Monica Seles

Before Monday's verdict, Seles' two-year absence from tennis had been blamed on her grievances about the way the court in Hamburg and the Women's Tennis Association (WTA) treated her immediately after the attack. The last time Seles granted extended interviews, 15 months ago, she spoke poignantly of being a talent derailed at 19. But the most forbidding obstacle to her return to tennis has always been the spectral possibility that Parche, or someone like him, would surface again—outside a store, through a window, across an airplane aisle.

That's the macabre fear Seles lives with. That's the unshakable anxiety that rears up unexpectedly and overtakes her. Everything will be fine for long stretches; Seles' tennis workouts and her determination to get back on tour may even peak. Then something—perhaps just sitting in a darkened movie theater—triggers a fresh rush of uneasiness. "Then she's thinking of the stabbing," says her father, Karolj Seles, "and she goes to pieces again."

Source: Johnette, Howard. Sports Illustrated (April 10, 1995)