TMS - THE ERICSSON OPEN

March 24, 2000

Monica Seles

WTA: Questions for Monica.

MONICA SELES: Their serves?

MONICA SELES: It's a very windy tournament, a lot windier than it was last year. The court is playing pretty fair. I think the speed is pretty good. That should help. We'll see my next match. She's a good server. It will be a good test.

MONICA SELES: I try to have someone serve bigger serves pretty much so I get the better timing.

MONICA SELES: I think definitely women's tennis has gotten so much coverage besides what's happening on the tennis court. I think that's great. It attracted so many fans and people who usually would not read tennis magazines, but would read People, magazines like that. That's really good because tennis players are more widely known.

MONICA SELES: Definitely. There's such a variety of different personalities, game styles. Before you used to have one or two. There was a point where you had four or five. But for a number of years, you had one or two. You have different athletes covering different demographics right now.

MONICA SELES: Hopefully that won't be the most important part of it, but I think it's human nature. It's why People and some other magazines have a high circulation. That's what people are interested in.

MONICA SELES: No, no.

MONICA SELES: I think for the top players, you always were doing well financially, if you compare it to 1990s or early '90s. It was just that one or two players were doing financially well, which I think now you probably have four or five players who are doing well off-court financially, not just on court. Definitely the prize money has grown. It has not grown as much as I think all the players would like, that's for sure. If you look at what you won in '95 compared to what you won this year, it's not a huge difference. That's one thing we had in our council meeting two days about. But I think it's going in the right direction. That's a good thing.

MONICA SELES: I think so, definitely. There seems to be more for more players. Before I think if you were not 1 or 2 in the world, there was not too many opportunities off-court. Now there seems to be four or five players who are doing much better earning-wise off-court than on-court.

MONICA SELES: In terms of off-court earnings?

MONICA SELES: They're pretty close to where they are, I think. They've gone up, but inflation has gone up. If you compare dollar for dollar, it's pretty close to what they're paying right now. But it's great to see when you see women athletes getting on the cover of Forbes magazine. I think that's just fantastic. It doesn't happen too often. Jennifer and I got on it, Anna now. I think that's just great. I just hope it won't put the emphasis on young girls starting that, "Gee, I want to play tennis because I'm going to make all these millions of dollars." It still should be for the love of the sport. I really hope other sports would have that opportunity as tennis players have.

MONICA SELES: Definitely. But, I mean, it's still the top five players, Martina, Lindsay, the Williams sisters, Anna. Lindsay I wouldn't even put in that group. She's not doing that much off-court stuff to publicize herself. It's really the other four players who seem to do a lot of things. They seem to enjoy it. They're doing well.

MONICA SELES: I don't think the tour pushes them. I think it's purely the players.