Dubai is raging and everyone is wondering what’s happening with Federer and we’ll get back to that, but I wanted to post this guest commentary on my column about Monica Seles. Michael Klarner, who lives in Germany, is our writer and he has a background in history as well as an appreciation for tennis history. I think you’ll enjoy his comments. You can also see his unique video diary here.

My thoughts broke out of me because one finds all these speculations about the rivalry of Graf and Seles so often… What would have been if….

It’s nice to speculate but it’s amazing that these people very often think so statistically. They kind of freeze the three years when Seles dominated and project these circumstances towards an imagined future. This way, Seles becomes a pure ideal projection. But in my experience that’s not how real life goes.

I am really passionate about tennis as a sport. I also started my passion with being a fan of some specific players. Then my perspective shifted towards tennis in a historical perspective… towards a longer perspective – besides the passion for the current moment. My interest shifted also towards all these great players we never saw playing (such as Suzanne Lenglen, Helen Wills Moody and many others) who were also considered as being the greatest ever (in their period).

I am a historian by profession and a historian learns that we have to understand specific phenomena of a specific period by the framing conditions. It’s difficult to compare and to speculate because there are always so many additional factors.

In the case of the Seles-adoration, very often all the other factors are excluded – even if these factors are so obvious! For example, Seles had some great periods in her second career but she was injured almost permanently. I remember that some tennis experts predicted very early that Seles’ double handed game could result in a lot of injuries and physical burn out. Why? They argued that the double-double handed player always had to go one additional step on both sides of the court. This worked well with Graf because Graf could not make the game fast on her backhand side. But it was a disadvantage with other players playing the same style but one handed.

In my opinion, this was also one of the reasons why Seles did not play that successfully on the young hard hitters. These players were strong on both sides and they had to go one step less in order to cover the court.
People are so quick in stating this or that player would have been the best ever. They see them playing a specific moment and they are passionate about what these players brought to the game. I was always asking myself: How can they do this if they never saw the great champions of the past? Most of them even don’t even know their names. So I asked myself: how can someone compare players of distinct periods by only counting what they won, by comparing only statistics?

If one reads the reports about the time when Suzanne Lenglen and Helen Wills Moody met, one will discover one of the greatest rivalries in sports history!

Moreover, I don’t like the fact that people forget so easily how dominant Graf had been from 1988-1991. Nina writes in her column that Seles dominated as Federer did today. But Graf did even more so! I remember when Graf came up, she broke into the circuit like an orca. The other players were afraid of Graf’s forehand and journalists counted her dominance by the minutes she needed to win a match. In 1988 and 1989, Graf lost only three and two matches all year. Not to mention, she won a Golden Slam – and lost only two sets in 4 Majors.

Not only Seles but also Graf revolutionized the game. If one has a look at the Wimbledon matches between Navratilova and Graf in 1988 (look on youtube), one will see a quality which we don’t see even today. At this time, Graf hit an amazing topspin backhand – because she had to! She went to the net – because she had to!

In the longer perspective, we find the real interesting and dramatic things: how rivalries change the players and their way of playing. How great champions are challenged and forced to adapt. The best example is the competition between Evert and Navratilova. Both say that this rivalry forced them to reach new levels of their game.

I personally think that this is the saddest part of the Seles-Graf story. As Pam Shriver put it: the public lost the rivalry of a period. And neither player was forced to improve and to reach the best that they would have been able to give to the game.

I believe that the all-time-greatest players (Seles is one of them) would have been able to succeed in all periods and under all possible conditions because they had the talent and the willpower to adapt their game to each possible challenge.