As Monica Seles retires, a look back at how her career might have gone.

Martina Hingis returned to the WTA tour in 2006 after a three year layoff due to foot problems. She managed to work her way up to a year end ranking of number seven and played in the year end championships – very respectable considering her layoff.

At Wimbledon this year, Hingis tested positive for cocaine. In November she announced her retirement for good. I thought about her when Monica Seles announced her retirement this week.

Hingis lost something in the time between her first retirement and her return to the tour. She had the same skills that gave her the nickname “cerebral assassin” but she’d lost the drive that allows an athlete to block out distractions and give up everything except practice, travel, and play. The positive cocaine test was an indirect – and somewhat embarrassing – confirmation of this. It’s as if some part of her admitted that she didn’t want to go through the grind anymore and forced her to finally retire.

Seles left the tour for two years after a deranged fan of Steffi Graf stabbed her in the back during a tournament in Hamburg in 1993. When Seles returned to the tour in 1995, she’d lost her fierceness and that was a huge part of her game. Her two-handed off both sides strokes were ugly, she didn’t have much of a serve, and her net game wasn’t really a net game – she hit the ball as if she were still standing at the baseline. But she killed you off the ground with ferocious power.

She still had enough left to get to four slam finals when she returned to the tour, but she only took home one slam title. Before the stabbing, she was 8-1 in slam finals. She didn’t lose all of her fierceness but it was enough.

I understand it. A man threatened me with a hunting knife in the early 1980’s and would have raped me if I hadn’t pretended to have an epileptic fit. I was sure I was going to die. In the months after the attack, I had to leave the room when there was a story on television showing coercion, which is much of prime time programming, and I couldn’t sit through a violent movie. I moved out of my house because my roommate – a very close friend – refused to lock the back door. He just didn’t get it.

The next summer I visited Rome. I was up on a hill at a popular tourist site that looks out over the city when a random man walked up behind me and scared me so badly that I relived the attack all over again. Seles’ assailant attacked her in the open air on a tennis court. Before she returned to playing – which must have been bad enough, she attended a few tournaments but it was an unsettling experience because she kept looking around to make sure no one was lunging at her with a knife.

Before the stabbing, Seles dominated the tour in Federer-like fashion. She won three slams in both 1991 and 1992 leaving only Wimbledon for Graf to win. Before Seles was stabbed, Graf had eleven slam titles and she’d won a grand slam – all four slams – in 1988. She went on to win 22 slams in her career.

Would Graf have won eleven more slams if Seles hadn’t been stabbed? If not, how many?

Seles got to the final of Wimbledon in 1992 and lost to Graf but it was the only time Seles went past the quarterfinals. Graf would have kept her three Wimbledon titles. For sure, Seles would have eaten up two or three more French Opens and a U.S. Open or two. Throw in an Australian Open and Graf’s total would be down to about six slams at most.

That would bring Graf’s slam total to 17 which is also my guess for how many slams Seles could have won without the interruption in her career. That’s one less than Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert, a rivalry that Seles and Graf could have duplicated if things had gone differently.

Seles faced Graf in two more slam finals after the stabbing, both times in the U.S. Open and both times she lost. I cannot begin to imagine how difficult that must have been for both players.