Getting a Grip Page 10

  With a renewed focus and a rehabbed ego, I felt like I was getting a little closer to that balance. At the end of 1992 I still didn’t have a life outside of tennis, but it didn’t matter: everything else was flowing well, and I told myself that as long as those things stayed perfectly positioned I’d be fine. I’d turned eighteen; long gone were the days when I’d be mortified into muteness if another player talked to me in the locker room. I no longer kept my head down, lost in Duran Duran blaring from my headphones. It would have been easy to blow my career. Money and fame were part of my life, and it would have been very tempting to give in to them. But it was hard to get a big head when I still had to do the dishes at home with my family, clean up after the dog, book my own court times, and pick up my own balls during practice. These are tiny things that sound insignificant, but they kept my ego small enough to fit through the door every time I came home from a tournament. When you are on tour, it is high-pressure and high-profile. Without someone around to keep you normal, you are in major danger of becoming a person you wouldn’t even recognize. If I hadn’t had my family with me, I don’t know who I would’ve become.

  My entire focus was on tennis and I was comfortably chugging along on the tour, still holding the number one position, and had just added a seventh Grand Slam to my tally with a 6-3, 6-3 win over Arantxa at the U.S. Open in September. It was the first time in my career that everything seemed okay and under control. My biological age was starting to catch up to the adult world I’d been thrown into four years earlier. My metabolism was starting to leave the hyperkinetic adolescent realm in favor of the slower-paced adult one, and my hips were incontrovertible proof: they no longer looked like a teenage boy’s. I started getting curves and the press took notice.

  “Monica, are you wearing a different style of dress because your body has changed?” a journalist asked me during a press conference in New York.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your backside,” he clarified. “It’s gotten bigger over the last year.” I was caught off guard and very embarrassed. I tried to laugh off the question but he was staring at me, waiting for an answer. My clothes had been feeling tighter, but I didn’t know it was that obvious. I deflected the awkward moment by saying that I was getting older and I had to start paying attention to what I ate. I couldn’t wait to get away from the reporters and their cameras.

  For years I’d been the scrawny and gangly girl, and my image of her was still embedded in my mind. Even though my body had filled out in the last year, I still thought of myself as a skinny waif. I guess I wasn’t anymore. Fine, I thought, no problem. I’ll just start being more careful about what I put into my body. I was embarrassed because a stranger had asked me about my butt in public, but I didn’t start crying when I got back to my hotel and I didn’t feel bad about myself. It is almost impossible for me now to go back inside that head. Food and my body weren’t my enemies then: I had no idea what kind of struggle lay ahead of me. At the end of the year I won the season-ending championships for the third time in a row. I knew the key to staying at the top was not to get too comfortable there. I remember telling the press, “I hope this isn’t the height of my career. I still have a lot to learn.” I meant every word of it.

  Never—not in a million years—did I think it would end up being the pinnacle of my playing days.

  14

  Derailed

  I never know how to handle this part. There isn’t an easy, antiseptic way to say it. It’s something that was so traumatic, shocking, and violent that when I mention it today it’s like I’m referring to something that happened to someone else. It can make people uncomfortable because they don’t know how to react to it; they don’t know what to say to me. There isn’t much to say. It’s a horrible thing that happened in my life and it irrevocably changed the course of my career and inflicted serious damage to my psyche. A split second of horror fundamentally changed me as a person.

  I was stabbed. On the court. In front of ten thousand people. The main thing people want to ask but usually don’t is: Did it hurt? Yes, it hurt a lot. It was worse than any pain I could have ever imagined. Once I understood what had happened, I went into shock, which is an amazing defense your body puts up to protect you from feeling the gravity of what just happened. The physical pain and the psychological confusion would be too much to process all at once. During the ambulance ride, as I clutched my brother’s hand, the shock shielded me from having to handle my world falling apart all at once. That would come later.

  Things had been humming right along when the 1993 season opened. I won my third Australian Open and had the best time hanging out with my family and reconnecting with an old friend in Melbourne. It was nothing short of a revelation: I could be happy on the road. I’d made a New Year’s resolution to embrace my last year as a teenager, to try to add fun—even just tiny bits here and there—into my tour schedule. I had grasped the concept of going out for dinner without staying out all night. I was reaching the point of understanding the commitment it would take to remain number one while making enough space in my life for the non-tennis-related outlets that would keep my mind centered and keep tour burnout at bay.

  After Australia, I took off for Chicago to play a Virginia Slims tournament, then flew across the Atlantic to Paris to play an indoor tournament. Then I got sick. A relentless travel schedule and too many time and climate changes finally caught up with me. My body shut down and it told my mind, which stubbornly wanted to keep going, who was boss. I couldn’t get out of bed without being hit with dizzy spells. I was sleeping sixteen hours a day, and walking to the bathroom was the most physical exercise I could handle. Instead of pushing through and going to tournaments so I wouldn’t disappoint the organizers, I decided to say the magic word: No. I just couldn’t do it, not without risking my health. I needed comfort and a change of scenery, a place where time didn’t matter and tournament organizers couldn’t get ahold of me. Jamaica was the perfect antidote. In March, Zoltan and I left home to spend two weeks in the sun. I lay on my towel all day long listening to the ocean and feeling the sun’s rays warm my skin and repair my spirit. At the end of the trip I felt like a new me.

  I’d skipped several tournaments while healing myself—a risky thing to do when leading up to the European spring swing—and I wasn’t about to walk into Roland Garros cold. I headed to Germany for a warm-up tournament in Hamburg.

  April 30 was a sunny day with a bracing chill in the air. After seven weeks away from tennis, it was my own little comeback. When you are number one, the press watches your every move, since missing just one tournament can affect the rankings. Luckily I had enough points to stay firmly at the top. I breezed through my first few rounds and was ready for my quarterfinal against Magdalena Maleeva on Friday. The youngest of the three Maleeva sisters on tour, I’d beaten her in our only previous match-up. I was up 6-4, 4-3, and we took a break during a changeover. I remember sitting there, toweling off and thinking, Just two more games. I can close this out quickly and go home to rest. I leaned forward to take a sip of water; our time was almost up and my mouth was dry. Drink this down quickly, I thought.

  It’s strange how the tiniest thing can have the most tremendous impact on your life. Doctors later told me that if I hadn’t bent forward at that precise second, there was a good chance I would have been paralyzed. The cup had barely touched my lips when I felt a horrible pain in my back. Reflexively, my head whipped around toward where it hurt and I saw a man wearing a baseball cap and a vicious sneer across his face. His arms were raised above his head and his hands were clutching a long knife. He started to lunge at me again. I didn’t understand what was happening: for a few seconds I sat frozen in my chair as two people tackled him to the ground. He had plunged the knife one and a half inches into my upper left back, millimeters away from my spine. I tumbled out of my chair and staggered a few steps forward before collapsing into the arms of a stranger who had run onto the court to help. My parents had stayed at the hotel that day—
my dad hadn’t felt well—and I was desperately looking around for someone I knew. Zoltan and Madeleine van Zoelen, a trainer with the tour, were by my side in an instant. I heard people yelling for help, calling for the paramedics. It was chaos. I was in shock but I remember one thought clearly racing around in my head: Why?

  The hospital stay was a blur of police officers and doctors. I didn’t understand a word of German or how bad my injury was. The scene was total mayhem and it was becoming a publicity nightmare for the tournament. On Sunday morning, two days after the stabbing, Steffi came to visit me in the hospital. By then, everyone knew that the attacker was a deranged fan who wanted Steffi back at the top of the rankings. Our conversation lasted just a few minutes before she had to leave to play in the finals. I was confused. The tournament was still going on as if nothing happened? I’d been in a bubble of pain and shock for two days and I’d lost track of time, but I’d assumed that the tournament would have been canceled. The organizers thought differently. That was a harsh lesson in the business side of tennis: it really is about making money over anything else.

  After Steffi left, two police officers came into my room. One of them was holding plastic bags. “We have evidence that we need you to identify,” the male officer said. I didn’t say anything. I was by myself—my family had run out to get some lunch—and too overwhelmed to understand what they wanted from me. I didn’t want to see anything from that day on the court. I couldn’t speak. I just stared at the female officer as she opened one of the bags and pulled out my white and pink Fila shirt, the one I’d been wearing on the court. It was ripped and covered in blood-stains. I felt like I was going to throw up.

  “Is this yours?” the male officer asked. I nodded my head. The other officer opened a second bag. She pulled out a long, curved knife. I knew that knife: the last time I’d seen it, it was being raised above my head. My mouth filled with saliva and I had to swallow hard to keep myself from gagging.

  The male officer pointed to it. “Is this the knife the attacker used?” he asked. There were streaks of dried blood down the sides of the blade. I nodded quickly and stared at a spot on the wall as they packed up my shirt and the knife and left the room. As soon as the door closed, I grabbed a plastic bowl sitting next to my bed and threw up into it. I dry-heaved until my stomach muscles ached.

  My agent at the time, Stephanie, had flown to Hamburg to handle the media storm. The first order of business was to get me back to the States. I needed a safe place to decamp and collect myself. A place where I could breathe without chaos swirling around me. Where I could find out just how bad my injury was. By Sunday night, two days after the attack, I was on a plane headed for Colorado. I was going back to the Steadman Hawkins Clinic, where I’d had my shin splints treated in 1991. I needed the best treatment and I needed people I could trust. Dr. Steadman and Dr. Hawkins were the obvious choice.

  I’d been stabbed with a nine-inch serrated boning knife. It had damaged the muscles and tissues surrounding my left shoulder blade, but my surgeons were cautiously optimistic that I’d make a full recovery if I followed their instructions:

  • No activity for five weeks. My shoulder was to remain immobile other than massaging and gentle stretching.

  • After three weeks, we’d start assessing how much rotation I had in my shoulder. From there, we’d create a rehab plan to get my shoulder as strong and agile as possible.

  • If all went perfectly well, I might be able to be back in time for the U.S. Open in August, although playing in that tournament without any warm-up tournaments would not be a good idea.

  I’d left as the number one and I wasn’t going to accept going back to the tour if I wasn’t at that level again. I wasn’t going to go out in the first round. Just taking a week off of conditioning dramatically affected my game, and now I’d be missing several months of elite level training. It was going to take a toll. If I made it back in time for the U.S. Open, great; if not, at least I’d be back in serious tournament shape by the end of the year.

  15

  Another Hit

  During that first week in Vail, I couldn’t move my arm but I let myself be filled with little rushes of hope that I would make a full recovery and be back to my old self in a matter of months. I think I was running on adrenaline: the enormity of what had happened to me in Hamburg hadn’t sunk in yet.

  Within a week of my stabbing, a meeting of seventeen of the top twenty-five players was called in Rome. They were asked to vote on whether or not to freeze my ranking while I recuperated. Nobody knew how long it would be—two weeks, two months, two years (or more, as it turned out)—and they all voted with their business hats on. Every player except for Gaby Sabatini, who abstained, voted against freezing it. I was hurt when I heard the news, but from a business standpoint I shouldn’t have been surprised. Going up one spot in the ranking system could translate to big money and new sponsorships. People were going to make a lot of money while I was away. A sponsor deal I had been close to signing before the stabbing was yanked and given to Steffi, the new number one. Like the decision not to cancel the tournament, it wasn’t personal—it was business. But it was hard to take when the wound in my back was still fresh.

  Then I was dealt some of the worst news of my life. There was a reason my dad hadn’t felt well enough to go to my match on that fateful day in Hamburg. When he and my mom joined me in Vail the day after my arrival, he was still feeling sick. His color was bad and he looked weak. Dr. Steadman immediately knew there was something wrong. He told him to go to an internist to have blood work done as soon as possible. My dad, an old-school guy who hated going to doctors and couldn’t stand having a fuss made over him, finally agreed to get checked out. It was prostate cancer. I’d just been stabbed and now my dad had been handed a grim diagnosis. I was devastated. It was like some sort of sick joke. My dad flew to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota for top-notch care. The plan was aggressive: immediate surgery followed by radiation therapy. All of this happened in the first few weeks following the stabbing.

  While I was trying to digest what was happening to my dad, more details about my attacker came out. His name was Gunther Parche, a thirty-eight-year-old unemployed German citizen who had been obsessed with Steffi Graf for years. He’d sent her disturbing fan letters and envelopes of money, instructing her to buy herself a birthday present. His letters were signed “freunde für ewig”—“friends forever.” He had pictures of her covering the walls of his room. In 1990, I beat Steffi at the Lufthansa Cup in Berlin. My victory infuriated him and he began to follow every step of my career. When I knocked Steffi out of the number one position, his obsession cranked up and, according to a psychiatric evaluation, he was determined “to teach Monica Seles a lesson.” He desperately wanted Steffi back at the top of the tennis rankings, stating that I was “not pretty. Women shouldn’t be as thin as a bone.” His life became devoted to finding a way to take me out of the game. In Hamburg he accomplished his goal. But I had unwavering faith that justice would be served, so I let the police department and the court system in Hamburg do their jobs without any interference from me.

  The unknown can be worse than the known, and in the spring of 1993 I felt like I didn’t know a thing. I was sick with anxiety over my father and over my playing career. In Vail, I did a lot of waiting by the phone to get updates from my parents in Minnesota. My dad’s surgery had gone well and he was undergoing chemotherapy. I wanted to be with them but I had to heal myself first. The phone would have to be our lifeline.

  In between my physical therapy sessions, I killed a lot of time by watching television. I’d been at the clinic for just over a month and the French Open was going on. As I watched Mary Joe and Steffi battle it out in the final, I was sick with frustration that I was not there. I was supposed to be on center court defending my title for the fourth year in a row. When Steffi held the championship trophy above her head, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking, That should’ve been me. A month later she was holding the sterling sil
ver Rosewater Dish above her head at Wimbledon and I thought, He did it. He got his wish. She was back to being number one and I was struggling to hold my arm above shoulder height.

  For two months I’d been funneling my frustration into my physical therapy, attacking it with the same intensity and focus I brought to all of my matches. I was meeting with therapists for four hours a day, one session in the morning and one in the afternoon. I was being put through painful mobility exercises and countless muscle-strengthening workouts using Thera-Bands, those long, wide strips of soft plastic that pack a ton of resistance. By August, I was right on track for making a comeback before the end of the year. But watching those two Grand Slams go on without me was excruciating. I hadn’t heard from any player since I arrived in Vail, and although I’d gotten a crash course in the “Tennis is a business” lesson, it still hurt. It was like I didn’t matter, like the stabbing had never happened. I’d gone from being on the A-list to being invisible. I’d gone from winning Grand Slams to struggling to swing a tennis racket. Instead of staying motivated, I started to feel listless. The inner drive that had been my constant companion since I was five years old began to disappear.

  An integral part of my rehab revolved around my cardio sessions. I had to keep up my endurance in order to make a comeback. I continued with my therapy, but I started finding excuses for avoiding the treadmill. I’d never made up an excuse in my entire life and now I was making them daily. Even ten minutes of walking was torture. I just didn’t want to do it. What was wrong with me?

  There was a problem that no CAT scan or MRI readout could diagnose. Darkness had descended into my head and it was going to stay awhile. No matter how many ways I analyzed my situation, I couldn’t find a bright side. I could play again? Great. Maybe I didn’t even want to play again. I was still in shock, still waiting to wake up and think, That was an awful nightmare. Then I’d get out of bed, walk down to the kitchen, and see my perfectly healthy, strong dad sitting there reading the morning paper and sipping his coffee.