It’s not a Seles market anymore

“I had the momentum,” Seles said, “and I let it go.”

The momentum in her career is gone, too, for reasons that warrant only sympathy.

Once a gushy chatterbox, Seles now speaks in clipped sentences with a vacant, sorrowful stare. Her father has stomach cancer, complicating her psychological recovery from the knife attack that sidelined her for nearly two and a half years.

“It’s a transition,” she said. “Five years from now may be different. I just always try to be in the present and hopefully try to do some things that can help for the future.”

At Wimbledon she was grim and tense, appearing on the verge of tears during one news conference when the questions turned personal. The topic of tennis was awkward, too.

She has become slow-footed and, by her own admission, overweight. Her thighs were the subject of unflattering newspaper photos each day until the London tabloids turned their attention to evander Holyfield’s ear.

Wimbledon is the lone Grand Slam that Seles has yet to win, and her questionable condition — mentally and physically — suggested she had little chance for a breakthrough during this fortnight.

Seles’ ranking has slipped to No 4 in the nine months since her last tournament title, and the only surprise about her elimination was that it came against Testud, the sort of player she used to beat with barely a grunt.Seles won the first seven games, then began to struggle. Still, she was just two points from the match in the third set at 5-2, 30-30, and was serving at 5-3, 0-15 when umpire Jane Harvey overruled a line call to give Testud a point.

“No way,” Seles shouted. “You can’t overdo that ” The overrule stood.“It didn’t come at a great time,” Seles said, “but I still shouldn’t have let it bother me that much. I was mumbling to myself a little bit in that game and the next game, too.”

Controversy aside, Seles has developed a tendency to squander leads. Her nerve — and backhand — failed her in key moments against Testud.

With match point at 6-5, Seles sent an easy shot long, and by the final game, the winner of nine Grand Slams was biting her nails. She stood and watched Testud fire an ace on the final point, leaving Mary Joe Fernandez as the only American in the women’s field.

Seles became the seventh seeded woman to lose in two days. No 11 Fernandez scored a straight-set win on Monday, as did Jana Novotna, Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario and Mary Pierce.

In five appearances at Wimbledon, Seles has reached the semi-finals only once, losing the 1992 final to Steffi Graf. But she still claims to believe she can win a Wimbledon title.

“I don’t think I would be out there if that wasn’t the case,” she said. “I would love it if i could win it. Gosh. I hopefully have a few more years to try at it.”

Such rivals as top-ranked Martina Hingis discount Seles’ current vulnerability and insist that she remains dangerous on any surface.“Monica is always going to be a hard player,” said Hingis, who beat Seles in the semis at the French Open. “It doesn’t matter where you meet her.”But for Seles, the tennis court has become merely a refuge. She probably won’t recapture her former brilliance, and that’s the least of her problems.