Tennis

When Monica Seles arrived in Melbourne in January 1996 to chase her fourth AO title, her biggest obstacles were the mental scars from a courtside stabbing three years earlier. By Martin McKenzie-Murray.

Revisiting Monica Seles’s mighty return to tennis

Monica Seles celebrates after winning the 1996 Australian Open.

Credit: Phil Cole / Allsport

Monica Seles expressed her athletic genius intuitively, precociously, joyfully. By the age of eight she was the highest ranked junior in Yugoslavia. A few years later she was the best junior in the world.

From a very young age, she acquired her signature: double-handed groundstrokes on both the forehand and backhand sides. In time, with the scrutiny of some of the world’s best coaches, she was encouraged to lose this idiosyncrasy, but it had long become habituated and the work of losing it proved disruptive, then disastrous. Her game suffered and it was decided she could take her double-handed forehand into her professional career.

There were other signatures: the grunting, the giggling, the aggressive line drives. She painted lines with a distinctive confidence and accuracy; she seemed to have the ball on a string.

Monica Seles turned pro in 1988. She was 15. She won her first major title – the French Open – in 1990. Between January 1991 and February 1993, she won 33 of the 34 tournaments she competed in. In these two years, she won 55 of the 56 grand slam singles matches she played. By the age of 19 she had won eight major titles, including three Australian Opens. Her only real rival was Steffi Graf, four-and-a-half years older but whom Seles had beaten in three of their previous four meetings in grand slam finals.

And then her life changed.

Günter Parche was floridly disturbed. In 1992, then 37, he quit his job as a machinist so he could better follow the career of fellow German Steffi Graf – the object of his infatuation. Parche lived with his elderly aunt at the time, and had plastered his bedroom walls with posters of the tennis star. He recorded her matches and obsessively replayed them as he made his own pilgrimages to her training sessions and European tournaments. He anonymously sent money to Graf’s mother so she might buy her daughter jewellery and flowers. “She is a dream creature whose eyes sparkle like diamonds and whose hair shines like silk,” Parche would later testify. “I would walk through fire for her.”

Parche, though, was aggrieved that Graf’s status as world champ was being competitively shared with Monica Seles. “In 1990 Steffi Graf lost to Monica Seles in the German Open in Berlin,” he would tell police after his arrest in 1993. “My world collapsed around me at that time. I could not bear the thought of someone beating Steffi Graf. Although she had not lost her No. 1 seeding at that time, it affected me so much that I even considered suicide.”

When, in 1993, Seles once again replaced Graf as the world’s No. 1 player, Parche began plotting how to badly injure Seles. In April that year, Parche travelled by train to Hamburg and stayed in a hotel from which he could walk to the city’s Citizen Cup, in which Seles was competing. “I had already thought through various means of getting to Seles,” he later told police. “I was present during her early-morning training sessions; I also thought of the possibility of giving Monica a bunch of flowers. I also thought about the possibility of doing something of the kind while asking for an autograph, but finally I came to the decision to do it right there on centre court.”

It was April 30, and Parche had bought tickets for the women’s singles quarter-final between Seles and Bulgarian Magdalena Maleeva. He brought with him a 23-centimetre boning knife, which he kept in a shopping bag beneath a match program. There was minimal security and, back then, no pre-entry scanning of spectators.

During a break in the second set, while Seles was sitting courtside mopping her brow and taking a drink with her back to the crowd, Parche rushed on court and plunged the knife into her back. “[The pain] was sudden, sharp – a burning point on the left that radiated pain across my back and down my right side,” Seles wrote in her 1996 memoir, Monica: From Fear to Victory. “There was a scream that was more animal than human. An anguished cry I hardly recognised as my own, even as it echoed in my ears. What is happening?”

Monica Seles’s 1996 memoir differs considerably from her later, better-selling Getting a Grip. The latter, written after her retirement, is softer, glossier – gone is the rawness of her 1996 testimony.

From Fear to Victory records Seles’s trauma, to which has been added domestic tragedy and a growing, bitter sense of estrangement from peers. She writes about how Steffi Graf visits her in her German hospital bed, and the two – once bound by respectful rivalry, now by the violent derangements of Parche – shed tears.

But Seles also records the fact that Graf stays for just five minutes because she must train for her match the following day. This feels like a hammer blow to Seles – it’s the moment she learns that her stabbing has not compelled the tournament’s cancellation. “I was sad that the players chose to act as professional athletes, not human beings.”

This was not the last time Seles would feel a sense of betrayal from fellow players, and she is not shy about recording it in From Fear to Victory. A week after the stabbing – when Parche’s motivations were publicly revealed, and it became clear Seles’s extended absence from the game would fulfil them – the head of the Women’s Tennis Association called a meeting of 17 of the world’s top 25 players. They were asked to vote on whether the association should freeze Seles’s top ranking until her return. Sixteen of the 17, including Graf, voted against this; one abstained.

The proposal was impractical, given the timing of Seles’s return was highly uncertain, but nonetheless the vote’s outcome “devastated” Seles, who felt her peers had now helped accomplish Parche’s desire to return Graf to the No. 1 ranking.

“I did not stab her with all my strength, because I only wanted to injure her,” Parche told police. “This act was her punishment for the past three years. It really upset me that Monica Seles was above Steffi Graf in the world tennis ranking. I think I will probably get 15 years’ imprisonment.”

Parche was wrong about his sentence, and this was another blow to Seles. In a German court, which found his crime was mitigated by extreme psychological disturbance, Parche was convicted of grievous bodily harm and given a suspended two-year sentence. The sum of his imprisonment was the five-and-a-half months he spent in custody between his arrest and the conclusion of his trial. The sentence was unsuccessfully appealed, and for many years Seles burnt with a sense of insult and injustice.

Within months of the stabbing, while in the middle of her physical rehabilitation in a Colorado clinic, Seles was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and her father with cancer. There were intrusive memories, nightmares. She was hypervigilant. The prospect of playing again seemed distant. She obsessed about the idea of Parche finding her again. She developed an eating disorder, which she struggled with for years. Having played so unselfconsciously for so long, how was she to return to that ecstatic state?

So it was impressive that Seles returned at all, but she did and quickly excelled. After two-and-a-half years away from professional tennis, she made the final of the 1995 US Open – she lost to Steffi Graf.

When she arrived in Australia in early 1996, she was followed by a coterie of bodyguards. Seles won the Peters International in Sydney, then the Australian Open – her ninth grand slam title, and the first since being stabbed.

The post-final media conference was a mixture of inanity and insensitivity. Journalists applauded Seles when she entered the room, but when a German reporter asked if she’d ever consider returning to play in the country where she was stabbed, she faltered, wept and covered her face with the brim of her cap. Cameras flashed. “Please, it’s not fair to photograph this,” she said.

Overwhelmed, choking on her words, she left the room.

To read the Australian sports pages from back then is to encounter several things. One is the peculiar condescension to Seles in The Age by Richard Hinds. About the final, he wrote: “What followed was a first set that belongs in that slim volume Great Moments in Women’s Tennis”. He concluded his column thus: “It may not be quite the old Monica, but she is back none the less and everyone wants a piece of her. It’s lucky she has put on those extra couple of kilograms. It means there is more of her to love.”

The other notable quality of the reporting and commentary from that time is how wide and confident the assumption was that Seles was back – that here was the resumption of her former domination after a tragically enforced absence. It can, of course, be forgiven. In the two grand slam tournaments she’d entered since her return, Seles had been runner-up and winner. So natural and abundant did her talent appear – and, with some qualification, so impressive her form since returning – that supremacy seemed preordained.

Sadly, it wasn’t. The 1996 Australian Open was Seles’s first grand slam title since her stabbing – but it would also be her last. She was just 22 and was now already descending the mountain. Still, 30 years ago this month, Melbourne witnessed a historically impressive comeback from a nightmare that we never properly understood, nor respected.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on January 17, 2026 as "Monica’s mighty return".

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