The Most Gruesome Day in Tennis: When Monica Seles Was Brutally Stabbed in the Back

From Number One to gone forever

Runner-up Monica Seles at the 1991 U.S. Women’s Hard Court Championships in San Antonio | Source C Thomas on Flickr is licensed under CC BY 2.0, altered by the author

At the age of 19, Monica Seles was the best female tennis player in the world. That same year her career was already over.

But she wasn’t just №1. The Guardian’s journalist Tim Adams claimed Seles was “the greatest female tennis player ever to pick up a racket.” Martina Navratilova declared that if Seles had been luckier, she’d have more Grand Slam titles than Margaret Court and Steffi Graf.

You don’t expect someone with such potential to stop playing tennis so soon. But she had to.

Her remarkable career was just getting started

Monica Seles (b. Szeles Mónika) was born in 1973 in a Hungarian family in Novi Sad, former Yugoslavia. When she was 11, she won the Orange Bowl Tournament in Miami. And the following year she moved to the US as successful foreigners usually do.

In 1989 at the age of 14, she started to play professionally and won a tournament in Houston against Chris Evert, a former world №1.

Only two years later, Seles was rocking it. The 16-year-old girl was climbing the ladder of success and became №6 in the Women’s Tennis Association.