Tennis had never seen anyone quite like Monica Seles when she charged onto the
scene 20 years ago. Part beguiling kitten, part snarling she-lynx, Seles was
sweet-tempered off the court and fiercely businesslike on it. With eight Grand
Slam titles to her name at age 19, there was little doubt she would wind up in
the International Tennis Hall of Fame someday.

Then came the 1993 stabbing incident during a changeover in Hamburg, Germany,
that literally cleaved her career into two acts, and the terrible aftershock of
watching her father and original coach waste away with stomach cancer. Seles
walked onto center court for the 1998 French Open championship match a few weeks
after his death wearing black, his ring on a chain around her neck, looking
resolute but humbled, her once cherubic expression shaded with grown-up sorrow.
"I don't think you are the one who deserved to lose today," opponent Arantxa
Sanchez Vicario said afterward.

But Seles did not win that day. Her odyssey from the country then known as
Yugoslavia, via Nick Bollettieri's Florida tennis academy, to the top of the
game -- at a time when teen phenoms were still allowed to take that rocket ride
-- is a storybook tale. The flip side of her journey is a very human and
imperfect one.

Seles played for nine seasons after returning from the stabbing, but she
absorbed other, more subtle losses out of public view, losses of control and
identity. She battled depression that manifested itself in an eating disorder,
painfully documented in a recent book, and said last spring that she had lived,
traveled, loved and competed for years in a persistent "fog." She faded from the
scene after a foot injury forced her offstage and never came back for an encore,
shunning closure for almost five full years. Seles had long self-medicated with
food, but as she slowly shed physical and psychological weight, she had little
appetite to be feted.

Now Seles, 35, has re-emerged, looking and sounding more like the sunny girl
with the lilting voice we fell for all those years ago. With her formal
retirement announcement in February 2008, someday has finally arrived and Seles
is set to be inducted in Newport, R.I., on Saturday. Hall of Famer and close
friend Betsy Nagelsen McCormack will introduce her. It completes a circle: Seles
helped induct Nagelsen McCormack's late husband, IMG founder Mark McCormack,
last year.

No one -- including Seles herself -- can take measure of her accomplishments
without wondering what might have been. Yet while this celebration of her career
might have a wistful undertone, it's also an affirmation of survival,
self-knowledge and personal growth -- qualities that can come hard to the most
driven athletes.

"I have a lot of respect for Monica," said Chris Evert, whom Seles beat to win
her first professional title at age 15. "What a great competitor. I marveled at
how happy she seemed on and off the court, I marveled at the great relationship
she had with her dad. And then with the stabbing and her father's death, her
life turned upside-down.

"She's come out of it with a lot of dignity, learned some hard lessons, but has
had a lot of grace throughout all these episodes. She could have won 10 more
Grand Slam events. I think she got robbed, she got shortchanged in the tennis
department, but it helped her personally. She grew up and found herself and
became a better person because of it."

Billie Jean King knew Seles as an enthusiastic Fed Cup participant who was part
of three championship teams, a naturalized American citizen (in 1994) who took
enormous pleasure in competing for her adopted country when King captained the
team, and later as a World Team Tennis player.

"The power," King said almost reverently of her first impression of Seles, whose
two-fisted shots off both sides were effective but not easily emulated. "She
used to do this thing where she'd stand close to a wall, and start hitting the
ball really hard, switching sides between shots. Whap! Whap! Whap! Whap! Whap!
Whap! It was amazing. I've never seen anything like it. Ask her to do it for you
sometime."

In a recent conference call with reporters, Andre Agassi -- whose wife, Steffi
Graf, was Seles' most formidable peer before the stabbing cruelly aborted what
figured to be a top-shelf rivalry -- reflected on Seles' dual legacy.

"I grew up with Monica," Agassi said. "I've known her since she was probably 10
years old at the [Bollettieri] academy. I always marveled at her game. I
marveled more at her discipline and fighting spirit. Watching her grow up and
becoming one of the best ever is a great journey to go on, from my perspective.

"Really, I think we would have seen much greater things had she not had to
endure what she went through in Hamburg on the court. As a result of that, I
think all players are left with that aftermath. We are all aware of the
exposures out there. I think security across the world [is] tending to those
possibilities more, and in a sense she's made us better and she's added to all
of us in our own little way.

"I know the game pretty darned well, and I would argue that she would be one of
the best of all time had she continued on the path she was. She was disciplined
enough and she was focused enough and she certainly had enough shots to leave
that kind of mark."

The violent act that altered Seles' trajectory had many unforeseen consequences.
One of the more positive ripples was the seemingly unlikely friendship she
forged with an African-American man nearly 50 years her senior, who will be
beaming from the audience in Newport.

Former New York City mayor David Dinkins, a tennis devotee who still plays
several times a week at age 81, wrote Seles a letter following the stabbing, and
later sought her out at a charity event. He became a familiar, vocal presence at
Seles' U.S. Open matches. The two continue to keep in touch and dine together
when schedules allow. "Monica is one of the nicest people I've ever met," said
Dinkins, who teaches part-time at Columbia University. "If you're a tennis fan,
you have to love Monica."

Yet Seles didn't win election to the Hall of Fame on a sympathy vote. Although
she won just one more Grand Slam event after her comeback -- the 1996 Australian
Open -- her credentials speak for themselves: nine Slam titles, 44 other
tournament wins, twice ranked No. 1 at year's end. It's absolutely fine to feel
compassion for her, as long as that never slides into pity. Seles recognizes the
privileges that came with her talent and fame. She considers herself fortunate,
not cursed.

"It's a great way to cap a fantastic career," Seles said of the upcoming
ceremony. "More importantly, I'm just lucky I got to do something I love to do,
and I'm hoping in my second life, as I call it, I can find something that I'm as
passionate about as I was about tennis. It's really that simple for me."

This familiar American ritual of enshrining athletes in a brick-and-mortar
pantheon is usually grounded in stats first and character second. It's true that
Seles' induction has a deeper context, but that's not simply because she was
wounded. It's because she showed the world how lengthy, difficult and ultimately
gratifying the process of healing can be.