Monica Seles @ monica-seles.com

If you're a working woman, doing tennis for a living, and somebody mentions "headache," you see double -- a vision of the Sisters Williams, perhaps?

Maybe. But not if you're Monica Seles, who hasn't been on the job for the better part of a year, and whose concept of a headache is the real thing: a pain that "makes you think your head will explode. You just have to go to bed, hide in a dark room, and hope it will go away. Days possibly." A migraine.

Stacked up against a migraine, Venus and Serena are minor annoyances, too much salt and pepper perhaps. Not the firestorm-size hurt of a migraine, Seles's unkind sometime companion over half a lifetime.

Seles, recently turned 30, twice the age of the squeaking adolescent who beat Chris Evert in Houston to win the first of her 53 professional singles championships, suddenly finds herself the grande dame of a game largely inhabited by kiddies. And wanting more of it. Also having decided to no longer hide her migraine problem, and feeling, "I may be able to help people with the same awful headaches by talking about it, and how I got help."

Seles is talking over the phone from New York, where she's attending to another physical malady that has kept her away from the white-lined, rectangular office since the French Open last May. Her size 9 1/2 left foot has betrayed her once again, the fifth time a bone within has fractured.

"Yes, I'm going to play again," she says with an energy and joy in her voice that tells you of her romance with tennis. "The MRIs will tell the doctors and me when. I think maybe late spring. Europe. Clay. Maybe the French." There, she was invincible for the years 1990-92, and probably would have kept it up longer if a would-be assassin named Guenther Parche hadn't intervened with a knife at Hamburg 11 years ago.

She was on her way to being the best ever, the youngest to hold so many major titles -- seven of her nine -- by age 18. "I returned [after a 28-month absence], but my game wasn't quite what it had been," she has said. Nevertheless, she's game to keep taking a whack at it if her feet behave.

There were days when she wished her head would behave, when there was no secreting herself in a quiet room, shades down, because she was on court banging balls in her inimitable double-barreled way and it felt like they were resounding off her skull.

Nobody but her parents knew. "You'd never know when the headaches would strike. Just kept playing or practicing. There were times when I was tempted to quit a match. But I'm pretty good at not letting on when something's bothering me."

An understatement. Monica Seles's list of complaints might fill Tom Thumb's thumbnail. She never moaned about the stabbing, a variety of other injuries, the death of her father, the migraines, or her mistreatment at the hands of the Women's Tennis Association, a portrait of disloyalty to one of its greats. Seles had stated that she would never play in Germany again after her German assailant, Parche, suffered no punishment by that country's courts.

Yet the WTA coldly shifted its season-ending championships from New York to Munich in 2001, thus removing a woman who had won the tournament thrice and been a finalist in 2000. A heartless business decision (that flopped). As usually happens in professional sport, dollars and cents outweigh flesh and blood.

Seles says the migraines "went on for ages. I wasn't aware of what they were, and that they could be treated. I just thought they were bad headaches, and I was glad when they went away. But in 1997, I found a doctor who tested me -- a blood test -- and detected the migraines. He didn't cure me, but prescribed a drug, Imitrex, that has made me comfortable. I'm pretty good at telling when they're coming on, and it's simple to take the pill. I've done it on court a lot."

As a spokeswoman for Imitrex, Seles advises migraine sufferers to be tested, "to see if they can be helped. I'd also suggest that they consult a noncommercial website called Headachequiz.com where a lot of questions about migraines can be answered."

"I don't want to know what my ranking is now," she laughs. It is No. 221 because of inactivity, far from the No. 1 roost she occupied for three years, and the top-10 finishes of 10 other years. "I've learned to respect my body, so I won't play again until I'm absolutely ready."

She agonizingly recalls the semifinal at Key Biscayne, Fla., in 2000, when her feet said "No!" but her heart said "Go!" She was double-bageled by Martina Hingis, and there were some boos in the air. But she was a show-must-go-on character. Damn the tormenting head and feet.

"I know I shouldn't have been out there; I was too headstrong," Seles says. "I'm older and wiser now."

Ironically, Hingis, a successor at No. 1, would be out of the game altogether before long, retired by gimpy feet at age 22.

"Retire?" Seles pauses. "I'll never retire from tennis. It's part of me. It's my fix. I'll always play. But if I can't play up to a high level, I will leave it as a career. Not for a while, I hope."

That's hopeful news for her admirers across the planet. "I want to be out there again," she says. "Our game [the women's precinct] is like a first aid room. The Williamses are hurt, Jennifer Capriati, Justine Henin-Hardenne. Hingis gone. Amelie Mauresmo out of the Australian. Too much pounding on hard courts, the doctors tell me. We've all been doing it most of our lives."

Kinder Parisian clay and Wimbledon grass beckon, and the MRIs may inform Seles that she'll be there, with her pills and ever-positive outlook, battling the migraines to a draw.

The grande dame and her grand game would look splendid anywhere. As long as Martina Navratilova keeps hanging around, Seles will feel like a schoolgirl.