Monica Seles

Monica Seles (born December 2, 1973 in Novi Sad Serbia) is a former world No. 1 tennis player who represented Yugoslavia and the United States.

She won nine major singles titles, eight of them as a teenager while representing Yugoslavia, and the final one while representing the United States.

In 1985, at the age of 11, she won the Junior Orange Bowl tournament in Miami, Florida, catching the attention of tennis coach Nick Bollettieri.

In early 1986, Seles and her brother Zoltan moved from Yugoslavia to the United States, and Seles enrolled at the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy, where she trained for two years and continued to practice until March 1990.

Nine months after their arrival at the Academy, Seles' mother and father joined her and Zoltan in Florida.

Seles played her first professional tournament as an amateur in 1988 at age 14.

The following year she turned professional on February 13, 1989, and joined the professional tour full-time, winning her first career title at Houston in May 1989, where she beat the soon-to-retire Chris Evert in the final.

A month later, 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 at the beginning of the season, Seles went on a 36-match winning streak and won 6 consecutive tournaments starting in Miami at the Lipton Player's Championships.

During that winning streak she also won the U.S. Hard Court Championships, the Eckerd Open, the Italian Open, and the Lufthansa Cup in Berlin, Germany (defeating Steffi Graf in the final in straight sets).

In 1990, Seles became the youngest-ever French Open champion at the age of 16.

Seles then won her first Grand Slam singles title at the 1990 French Open.

Facing world no. 1 Steffi Graf in the final, Seles saved four set points in a first-set tiebreaker, which she won 8–6, and went on to take the match in straight sets.

In doing so, she became the youngest-ever French Open singles Champion at the age of 16 years, 6 months.

Her winning streak was stopped by Zina Garrison at Wimbledon in the quarterfinals, where Seles had a match point before Garrison eventually won 9–7 in the third set.

Seles then won the Virginia Slims of Los Angeles title against Martina Navratilova and then defeated Navratilova again in winning the Oakland California tournament, in straight sets.

She also won the 1990 year-end Virginia Slims Championships, defeating Gabriela Sabatini in five sets (in the first five-set women's match since the 1901 US National Championships), becoming the youngest to ever win the season-ending championships.

She finished the year ranked world number 2.

She went on to win eight major singles titles before turning 20 and was the year-end No. 1 in 1991 and 1992.

1991 was the first of two years in which Seles dominated the women's tour.

She started out by winning the Australian Open in January, beating Jana Novotná in the final.

In March, she replaced Graf as the world no. 1. She then successfully defended her French Open title, beating the former youngest-ever winner, Arantxa Sánchez Vicario, in the final.

Unable to play at Wimbledon, suffering from shin splints, Seles took a six-week break.

But she was back in time for the US Open, which she won by beating Martina Navratilova in the final, her third Grand Slam title of the year, to cement her position at the top of the world rankings.

She also won the year-end Virginia Slims Championships for the second consecutive time, defeating Navratilova in four sets.

At the end of season, Seles had won 10 out of the 16 tournaments she entered (reaching the final of every tournament that she entered that year).

She ended the year as the no. 1 ranked player in the world.

However, on April 30, 1993, while playing a match, she was the victim of an on-court attack when an obsessed fan of Seles' rival Steffi Graf stabbed Seles in the back with a 9 in knife as she was sitting down between games.

Seles did not return to tennis for over two years after the stabbing.

Though she enjoyed success after returning in 1995, including another major championship at the 1996 Australian Open, she was unable to consistently produce her best tennis.

She played her last professional match at the 2003 French Open but did not officially retire until February 2008.

Regarded by many as one of the greatest tennis players of all time, Seles was named one of the "30 Legends of Women's Tennis: Past, Present and Future" by Time.

Several players and historians have stated that Seles had the potential to become the most accomplished female player of all time had she not been stabbed.

She was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2009.

Seles was born in Yugoslavia to an ethnic Hungarian family.

Her parents are Ester and Karolj (Eszter and Károly in Hungarian) and she has an older brother, Zoltan (Zoltán in Hungarian).

She began playing tennis at age five, coached by her father, a professional cartoonist employed for decades at the Dnevnik and Magyar Szó newspapers, who drew pictures for her to make her tennis more fun.

He is responsible for developing her two-handed style for both the forehand and backhand.

Later, her coach was Jelena Genčić.