Seles Opens Up About Her Weight Battle

The food warden was stationed in the room by the kitchen to block her off from any late-night tip-toeing toward the fridge. On the road, a manager was sent into her hotel room to empty out the mini-bar. Room service was notified that food was not to be delivered to her room, no matter what she ordered.



And once she ordered a salad on a romantic date in Italy, and the guy she was with grabbed the olive oil and slid it toward him. He had been warned.

Monica Seles was not to be trusted. Could not be trusted. You might know her as the former tennis great with the loud grunting. You probably remember that during a match in Germany when she was 19, a deranged Steffi Graf fan stabbed her in the back between her shoulder blades

But Seles is letting people into another side of her life. The stabbing, followed by her father's long, but lost battle with cancer, dropped her into a depression that led to years fighting binge-eating, weight gain and serious body-image issues.

At night, when the trainers would go home -- before the food warden arrived -- Seles might find herself at a convenience store, ballcap pulled low, loading up a cart with potato chips, Oreos, pretzels.

Exactly how much would you eat in one sitting?

"Obviously a lot,'' she said Monday. "I played and trained five, six hours a day and I was 35 pounds overweight. Of course, I would look at myself in the mirror and I knew the truth. But I read the articles and it would be very hurtful, some of the stuff they would say about me. People would say 'You're fat,' and it was like, 'I know that, sir. Trust me.' ''

Seles details it in her book, "Getting a Grip. On My Body, My Mind, My Self,'' due out Tuesday. When I told her I had read the book and liked it, she said, "That's good to hear from a man.''

Yes, this book is going to speak to women, especially women who have struggled with diets. It was only after Seles finally quit tennis, quit having expert trainers and nutritionists around, that she lost all the weight. Her ideal playing weight, she said, was in the mid-130s, but she reached 174. She writes about going on a vacations to beaches with friends, checking the rear view in a mirror before leaving her room, and then never taking off a cover-up or getting in the water.

And there was the time her Japanese sponsor took her to a sumo wrestling match. Afterward, she asked a wrestler about his diet and found it eerily familiar. She wrote about leaving dates early so she could run home to binge without her boyfriend seeing.

And her 21st birthday?

"I rang in the big birthday sitting on the couch with a bag of peanut-butter-filled pretzels,'' she wrote in the book. "I turned off my phone so nobody could reach me and I watched television until I fell asleep. I didn't feel sorry for myself; in fact, I didn't feel anything at all.''

Now at 35, Seles is back at her playing weight, and wore skimpy dresses on "Dancing With the Stars." After an early exit, which she attributes to having two left feet, Seles said that Playboy Magazine asked if she would be interested in a pictorial. She declined.



Seles said that her life had been out of balance, and when she started taking chances and experiencing things -- she went bungee jumping and skydiving and, of course, to "Dancing With the Stars" -- that did more than any diet.

So this is more than a book about sports, but it also explains to tennis fans how that stabbing all-but wiped out her entire career. Why did it take more than two years to come back? Traumatic and painful, of course. But that's an awfully long time. And she came back too heavy for competitive tennis.

To fess up: At the time, I thought she had lost her willingness to work.

Wrong.

Seles said Monday that if it had been about physical recovery only, it would have taken her about nine months to get her game fully back. But her father got sick, and then the man who stabbed her was sentenced only to two years probation. At the time, Seles couldn't even believe they completed the tournament without her. And she watched for months and the stabber got his way and Graf held up trophy after trophy.

Seles turned to food for comfort.

"Nobody had gone through what I had gone through,'' she said. "There was not someone I could call up and say, 'How was it getting stabbed?' How it affected me was I came back 20 pounds heavier.

"I had a nine-year battle with food. I was trying to numb my feelings.''

She says the stabbing was the beginning of a lack of balance in her life, but I wonder. As a young teenager, she was sent from her home in Yugoslavia to Nick Bollettieri's tennis academy in Florida. His schedule was tough, waking up at 6 and playing tennis or going to school every minute of the day. No TV, no phone. At one point, she called her parents wanting to come home. Instead, they moved to Florida.

That doesn't seem like a life in balance for a teenager. But Seles said that was something she wanted to do, that in tennis, you have to act as a professional by 14, 15, and "every other kid at the academy had the same schedule.''

Maybe that's a problem.

But while Seles was gone, the field did not advance much, other than adding a little more power, and, unfortunately for Seles' psyche, a lot of sex appeal. She was paired up with Anna Kournikova to play doubles once, and Kournikova complained about having to use hotel shampoo.

Seles said her hair Kournikova looked as if she had just come out of a salon, while her own hair looked, "poodle-like."

But Seles came back and won her ninth major title, the Australian Open.

And while tennis fans saw that as a touching comeback, she was embarrassed about how she looked. Seles didn't win another major, but managed to stay in the top 10 and she fought, and lost, the battle over her weight. She said she would do all the work for hours every day, and then go home and binge for weeks at a time. She still had the game to contend for majors, but the extra weight made her too slow.

She wasn't fooling her trainers and coaches, either, who saw the lack of results. I called one once a few years ago, and all he would say is "No comment.''

She said she felt, too, that if she could lose the weight she could win big again. "Of course.'' But she couldn't do it, and that was part of the torture. Nine years, she said, she spent mostly in depression.

She makes her tale funny in the book, somehow, telling of how a binge forced her to have a bridesmaid's dress let out twice in nine days. She said she intentionally put a "fat picture'' of herself in the book, but when I pointed out that her legs looked muscular in the picture, she said, "You're not seeing my stomach. I was becoming very brilliant at hiding it.''

And the rigid diets and exercise programs just meant more rigidity in her life, which was only making things worse.

"Some very powerful women, say Oprah Winfrey, talk about eating issues,'' Seles said. "People say, 'How could simple things like food control you?' Well, it did.

"I read every single diet book looking for an answer for me. The answer was held by me, Monica.''

Eventually, a foot injury forced her to sit out, and she began to explore things other than tennis and diet. She spent days putting thousands of pictures her father and taken and putting them into albums, putting her life in order.

Now, she's 137 pounds and happy, she said. She plays tennis when she feels like, which might mean three times this month, or zero. She eats a balanced diet, and best of all ...

No more food warden.