Editor’s note: This story is part of a series counting down the 40 greatest comebacks in sports.
So let’s begin here: I don’t think anyone in tennis history hit more lines than the young Monica Seles. It was uncanny. How do prodigies like Seles happen? Here was this 16-year old girl, this 17-year-old girl, from a city called Novi Sad on the Danube River in the former Yugoslavia (now Serbia), a city that had a grand total of four tennis courts. Here was this girl who still hit forehands two-handed because that’s how she learned how to play as a child when the racket was too heavy to hold with one hand.
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“You’re not going to let her keep hitting like that?” tennis people asked her father, Karolj, again and again.
“That is how she picked up the racket, that is how she is supposed to play,” he said.
And in those first years after she turned pro — when she was so young and hit the ball so hard — she cracked shot after shot after shot off of the baseline or sideline. Of course, all pros can hit the lines — even us amateurs can hit lines from time to time. Seles hit more of them.
Tennis pros will talk about how you should give yourself a margin of error. Seles had no margin of error. The joke used to be that she wasn’t just aiming for the line, she was aiming for the back of the line.
And hitting all those lines, she was unbeatable. Seles played in eight Grand Slam tournaments from 1991 to 1993. She won seven of them and lost in the Wimbledon final to Steffi Graf in the other one — Seles never did love grass as much as the other surfaces.
With Seles, the story was always bigger than tennis. She was a magnetic, giddy and outrageous star — “Bigger than life,” Mary Carillo called her — who wore flashy outfits, changed her hairstyle weekly, and giggled at least a little in every sentence she uttered. She all but invented the tennis grunt; she was the first one who grunted so loudly that other players complained.
Opponents called her a diva. Wild rumors followed her everywhere. Fans rooted madly for her and even more madly against her. She basically was women’s tennis.
Beyond all the theater and melodrama, though, there is something almost impossible to describe about Seles as a tennis player, something that even Seles herself has had trouble expressing through the years. In her book, “Getting a Grip,” Seles goes deep into the emotions she has struggled with through the years, even giving a heartfelt account of her trying appearance on “Dancing With the Stars.” She has no trouble discussing her feelings most of the time.
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But when it comes to trying to explain just what it was that made her younger self so confident on the tennis court, so assertive, so free, words fail.
How did she hit all those lines? Why was she so mentally driven? How did she unleash such power? She couldn’t say. Just listen to how she sums up winning her first Grand Slam title at the incredible age of 16.
“Winning my first Grand Slam came down to what was going on between my ears. If I believed I could beat her, I would.”
That’s all it was for the young Seles: If she believed it, it would happen.
David Foster Wallace, in his classic essay “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” goes in-depth into how it is basically impossible for athletic prodigies to explain what makes them athletic prodigies. “Those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it,” he wrote, “and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence.”
Seles’ book confirms the thought. She calls herself a prodigy several times but cannot explain what that means, how that felt — it was simply her natural state of being. She aimed for the lines because she knew that she would hit them in the same way that people run down the stairs knowing that there will always be a solid step below their feet. It wasn’t anything to think about. It wasn’t anything to ponder.
The young Monica Seles felt invincible on the tennis court because she was invincible on the tennis court. And vice versa.
You hate to leave this part of the story … especially because you know where it goes next. Had history been different, could Seles have been the greatest tennis player who ever lived? I’d have to say yes. She was No. 1 in the world for 91 consecutive weeks. In that span, she played in 34 tournaments and reached the final in 33 of them. She was still just 19 years old when she dispatched Steffi Graf in the final of the 1993 Australian Open, and there seemed to be nobody on the horizon who could beat her.
And that’s when a madman wrecked everything.
“I never know how to handle this part. There isn’t an easy, antiseptic way to say it. It’s something that was so traumatic, shocking and violent that when I mention it today it’s like I’m referring to something that happened to someone else. … A split second of horror fundamentally changed me.”
— Monica Seles, “Getting a Grip”
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I won’t say his name. I won’t tell his story. You might know both already, but this is about Monica Seles and coming back from the unimaginable. During a changeover in her Citizen Cup quarterfinal match against Magdalena Maleeva in Hamburg, Germany, he walked to the sideline of the court where Seles was resting and stabbed her in the back with a 9-inch knife. The physical injury for Seles was serious — he slashed a half-inch wound between her shoulder blades. Seles was rushed to the hospital. Doctors there told her had it not been for her bending her neck at that precise second to drink some water, she would have been paralyzed.
Seles would recover from the physical injury in a few weeks. That was hard. But it wasn’t the hard part.
The mental pain, the emotional pain — again, words fail. You will often hear athletes talk about the court or the field as their sanctuary, their safe haven. Monica Seles felt at home on the tennis court; that’s where her genius burst forth. Those hours on the court, everything else in the world faded away. There were no reporters asking questions, no fans making demands, no life problems to deal with other than Graf’s forehand or Gabriela Sabatini’s backhand or Martina Navratilova at the net. Seles could handle those things. In fact, she loved handling those things.
“I felt the safest there,” she would say. “All my worries were gone. Suddenly, that was taken away. I’d just cry, cry, cry.”
You might not know this, but they actually finished that Hamburg tournament. Graf ended up losing to Arantxa Sánchez-Vicario in straight sets in the final. You can argue about how right or wrong it was to play on even after Seles was stabbed on the court by a deranged fan — but you cannot argue about the impact it had on Seles, an impact almost as devastating as the stabbing itself. It made her feel as if her pain didn’t matter. And that’s how she felt for the next two-plus years.
“That was a harsh lesson in the business side of tennis,” she would write. “It really is about making money over anything else.
“It was like I didn’t matter, like the stabbing had never happened. I’d gone from being on the A-list to being invisible. I’d gone from winning Grand Slams to struggling to swing a tennis racket. … The inner drive that had been my constant companion since I was five years old began to disappear.”
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Yes, she was out of tennis for more than two years. During that time, she searched for something in life that made her happy. She tried to learn French. She watched a lot of television. She couldn’t find anything that held her attention. Shortly after Hamburg, Seles was told that her beloved father had cancer. It was all too much. She struggled with binge eating disorder and gained 40 pounds. She also began treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder.
And then — and she makes it sound like this epiphany came all at once — she realized that the thing that did make her happy was, well, tennis.
So she came back.
“A month after (an exhibition with Navratilova), I played in the Canadian Open, my first WTA match in two and a half years — a lifetime in women’s tennis. Amid a roaring and supportive crowd and my teary-eyed family, I won the title. I was back.”
That’s all Seles wrote in her book about coming back to play in the Canadian Open. That’s it. Three short, flat, unemotional sentences about one of the most absurd and remarkable comeback performances in sports history. Seles had not played in a tournament in two and a half years, a time that had been filled with darkness and despair. Her father’s cancer had returned. She felt ashamed of the weight she had put on.
And she went out in Canada and dominated like no one had ever dominated a tournament — she lost a grand total of 14 games the entire tournament. True, she didn’t have to face Graf, but it undoubtedly wouldn’t have mattered. She steamrolled every opponent placed in front of her, destroying Sabatini 6-1, 6-0 in the semifinal, and simply reversing the score by beating Amanda Coetzer 6-0, 6-1 in the final.
A couple of weeks after that, Seles breezed to the US Open final, not losing a single set along the way. In the championship, she faced her nemesis, Graf, who was dealing with her own issues. Graf’s father had just been arrested and was in prison for tax evasion. Plus, in the two and a half years that Seles had been away from tennis, Graf’s victories had all seemed hollow and empty. Seles was a ghost. That US Open Final between them should be made into a movie.
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It was not always a great match … but it was filled with tension and emotion. Seles and Graf played a grueling first-set tiebreaker. Seles thought she had won the set on an ace, but it was called out by the linesperson. As mentioned, I don’t think anyone ever hit more lines than the young Seles. When this one was called out — there was no replay in tennis then — she faltered and lost the set.
Seles then destroyed Graf 6-0 in the second set.
That’s when Graf regrouped and Seles ran out of steam. Seles also lost her cool again after what she felt sure was a bad call. Graf won the final set and the match 6-3. Graf was so emotional after that she broke down in tears during the press conference.
And Seles? Well, what if I told you: She doesn’t even mention this match, or the US Open, in her autobiography? Not one word. Strange, right?
Well, no, I don’t think so. See, I don’t think this is the part that Seles would call her comeback. Yes, she came back to tennis, and she played very well right away. As 1996 began, she won the Peters Invitational in Sydney, and then she breezed to victory in the Australian Open, her ninth Grand Slam championship. She barely wrote about that either.
See, it comes to that word, “comeback.” What does it mean? Yes, Seles came back and was a good player for a few years. She no longer hit lines as she had — she seemed more hesitant — but she still reached two more Grand Slam finals, once losing to Graf, the other time to Sánchez-Vicario. Then, new tennis prodigies like Martina Hingis and Venus and Serena Williams came along, and Seles found herself old news. She was a regular in the quarterfinals, an occasional visitor to the semis, but she was no longer a threat to win.
Anyway, all of that was a crucial part of her life, but tennis was Seles’ gift. Getting back on the court and playing well, that wasn’t the real challenge, not the way she looks at it. Monica Seles had to overcome the most traumatic event any athlete could imagine. She had to overcome a severe eating disorder. She had to overcome the death of her father. She had to overcome anger and sadness — Seles could have broken all the records. She could have created a legend never to be matched. That chance was taken from her.
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And surmounting all that, yes, that was the comeback. The thing people around tennis will tell you about Monica Seles is how much richer a human being she became as the years went along. The fans came to love her in a deeper way than they ever did when she was hitting all those lines and blowing away the best players in the world.
“It became impossible to root against her,” Sports Illustrated’s Jon Wertheim wrote. “At first, out of sympathy. Then, because she revealed herself to be so thoroughly thoughtful, graceful, dignified. When she quietly announced her retirement last week at age 34, she exited as perhaps the most adored figure in the sport’s history.”
Yes, that was the comeback: Seles came back from the abyss and became sports royalty.
“Do I regret not winning a tenth Grand Slam?” she writes. “Sometimes. But when it comes down to it, one more Grand Slam doesn’t really mean anything. It’s just another line in my obituary. It doesn’t define me as the person I am today.
“It has been a long, painful and challenging journey, but I live where I am today. I wouldn’t give any of it back. It’s made me who I am.”
(Top illustration: Adrian Guzman/The Athletic)