DUKE: Her Attacker Walked Free. Monica Seles Spent Years Paying The Price

Hey y’all, welcome back to Unfit to Print.

As the U.S. Open gets underway, I’d like to revisit one of the most tragic moments in tennis history.

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SHE SERVED HIS SENTENCE

In the early 1990s, Monica Seles was the most dominant player in tennis.

By the age of 19, she had already racked up eight Grand Slam titles.

She was the youngest French Open champion at 16, won the French Open and Australian Open three times in a row, and won the U.S. Open two years in a row.

From January 1991 through February 1993, Seles reached the final in 33 of the 34 tournaments she played, winning 22 of them. In Grand Slam matches, she went 55-1.

Her playing style was also fairly revolutionary. She used a two-handed stroke on both the backhand and forehand side that allowed her to produce extraordinary angled shots, routinely stepped inside the baseline to take balls on the rise, taking time away from her opponents, and had relentless power on both wings.

Here’s a collection of some of Seles’s greatest points so you can get an idea of why she was so great.

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Seles’s chief rival was German player Steffi Graf. Graf was supremely talented in her own right and was the world number one before the teenage phenom took her spot. In the 1993 Australian Open, Seles defeated Graf in a blockbuster three-set match.

Three months later, everything changed.

On April 30, 1993, Seles was playing Magdalena Maleeva in the quarterfinals of the Citizen Cup in Hamburg, Germany. She won the first set 6-4 and was leading 4-3 in the second when the players sat down for a changeover.

Seles leaned forward in her chair. The camera cut away and, suddenly, Seles screamed. A man had plunged a knife between her shoulder blades.

The man was Günter Parche. He was German, 38 years old, unemployed, and an obsessive fan of Graf. He stalked Seles and planned to take her out so Graf could once again be the best women’s tennis player in the world.

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The knife narrowly missed Seles’s spinal cord. She was carried off the court.

And just like that, one of the most dominant runs in tennis history was over.

What happened next, though, was far bigger than tennis.

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