A top parlor game among tennis fans is to ponder how great Monica Seles might have been.

Stepping onto a Hamburg tennis court in April 1993, the phenom from the former Yugoslavia looked unstoppable. Just 19 years old, she already had bagged an impressive string of wins en route to knocking German Steffi Graf from her perch atop the women's rankings.

While sitting during a break in her match with Magdalena Maleeva at the tournament in Germany, Seles felt a sudden, burning pain in her back. An obsessive Graf fan named Guenter Parche had stabbed Seles between the shoulder blades with a long knife, sending her to the hospital and suspending her career for what would be two years.

Born in 1973 to Hungarian parents in Novi Sad in what now is Serbia, Seles learned to crush the ball at the Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Bradenton, Fla. She trained alongside such future stars as Andre Agassi, Jim Courier and Mary Pierce.

From an early age, the left-handed Seles hit both her forehand and backhand strokes using a two-fisted grip on her racket. Her father and first tennis coach, Karolj Seles, encouraged the two-way style. He wanted Monica to do what felt most natural, especially when the result was such forceful ground strokes.

As she improved in competition, she turned up the volume — on her grunting. When she hit the ball, Seles would let loose a guttural noise that, for her opponents, was at best a distraction and at worst a hinderance. Some complained they couldn't hear the ball being struck, the grunts were so loud.

"My grunts have always been a natural way to release air and energy," Seles said in her autobiography, "Monica: From Fear to Victory." "Any athlete who exerts momentary bursts of physical effort has to release the air in her lungs. It just happens from all the effort of cracking the ball over the net."

After turning pro in 1989 at age 15, Seles set about torching the women's field with her unorthodox style and a power game like nothing seen on the Women's Tennis Association Tour. She quickly won her first WTA title win, beating a true tennis legend, Chris Evert, in the final of a tournament in Houston.

That spring, having risen in the tour rankings to No. 22, Seles set her sights on the French Open. It was her first Grand Slam tournament — and for Seles, Grand Slams would become the reason she played tennis.

"Being No. 1 has never been a goal for me," she said in her book. "My goal has always been to do well at Grand Slams. A rank is just a number on a piece of paper."

At the French, Seles battled the No. 1-ranked Graf in the semifinals. Though Graf took the match 6-3, 3-6, 6-3, it was the wavy-haired wunderkind Seles, with her flashy teal outfit and blistering ground game, who electrified the Roland Garros crowd.

For Graf, too, the performance was an eye-opener. She conceded that no player had ever hit the ball so hard against her.

"She is already strong," Graf told the press after the match, "can give you very good competition and win every once in a while. But she is only 15 and needs more time."

As it happened, Seles needed just a year. She returned to Paris to defeat Graf in the 1990 French Open final for her first Grand Slam title.

Seles continued to rally in 1991, winning the Australian, French and U.S. Open titles and finishing the year ranked No. 1. In 1992, she was the Australian and U.S. Open champion for a second time and won her third straight French.

What Seles now wanted was the Grand Slam — all four major titles in one year. Graf had pulled the feat in 1988 and stopped Seles from duplicating it in 1992 by whipping the younger player 6-2, 6-1 in the Wimbledon final.

As the 1993 season began, Seles reloaded for another Slam shot. She started promisingly, with a three-set victory over Graf to nab a third straight Australian Open title.

Then came the Citizen Cup event in Hamburg, the bloody hand of Parche and two years of darkness and depression. Though she left the hospital three days after the stabbing, Seles withdrew to a clinic in the Colorado mountains for six months, then to her home in Sarasota, Fla., haunted by the attack.

In her autobiography, she wrote of her reticence when meeting with therapists: "I couldn't say that I was unable to imagine myself walking out on a tennis court again, sitting with my back to the spectators; that I was afraid my career was over. The words just wouldn't come out."

Then a German court freed Parche — convicted of causing "bodily harm" to Seles — on the condition that he check in occasionally with probation officers for two years.

"He intentionally put a knife in my back at a tennis match," Seles told Tennis magazine. "And with everything he said and did, for him not to get even one day of punishment was, for me, hard to take."

Seles sought a return to her Grand Slam form in 1995. She trained rigorously with Bob Kersee, husband of Olympic hero Jackie Joyner-Kersee. She hit balls with father Karolj and brother Zoltan.

When Seles hit the U.S. Open in New York, she was ready. She rolled through the field without losing a set before falling in three to Graf in the final. In victory, Graf praised the Seles comeback: "It's even more important to see her play that well and obviously enjoy herself. It's so great to see that."

Four months later, Seles looked like she was all the way back. By now a U.S. citizen, she made a triumphant return to Melbourne, winning her fourth Australian Open title in a straight-set final against Anke Huber of Germany.

But that 1996 championship was her last in a Grand Slam.

She was soon shadowed by injuries, weight gain and her father's death from cancer. She won a WTA Tour tournament in 2002 and hasn't officially retired, but she no longer plays on the circuit.

Now 33, Seles can look back on 53 singles titles, including nine in Grand Slams and three in the WTA year-end tourney. Eight of those Slam titles came before she was 20.

In that parlor game, some contend Graf was the better player all along.

Others say that in Seles' salad days, she devoured everyone else and simply sat at tennis' head of the table.


BY CHRISTOPHER CAILLAVET