martina Navratilova surmises that she,
Chris Evert, Graf and Seles would have likely ended up with similar
totals. Navratilova and Evert won 18.

Seles claimed her ninth and last Slam in the Australian Open in 1996.
By the time Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario beat her for the 1998 French Open
title, she was a player in decline. She got no further than the semis
in any of her last 17 Slams. In the final one, on her favorite surface
at the 2003 French Open, she was beaten in the first round.

But that's all just statistical babble. What makes Seles such a
sympathetic figure is how she never lost her equanimity. As for
whatever bitterness she felt — few athletes have been more righteously
entitled to same — it rarely surfaced in public.

A career-altering moment, in the form of a criminal act, couldn't
break her spirit or harden her mind.

The Monica Seles who visited Houston for the River Oaks exhibition
against Navratilova last spring was infinitely more mature and
well-spoken than the bubbly, often babbling adolescent who knocked off
Evert at Westside in 1989, but the person inside hadn't changed a bit.

While conceding her "terrible luck," Seles said, "I've always tried to
roll with it and stay positive." Entering her mid-30s, she insisted,
"life is good, very good. I have lots of piece of mind. I love tennis
to the extreme. I'll always play."

That day she seemed to honestly believe there was a place for her on
the Sony Ericsson Tour, if she could just get the foot strong again.
It didn't happen, and that's that.

Because she last played so long ago, Seles is easy to forget. But
don't. To keep her remarkable résumé in perspective, consider this:
Seles won as many major championships as a teenager as any of the
active women have in their careers.