Monica Seles is a retired American and Yugoslav professional tennis player, Seles was born in Yugoslavia. She began playing tennis at age five, coached by her father, He is responsible for developing her two-handed style for both the forehand and backhand. Later, Seles and her brother Zoltán moved from Yugoslavia to the United States, and Seles enrolled at the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy.
Seles played her first professional tournament as an amateur in 1988 at age 14. Seles reached the semifinals of her first Grand Slam singles tournament at the French Open, losing to then-world no. 1 Steffi Graf. Seles finished her first year on the tour ranked world no. 6. After a slow start the season after , Seles went on a 36-match winning streak and won 6 consecutive tournaments. Seles then won her first Grand Slam singles title at the 1990 French Open. Facing world no. 1 Steffi Graf in the final, In doing so, she became the youngest-ever French Open singles Champion at the age of 16 years, 6 months. She finished the year ranked world no. 2. 1991 was the first of two years in which Seles dominated the women's tour.
She won the Australian, then won French Open title, skipped Wimbledon, and won the US Open. In 1992 was an equally dominant year. Seles successfully defended all her titles and only lost her first-ever final at Wimbledon against Graf. We got to point the fact that she was not allowed to scream when hitting shots like she was usually doing. That was big part of her defeat as she could not be 100% focused on the game. . From January 1991 through February 1993, Seles compiled a 159–12 win-loss record , including a 55–1 win-loss record (98%) in Grand Slam tournaments. Seles was the top ranked women's player heading into 1993, In January, Seles defeated Graf in the final of the Australian Open again. This was her third win in four Grand Slam finals against Graf. Later that year she played in …………….. Hamburg, Germany.
On April 30 during a quarterfinal match with Magdalena Maleeva in Hamburg in which Seles was leading, Günter Parche, an obsessed fan of Steffi Graf, ran from the middle of the crowd to the edge of the court during a break between games and stabbed Seles with a boning knife between her shoulder blades, to a depth of 1.5 cm (0.59 inches). While Seles felt a sharp pain shoot up in her back, it took her a while to realize what had actually happened to her. The spectators pounced on the perpetrator and within minutes the security guards whisked him off the court. While the tournament officials and doctors attended to Seles, Maleeva sobbed in disbelief! It was later found that the man who stabbed Seles had ‘psychological issues’. The man told the court that he felt remorse and did not have intentions of killing Seles. He only wanted to hurt her so that she would not play for the next two weeks. Parche was charged following the incident, but was not jailed because he was found to be psychologically abnormal, and was instead sentenced to two years' probation and psychological treatment
Seles was quickly taken to a hospital. Thankfully the blade missed Seles's vital organs and it took only a few weeks for her to heal, but she did not return to competitive tennis for more than two years. SELES finally returned to the tennis court in August 1995, and miraculously win one last grand slam at the 1996 Australian Open but she was never the same,
Graf supported Seles' co-ranking, but not the additional proposal that Seles' co-ranking not be determined by the minimum participation of 12 tournaments a year required of everyone else. Graf felt that would give Seles an unfair advantage in the rankings.
In a 2013 interview, Martina Navratilova theorized that if Seles had not been stabbed, "We'd be talking about Monica with the most Grand Slam titles [ahead of] Margaret Court or Steffi Graf."
During her 17-year career, Graf used her powerful forehand shots to win 22 Grand Slam singles titles second only to Margaret Court's 24, and 107 tournaments on the WTA Tour. She spent a record 377 weeks as the No. 1 player in the world, including an unmatched 186 in a row.
Between the age of 16 and 19 Seles was pretty much unbeatable, winning eight major titles and holding the top ranking for more than 100 weeks. Even Steffi Graf admitted that when Seles was on song, there was little anyone could do to stop her. no-one before or since has been so dominant at such a young age.
To know more about the subject:
Cronin, Matt (May 1, 2013). "Navratilova: Seles would have won most Slams". tennis.com. Retrieved June 6, 2017.
Scott, Jonathan (April 30, 2012). "20 Years Later: Remembering Monica Seles' Stabbing". Tennis.com. Retrieved May 27, 2017.
Tennis star stabbed". On This Day 30 April 1993. BBC. April 30, 1993. Retrieved July 17, 2011.
Seles, Monica; Richardson, Nancy Ann (1996). Monica: From Fear to Victory (1998 ed.). HarperCollins
Serena Williams: Is she your greatest female player of the Open era?". BBC Sport. January 28, 2017. Retrieved January 30, 2017.
Adams, Tim (July 4, 2009). "Interview: Monica Seles". theguardian.com. Retrieved June 6, 2017.
