WHAT COLOUR cheongsam would Anna Kournikova or Serena Williams have chosen if they'd been shopping in Shanghai Tang this week? Neither superstar is in town for the Hong Kong Ladies Challenge, which starts today at Victoria Park, but one of tennis' best-loved stars is, and she chose an elegant but understated black sheath.
For Monica Seles is a rare thing in women's tennis - a player who lets her racket and her record do the talking. Not for her the hot pink cheongsam, the Serena Williams catsuit, or the Martina Hingis long sleeve/short sleeve look. Though she appreciates the importance of marketing in sport, and hasn't a bad word to say about the aforementioned trio of starlets or their headline-hunting outfits, Seles simply doesn't need to draw attention to herself to win over the media or the fans.
'I mean, it's great,' Seles says. 'It definitely brings a lot of attention, too - what Serena or Anna or Martina wear - and it's great because it transcends the sports pages. You see on the TV ratings that the women are outnumbering the guys and I think right now women are just really great to watch. They're well known around the world.
'Tennis has been marketed so well over the years,' she adds. 'Looking back even to the 1940s or 50s when you had Gussie Moran wearing those panties, I mean, the history of tennis, it's always been very fashionable. Other sports are trying, at least in the States, to promote female athletes, so we'll see how that will go. I think it's important for girls to have more choices besides playing tennis and golf to make a living and a career as an athlete.'
The 29-year-old has been a darling of the tennis world since arriving on the scene in the late 1980s (she made her professional debut at 14). As the only woman who could, and did, challenge German ace Steffi Graf in the early 1990s, she collected three Australian Open titles (1991, 92, 93), two US Open wins (91, 92) and three French Open crowns (90, 91, 92), and held the No 1 slot for two years, all before turning 20.
But then tragedy struck. On April 30, 1993, during a changeover in a quarter-final in Hamburg, Germany, against Magdalena Maleeva (who is also in Hong Kong this week), Seles was stabbed in the back by 38-year-old Guenter Parche, a fanatical Graf fan who wanted to see the then Yugoslav's rival back at No 1.
