Günter Parche died, stabbed Monica Seles and spent only 6 months in prison – Corriere.it

Günter Parche, the man who 30 years ago (it was April 30, 1993) stabbed Monica Seles in the back, is dead. The WTA tournament in Hamburg was being played and the man, then 38 years old,
aimed at the back of the 19-year-old Serbian who was “guilty” of being a rival of her idol, the German Steffi Graf
.

He brings it back there Bild, which discovered that Parche died in August 2022 at the age of 68, of which the last 14 spent in a nursing home for mental illness in Nordhausen, Thuringia between Leipzig and Göttingen. Parche, a native of Görsbach, ten kilometers from Nordhausen, could not bear the idea that Seles had ousted Graf from the no. 1 in the ranking and he wanted to do something to “hurt Seles so badly that he couldn’t afford to play tennis for a long time», as he himself admitted during his testimony in court for the trial following the assault. He also admitted to having carried out a real stalking of the athlete in the previous days.

The moment of madness happened, as we said, on April 30, 1993, in Hamburg: around 5pm on a sunny Friday afternoon, at the break for a field change of the quarter-final against the Bulgarian Magdalena Maleeva. Parche pushes her way through the spectators, she approaches the sideline and plunge the blade between the scapula and lungs. The clinical damage is relatively minor – a one and a half centimeter deep wound when the blade was 20 cm -, the psychological ones will mark the career of the young Serbian.

Pbefore the bout he had won eight of the previous ten Grand Slams (three Australian Open, three Roland Garros and two Us Open, and the final of Wimbledon ’92). Upon his return to the field After about two years old, he conquered «only» the Australian Open in 1996 (and an Olympic bronze). In 2008, on Valentine’s Day, she retired after a total of 53 victories.

Parche, after two trials, was sentenced to two years of probation for “serious injuries”, while with the attempted murder he would have risked 20 years. And, between the attack and his conviction in October, he spent his only six months in prison. It was indeed judged to be of intellectual level too below average and not socially dangerous.

«…My world suddenly fell apart…. I remember sitting, wiping my sweat with a towel and then I leaned forward to drink some water; the break was almost over and my mouth was dry – Seles tells from 2010 in his autobiography «I regained control. Of my body, of my mind, of myself», Libreria dello Sport edition – . As I bring the glass to my lips I feel a tremendous pain in my back. I whirl around to see a man in a baseball cap, grinning at me. His arms were raised above his head and he held a long knife in his hands. He was about to sink it back towards me.’ And then, again, he recalls what was his good fortune: «The doctors told me later thatif I hadn’t leaned forward right then, I would have seriously risked paralysis».