Newport, Rhode Island. 2016. And yes – I know how this sounds. One trip, one weekend, and somehow the stories keep coming. Marat Safin writing his Hall of Fame speech outside my hotel. Andy Roddick on the grass courts. And now this.
I promise I’m not making any of it up. That’s just what Newport does during induction weekend. Reality becomes slightly cinematic and you just try to keep up.
As I write this, Roger Federer’s own Hall of Fame induction looms on the horizon. I already know there will be tears – his, mine, everyone’s – as he speaks about his love for the sport and the people who shaped him. But that’s a story for another day.
This one is about Monica Seles.
I had first encountered her earlier that day. She’d visited our lounge, and I’d walked her through the tennis data work we were doing at Infosys – the ambitious project we’d begun with big data for the ATP. She was engaged, curious, warm. The kind of person who makes you feel like what you’re saying genuinely interests her.
So when that evening arrived – a cocktail dinner with clients, design thinking workshops wrapped up, the Hall of Fame ceremony still humming in the air – and we were told Monica Seles would be joining our table, I felt something between excitement and quiet terror.
My then US marketing head and several clients around the table had a quiet conversation and reached a unanimous verdict: I should sit next to her. Being the most passionate tennis person at the table, they felt I was best placed to hold the conversation.
I was deeply honoured. I was also deeply nervous.
I sat down and tried to mentally catalogue everything I knew – her life, her career, her comeback, the questions worth asking and the ones worth leaving alone. The morning conversation helped. At least we weren’t starting cold.
She arrived in a charming red dress, greeted everyone at the table with a warm smile, and immediately made the table feel smaller in the best possible way. Easier. More human.
The evening unfolded beautifully. Speeches were made celebrating the inductees -Marat Safin, Amélie Mauresmo – with the wonderfully eloquent Vijay Amritraj hosting proceedings with the grace only he can bring to a room. The kind of evening where you keep thinking, I need to remember every detail of this.
With Monica, the conversation flowed more naturally than I had any right to expect. I told her about what Infosys was building for tennis – the vision, the data, the ambition behind it. I dropped in a few tennis statistics I’d recently discovered that I thought might surprise her. She listened, responded, pushed back gently in the way intelligent people do.
We talked about her life. Her career. Her remarkable comeback -from the stabbing incident that derailed what might have been the most dominant run in women’s tennis history, back to the court, back to competing, back to herself. The resilience required for that is almost incomprehensible.
And then somehow -the way dinner conversations do -we ended up talking about music.
I told her I’d grown up listening to a lot of American music. CCR. The classics. She talked about her love for Cliff Richard.
Monica Seles. Nine Grand Slams.
I had the pleasure of meeting Monica again seven years later at an Infosys event. She was exactly the same – warm, grounded, completely herself.
She made it easy at the dinner at Newport. That’s the thing about her. She always makes it easy.
There is, I should tell you, one more story from that evening. Something that happened that I haven’t written here. A secret that belongs to Newport 2016 and will stay there – until I meet any of you in person.
Same side of the net.