The Greatest of All Time

Monica Seles and the brutality of tennis

I think, at some point in my youth, I was a decent tennis player. I took lessons at the park, I competed in tournaments, and played, for two years, on the varsity team. I was in possession of a few attributes. Though I wasn’t tall, and wouldn’t physically develop until my late teens, I had a naturally powerful forehand and backhand. Though I write and throw left-handed, I learned to play right-handed, since I’m curiously ambidextrous. This meant I swung my backhand like I was in the batter’s box, hitting a thudding, flat ball that was tough to return if I ever kept it in. My first serve came in hot and fast and often out. I liked the fast twitch rhythm of volleying. If everything went my way, tennis was exquisite, requiring the mental strain of chess and the endurance of long-distance running and the inherent hatred that you nurture of your opponent in a boxing match. I’d like to think, if I stuck with it, I could’ve been a contender.

Except I wasn’t. I wasn’t rising beyond the USTA Boys’ Eastern Section, where I was apparently ranked 30, whatever that meant. I didn’t have what it took. Whatever fortitude and controlled fury I could bring to other facets of my life—writing, for example, has never enervated me, and the words always seem to come—I could not muster on the tennis court. I sobbed before tournaments. I panicked during matches. I growled and slammed rackets. The resentment I felt toward my opponent could not, on a regular basis, be channeled towards their destruction. When I played a match, the joy melted away. As a baseball player, I was fragile too, but I would only bat three or four times in a game, and it was in those instances I could battle nerves or throw my bat if I didn’t reach base. I was on a team. Pressure, in baseball, is diffuse. You’re one of nine, plus the bench.

In tennis, truly, there is nowhere to hide. And when it came to the heat of a match, I wanted to duck away.

Whatever talent I had for tennis, and athletics in general—my best sport, it turned out, was the utterly New York one-wall handball, where I lost much less—came from my mother. My mother, I think, could have been a professional tennis player if she wanted to be one. A self-taught parks player in Brooklyn, she won so many amateur tournaments she earnestly couldn’t tell you, off the top of her head, how many trophies are jammed away in her closet. She won in singles, she won in doubles, and she competed against and beat men. She is, on a technicality, a senior citizen, but she is physically superior to men and women thirty or forty years her junior. I’ve seen her temper, but she never let it keep her from dominance; she played the big points with sangfroid and broke her rivals. I don’t think she ever believed she’d lose.

Of late, I’ve contemplated playing tennis again. This has been something of a multiyear musing, ever since I hit my thirties, and it seems to bubble up in fall or winter, when baseball and softball isn’t occupying me. In softball, I can at least check my athletic neuroses to play well enough, if never to my internal standards. In tennis, well, can I get on the court? Tennis is the game of social capital and many adult players never, like me, competed in their youth, and this should lend me an edge. I’ve kept in decent shape. Hey, I heard Ben Smith likes to play tennis. But I cannot abide by losing. I’d rather not play. I’d rather watch.

This watching, perhaps, is what brought me to Monica Seles matches on YouTube. On YouTube, time is flat, the great rapids contained in a single search bar, and I’ve learned almost anything, with enough effort, can be dug up there. I can watch grainy footage of the Beach Boys in Europe or lost episodes of some anime or Mike Dukakis’ concession speech. I don’t know, exactly, how I started watching Seles play tennis. I only know I found a match and the algorithm spun more my way and soon it was Seles v. Graf at the 1992 French Open or Seles v. Navratilova at the 1991 U.S. Open. Seles, who served left-handed and hit a two-handed forehand like a right-handed player, her grunts exploding across the court, uh-EHH, uh-EHH, uh-EHH. On screen, she seems diminutive and her youth, when the camera pans to her, is obvious. These matches were played when she was a teenager.

They were played when she was, unquestionably, the best tennis player in the world.

Today, the name Monica Seles is only meaningful to tennis fans. She is not a global icon like Serena Williams or Novak Djokovic. Her name is not a shorthand for athletic wonder. She is wealthy enough but not sitting on hundreds of millions. She has had far more success than almost any tennis player who ever lived, but she is not the most successful, as was her destiny in the early 1990s. She was going to win as much as Serena, as much as Martina—as much, certainly, as her great German rival, 22-time Grand Slam winner Steffi Graf.

Nothing on the court could stop Monica Seles. Like me, she had a tremendous fear of losing. Unlike me—and unlike most human beings—this fear ensured she would almost never know what losing was like. She would win so much the fear could subside. If the tennis court, for me, was a source of resentment, it was, for Seles, an oasis. If she was there, she would only know triumph. She would be feted as the best who ever lived.

On April 30th, 1993, Seles was the top-ranked women’s player on Earth. That January, she had won the Australian Open, defeating Graf. She had also bested Graf at the 1992 and 1990 French Opens. Graf, who was four years older, had lorded over the tour until Seles, at age 16, won her first French Open. In the late 1980s, it had appeared tennis would belong to Graf. She had won all four Grand Slam tournaments in a single calendar year and an Olympic gold medal. But it was the Yugoslavian Seles, with her blistering baseline strokes, who swiftly ended Graf’s reign. Seles overtook tennis like Michael Jordan’s Bulls ran roughshod over the NBA. The numbers are still difficult to comprehend: from January 1991 through February 1993, Seles won 22 titles and reached 33 finals out of the 34 tournaments she played.

In that time period, she was 159-12 overall, with a staggering 55-1 run in Grand Slam tournaments. She had already won eight Grand Slam singles titles and wouldn’t even turn 20 until December. A tennis player typically peaks in their early twenties, which meant that Seles, at the minimum, could look forward to several more years of her best tennis.

A German man named Günter Parche knew this. He had a deranged obsession with Graf, and believed she should have remained the number one player in the world if not for Seles. Parche was watching the April 30th match in Hamburg between Seles and a lesser-known player named Magdalena Maleeva. It was a tune-up tournament for Seles, who was getting ready for the French Open in a month. Since she had won the last three French Opens, she was heavily favored to win a fourth. Graf was helpless against her on clay.

While Seles was resting between games, Parche approached. In the 1990s, security at tournaments was relatively light, and the Citizen Cup in Hamburg was no exception. Parche reached Seles and plunged a boning knife between her shoulder blades. The blade sunk half an inch into her skin and barely missed her spine. There is no video of the stabbing itself, but Seles can be heard screaming. Parche is put into a headlock and wrestled down. Seles stands, holding her back, before she collapses to the court. Tournament and medical officials surround her. She is dazed, wincing, the searing pain evident on her face. Eventually, she is helped up onto a stretcher and wheeled off as the crowd applauds. Parche later told police he wanted “hurt Seles so much that she couldn’t play tennis for a long time. I couldn’t bear the thought that anyone could beat Steffi.”

He got exactly what he wanted.

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Monica Seles was born in 1973 in Yugoslavia, the child of ethnic Hungarians. One morning on a family holiday on the Adriatic, Seles saw her father, who worked as a newspaper cartoonist, and her brother packing a bag with tennis rackets. She wanted to know where they were going. “To play tennis,” her brother Zoltan told her. Play sounded like fun to her. She asked to tag along.

From there, Seles never stopped. Her father had been a great amateur athlete, a nationally ranked triple jumper, and he regretted never pursuing an athletic career. He was already focused on Zoltan, an elite junior player competing against top players at European events. Though eight years younger than Zoltan, Monica decided she wanted to beat her brother. Her father encouraged her interest in tennis, drawing the face of Jerry the mouse on a tennis ball as Monica, as Tom, tried to smack him with her racket for hours on end. Since children weren’t allowed at the local tennis club, her father strung a net between two cars in a parking lot and told her to hit balls into boxes at the corners of the makeshift court. After a couple hundred of balls struck accurately, it was time for supper.

Her father taught her to generate more power with her forehand by simply using two hands. This was highly unconventional, since a two-handed shot naturally limits reach. But Seles was a savant, able to compensate for whatever she lost in her extension by outrunning the ball and crushing it with otherwordly force and precision. Tennis, which had been a serve-and-volley sport, would transition into a baseline power game under Seles, as she rapidly overwhelmed her opposition. By 13, she was the top-ranked under-18 player in the world, and she was invited to move to Florida to train with Nick Bolletieri, a legendary tennis coach. She knew little of America and hardly spoke English. She was on scholarship, unlike the affluent players who paid their own way, and she struggled to make friends. Bolletieri, who said she was the brightest prospect he had ever seen, quipped to her that her boyfriend was her “Prince ball machine.” In a sea of hyper-talented youth, Seles stood out as a genuine prodigy, and she practiced so much and so aggressively that a future top-ranked male tennis player, Jim Courier, refused to hit balls with her because she chased him around the court so much.

Soon, she was a player absent weaknesses. She barreled past opponents with her flat, deep shots, and struck winners at will with her two-handed strokes. She carved up the court with crushing cross-court angles and returned almost everything hit her way. More importantly, perhaps, she was unflappable. She did not panic, she did not angry, and she rarely made mistakes. If, physically, she had entered her own league, she was already there mentally. Opponents, grasping for advantages, complained about how she grunted. Tennis is a game that is supposed to be played in silence; spectators can only clap when points are finished and must hush up otherwise. Seles inadvertently grunted when she struck the ball. This, like her two-handed forehand, was considered unusual, but there was nothing any of her rivals could do. Seles was a winner, a real winner, and they weren’t.

At 16, Seles realized her greatness: she defeated Graf, then number-one, at the French Open, becoming the tournament’s youngest-ever champion. She seemed to be reimagining tennis itself. She attacked and attacked, hit harder, and never gave in. The only Grand Slam she couldn’t conquer was Wimbledon, played on grass, but she was a finalist there and won everywhere else. It was only a matter of time until she figured out grass. Graf’s time was up. Just as Martina Navratilova and Chris Everet had the 1980s—Seles would recall, growing up, she assumed professional tennis was just a match-up between those two women—Monica Seles would have the 1990s. Graf had crumbled against her, and the next great hero of women’s tennis, Serena Williams, wasn’t due to arrive until the end of the decade.

The stabbing took that future away.

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“It’s going to be like Steffi and the Seven Dwarfs,” Navratilova said in 1995, shortly after she retired.

The 18-time Grand Slam champion, and one of the best to ever play the sport, was talking about the tennis tour without her. But the subtext was much louder, and one Navratilova didn’t shy away from: Graf didn’t have to worry about Monica Seles anymore.

In the aftermath of the stabbing, Graf visited her rival in the hospital once, and relations were cold between the two champions. Later in the year, the WTA suggested that Seles’ No. 1 ranking be preserved in her absence, since it was a stabbing, not any ordinary injury, that had taken her off the court. A vote was held at a tournament in Rome and 16 of the 17 top players who voted rejected the proposal outright. Graf, who did not advocate for a ranking freeze, was not at the tournament and missed the vote.

Seles was no longer the top-ranked player in the world.

“In terms of the game itself,” Seles later told the Guardian, “it was like the stabbing never occurred. One problem was that it happened in Germany and was ‘because’ of a German player. The German federation decided to continue the tournament as if nothing had happened, and everyone else seemed to follow on from that.”

“It felt like everyone benefited from the stabbing except me,” she said. “They just wanted me to go away, it felt like … I was 19 years old. Their money was tied up to the ranking system.”

Parche, meanwhile, stood trial on a charge of wounding rather than attempted murder, and though he admitted the attack was premediated, he never served a day in prison. Last year, he died in a nursing home at the age of 68.

For two years, Seles did not play tennis. Steffi Graf was the champion of the 1993 French Open, breaking the three-year winning streak Seles had at that Grand Slam. Graf then won Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. With Seles gone, no one was going to stop Graf. By the time of her retirement, she had won 22 major singles titles, a total only surpassed by Serena Williams.

Of those 22 Grand Slams, half were won after Seles was stabbed in the back.

In her time away from tennis, Seles suffered. She developed an eating disorder. Her father was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer. She sued the German Tennis Federation for lack of security and lost income. She did not win the cases.

There were triumphs; Seles was too good to simply fade away. If the psychic wounds of the attack couldn’t quite heal, she was able to become a Grand Slam champion again, winning the 1996 Australia Open. She would reach the finals again in other majors and play tour matches until 2003. The consistent dominance, though, was no more, if she was still among the very best on tour. And she endured sexist taunts from tabloid reporters who commented, perpetually, on her weight gain. The British press, she recalled, were particularly cruel.

Seles, though, would always be regarded as one of the greats. For those who played against her, the truth was plain. “She would have won so much more,” argued Navratilova. “We’d be talking about Monica with the most Grand Slam titles [ahead of] Margaret Court (who has 24) or Steffi Graf. Steffi had 22 but she didn’t have anyone to play against. This guy changed the course of tennis history, no doubt about that.”

Graf’s fate was to be subsumed by the Williams sisters, who captivated the entire athletic world and inspired several generations of players. In retirement, Seles would publish her own memoir, which detailed her tennis years, the stabbing, and the struggles that, for a time, followed. She eventually conquered her eating disorder. She was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. All of it still makes up an unimaginably successful career. Knowing, in my own picayune way, how punishing the sport of tennis can be, I remain in awe. If I even had a crumb of Seles’ fortitude, I could’ve been somebody.