She had suddenly emerged from the locker room building for the 100-yard walk across a public area to the stadium court at the National Tennis Center, but the people along the route didn’t see Monica Seles at first. Her head was down and she was moving at the pace of a race walker in the middle of a phalanx, surrounded by five yellow-shirted security guards and three other protectors.
Finally, just as Seles was about to disappear into the shadows of the stadium, she stopped at a fan’s request. A gap opened in the phalanx. A camera flashed. And then she moved on, less hurriedly, for the final few steps that would take her back to daylight, to the stadium court where Seles would play a brief celebrity match Sunday afternoon and would beat 44th-ranked Ruxandra Dragomir of Romania 6-3, 6-1 in her first Grand Slam tennis tournament match in 2 1/2 years Monday night.
These were her first appearances before New York fans since winning a second consecutive U.S. Open title in 1992. Seles had not played the U.S. Open since because of what happened April 30, 1993, when she was stabbed in the back while seated during a changeover at a tournament in Hamburg, Germany.
Monday’s was a first-round match of the 1995 U.S. Open, in which Seles suddenly, stunningly, is a title favorite for reasons beyond sympathy or empathy. Sunday’s was to play doubles with Bill Cosby against 1981 U.S. Open champion Tracy Austin and Jets placekicker Nick Lowery in the Arthur Ashe Aids Tennis Challenge.
Before her 15 minutes of light(hearted) work Sunday, Seles walked to the stands and willingly began signing autographs. At first, her back was to the empty court, but the fans were virtually pressing the flesh with her. Then, at one point, she waded in deep enough that fans were behind her, and a teenage boy reached a piece of paper across her back. Seles turned, calm in this brief frenzy around her, and signed the paper.
“For a long time you see this tunnel and it’s dark all the time and it was really nice to see some light coming in,” Seles said of her return to tennis. “Going back to something that I’ve done, and all I’ve ever done in my life is play tennis, and this became a little bit more out of control with what happened. But it became bigger than tennis and it should have been so simple. I mean, it’s sport, I shouldn’t be worried.”
Those thoughts came from the transcript of a recent press conference. The 21-year-old talks that way, in stream of Seles consciousness, her thoughts punctuated mainly and randomly by a giggle or a pause.
There was a significant pause in her press conference Sunday, when Seles was talking about her practice opponents during some of the darkest days. “I mostly played with my father,” she said, “and then I played about maybe altogether from”–and there she paused, for five seconds that seemed hours–“since the day I got stabbed, about 15, I don’t know, about 10 different guys.”
Seles was sitting at a table in an indoor court No. 2, the same place where she had done a press conference almost exactly two years earlier, on the day before the 1993 U.S. Open was to begin. That was only four months after the stabbing, and Seles was talking about coming back for the 1994 Australian Open the following January.
It would take her nearly two years more to get back into a tournament, the Canadian Open earlier this month in Toronto. Then she surprisingly won the title without losing a set and dropping just 14 games in five matches.
The question would be what had kept her away so long, why she disappeared behind a high-walled compound in Sarasota, Fla., escaping mainly incognito, except for the day last year when she was sworn in as a U.S. citizen in Miami.
“I started having this really difficult period,” she said Sunday, referring to the fall of 1993, “and I worked very hard on it, and now I just really want to try to put it behind me. I believe it is in my head and I got to the point that I know it did happen, but I want to keep it under a key and move on because I can’t rebring this stuff back and forth.”
Seles was 19 when it happened, winner of seven of the eight previous Grand Slam tournaments she had played, clearly the best woman tennis player in the world, lacking only a Wimbledon title in a tennis career that had begun a decade earlier on a parking lot in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia. And then Guenther Parche, a man apparently deranged by the idea of having his countrywoman, Steffi Graf of Germany, become No. 1 again, decided to improve Graf’s chances by stabbing Seles in the back with an 8-inch knife he previously had used to cut sausages.
Stabbed in the back. In terms both real and metaphorical, it is the most heinous way to attack someone. It leaves scars far greater than the one that remains on Seles’ body, only an inch from herspine.
She imprisoned herself, in the tunnel, while the German justice system twice decided Parche did not need to be locked up, even though he was found guilty of assault. Haunted by the thought of Parche walking free, she missed three French Opens, two Wimbledons, two Australian Opens, two U.S. Opens.
“For a long time day to day, there is so much darkness in there,” Seles said in Toronto.
She emerged after months of work with Nevada psychologist Jerry Russel May, who treated Seles for post-traumatic stress syndrome. She found support from friends like Martina Navratilova, her predecessor as the top woman player, against whom Seles made her return July 29 in a made-for-TV exhibition match. She got guidance from Mark McCormack, founder of the International Management Group, and his wife, former tennis player Betsy Nagelsen. She was inspired by training with Olympic track gold medalist Jackie Joyner-Kersee. She gained resolve by watching her father, Karolj, 62, fight back from both stomach and prostate cancer.
“I said, `You are a strong person, you have to get through this,’ ” Seles said. “You can’t let one person change your life if you love to do something and I love to play tennis and that’s what it boiled down to.”
Seles returned to a women’s tour that desperately needs her giggles and grunts and cannonading, two-fisted groundstrokes, but her comeback provoked both pleasure and rancor. The Women’s Tennis Association’s decision to give Seles a No. 1 co-ranking with Graf did not sit well with many players, notably Arantxa Sanchez Vicario of Spain, the U.S. Open defending champion. As third seed, Sanchez Vicario gets a tougher draw in every major tournament.
“The whole ranking issue, I made it very clear to my agent that I do not want anything,” Seles said. “If I am good, I will be where I am supposed to be. If I am not good, I won’t.”
She was good enough to win easily in Toronto, despite tendinitis in her left knee, a still-evident roll of extra weight around her stomach and first-round nerves that made her legs wobble and the sky seem to move as she warmed up.
Although she avoided meeting either Graf or Sanchez in Canada–both were upset early–Seles crushed Gabriela Sabatini (the 9th seed at the U.S. Open) 6-1, 6-0 in the semifinals before beating Amanda Coetzer of South Africa (who had eliminated Graf, Mary Pierce and Jana Novotna) 6-0, 6-1 in the final.
“We were all surprised she is already playing great tennis,” said Germany’s Anke Huber, who lost 6-3, 6-2 to Seles in Toronto and could play her again in the 4th round here. “Her game didn’t change–she still takes the ball very early and hits it very hard.
“Maybe she is not as quick as she was before but she doesn’t need to move the way she did before. She makes the game and puts the pressure on her opponents.”
Seles, who meets Erika deLone of Lincoln, Mass., (No. 113 in the current world rankings) in the second round, likely would not face a tough challenge until a potential quarterfinal match with the fifth-seeded Novotna of the Czech Republic in the quarterfinals.
Were Seles and Graf to meet in the final, both would be carrying emotional and physical baggage. Graf has a bad back and her father, Peter, has been jailed for tax evasion that may involve some of her money.
“Steffi is also going through a very painful time,” Seles said.
Novotna’s coach, 1985 U.S. open champion Hana Mandlikova, was among those marveling at how Seles played in Toronto.
“When I had to take six months off, it took me a year to come back,” Mandlikova said. “It’s amazing that mentally she could get right back into matches.
“The real test comes here. Two weeks. Seven matches. It will really show what she is made of.”
Having grown more than an inch since the stabbing, Seles is serving and volleying better than ever. The only limitation in her current game is relatively less movement due to the knee problems and a diminished fitness level. Once the Open ends, Seles intends to work on both those weaknesses.
“I really started practicing very hard a few months ago . . . I still go back and forth a lot of days but I wasn’t even thinking of playing a match,” Seles said.
“I have to move on with my life and this was a choice, either you do or you don’t. For me the hardest was I was playing good tennis and somebody just suddenly took that away. That’s all I had done from a very early age on and suddenly it was missing and I was missing it very much. I mean, I was not the same person as I was with it.”
After playing her celebrity doubles match Sunday, Seles began to practice with Jimmy Arias, first on the stadium court, then on the adjacent and more intimate grandstand court. Her hair was tucked through the gap in the back of a baseball cap, her gray T-shirt soaked in sweat, her eyes squinting in concentration over every serve, return, topspin lob or crackling groundstroke. A few hundred fans watched, one offering “bravo” at every good shot, others giving appreciative applause that seemed to swell in the roar of planes passing low overhead after takeoff from nearby LaGuardia Airport.
“For a long time,” Seles had said, “I didn’t see the light. And now to be part of the light, at least in my tennis career, it’s great, it’s just wonderful.”
The cheers frequently made Seles smile, an eyes-shining, teeth-gleaming smile. She was back on her stage, on a New York stage, where the lights are brightest, and Monica Seles did not seem to have any stage fright at all.
