Monica Seles looked destined to become one of the greatest tennis players of all times, if not the best, but her career was cut short on a fateful afternoon in Germany when she was stabbed in the middle of her Hamburg Open match against Magdalena Maleeva by a crazed Steffi Graf fan.
Seles was 16 when she won her first Grand Slam title at the French Open in 1990, beating the nine-time Grand Slam winner Steffi Graf in straight sets in the final.
Three more Grand Slam victories had followed in 1991, and she went on to make it to the final of all four majors in 1992, winning three and losing the Wimbledon final to Graf.
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With the 1993 Australian Open already pouched, Seles looked unstoppable in her quest to make it four French Open titles in a row when she took to court for her quarterfinal against Maleeva.
Eight Grand Slam titles under her belt as a teenager meant Seles was expected to be a a solid threat to Graf, who was on 11 at that stage but had won just three majors in the past three years since the arrival of the Yugoslavian.
The Stabbing Incident
It was April 30. The Hamburg Open was a precursor event to Roland Garros, and having dropped just eight games on her way to the last eight, the top seeded Seles looked set to storm past her opponent here too.
Leading 6-4, 4-3, Seles was seated during the changeover when a deranged man, Gunter Parche stabbed her with a boning knife. T
he knife penetrated in her shoulder blades to the depth of 1.5 cm and a screaming Seles staggered backward. While the offending man was soon overpowered, it took a few minutes for Seles to get back to her feet and dazedly get on to the stretcher the authorities had arranged by then.
What Happened Next?
Parche, the man who stabbed Seles, got away with a very light sentence. He remained in prison for six months before his trial. He was found to be ‘psychologically abnormal’ during his trial due to which he wasn’t jailed, instead sentenced to a probation of two years and asked to undergo psychological treatment.
An unhappy Seles decided not to return to Germany to play tennis again as a result of this.
It did not take too long for the Seles injuries to heal but the mental scars prevented Seles from making an immediate comeback. She finally returned to tennis in 1995.
Playing at the Canadian Open in her first competition since her return, Seles defeated Amanda Coetzer in the title-decider to lift the trophy.
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Interestingly, when Seles returned to tennis, the second major she participated in was the 1996 Australian Open and she dropped just one set on her way to winning the title. That made it four Australian Open title wins in a row, with Seles having never lost in Melbourne since she started playing as a teenager.
She kept away from it the following two years and suffered her first loss there in the semifinal of the 1999 edition when she went down to the eventual champion Martina Hingis.
However, that 1996 Australian Open win was her only Grand Slam victory on her return and while she made it to three others finals – at the 1995 and 1996 US Open and 1998 French Open – she lost to Graf on the first two occasions and Aranxta Sanchez in the third.
She last played a competitive match in 2003 before a foot injury kept her out. After making a few comeback attempts, Seles finally announced her retirement in 2008.
Seles Might Not Have Been the Only One
In a more recent interview with Indian Express, Spaniard Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario, who revealed she had also been threatened by Gunter Parche for similar reasons. According to Sanchez-Vicario, Parche was unhappy Seles and the Spaniard had the game to upset Graf and had written to her on multiple occasions to keep away from Germany.
She revealed Parche had allegedly said, ‘If you come to Germany, you’re next’.
Sanchez-Vicario, who had won the 1989 French Open after defeating Graf in the final, also revealed she needed to take extra precautions while playing in Germany because of Parche’s presence, needing to employ her own security guards for the same.
She told the newspaper:
“I knew this guy was around. So when I was playing, I would try and concentrate and not think about it. Fortunately nothing happened to me. But this guy always tried. I knew he tried different things but he could never do it.”
What about Graf?
The German, who was a finalist at the Australian Open just prior to this stabbing incident and lot to Seles, went on to win all the remaining three Grand Slams in 1993. Graf defeated Mary Joe Fernandez, Jana Novatna and Helena Sukova in those respective finals, and then added the Australian Open title in 1994 where she crushed Sanchez-Vicario in the final.
Graf returned to capture all the six Grand Slams she participated in the 1995-96 era, before adding one more in 1999 before her retirement.
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