Paul Zimmer is digging into the past. There’s a pile of old photos on the table, and each one is hard to bear. It’s been half a lifetime since he shot them, all on the same day. A terrible day. And terrible photos. None of them play tennis – it’s more about murder than sport. An assassination.
You see people panicking. And faces, distorted, shocked and appalled. Security guards pounce on the man with the knife. His gaze is confused, his hair disheveled, the others throw themselves over him, grab him and overpower him. Next photo: A man in a pink shirt bends over the victim, feels the stab wound on the back, the shirt is soaked in red. “I originally studied medicine,” says Zimmer. But in the end he chose a different, more enjoyable career path. And on that day, too, he only wanted to photograph beautiful tennis – and not how an emergency doctor staunches the blood when a madman suddenly stabs a tennis player.
Sports photographer Paul Zimmer once at work
Those: imago sport
It’s been 30 years, but Zimmer remembers every moment “as if it were yesterday”. The images haunt him, he has them burned into his head, digitized in the archive and now on glossy paper on the office table. He captured everything with the eye of the camera in the chaos – he even photographed the clock on Center Court. “6:55 p.m.,” says Zimmer.
April 30, 1993, a Friday. At five to seven, child prodigy Monica Seles, 19 years young and number one in the tennis world, is sitting on her break chair in her quarter-final match against Bulgarian Magdalena Maleeva at the tournament at Hamburg’s Rothenbaum. Behind her, a few meters away, sits Zimmer, he has a good seat because as a photographer he is one of the best in his trade. As a close companion of Steffi Graf and Boris Becker, the native of Stuttgart had his own meteoric career in the 1980s, with prizes and medals, even the AIPS award for World Photo of the Year. Zimmer has already experienced everything – except for what happens in the next moment: A spectator heads for the child prodigy’s break chair: “I thought: Does the weirdo want an autograph now?”
“I’m a fan of Steffi,” says the assassin during the interrogation
But the weirdo is not an autograph hunter. Not even the dumbest would come up with the idea of picking up a dedication for the poetry album during the break. Instead, what happens is this spooky, unreal, unbelievable scene. Zimmer: “Suddenly the guy bends over Seles and strikes.” He rams a knife into the Serb’s back. Zimmer’s photos tell the rest: the chaos, the screams, the blood. The ambulance to the hospital. And how the muddlehead is put out of action by the security people and carried away, “grabbed on all fours, like a stubborn dog”.
“I’m a fan of Steffi,” says the assassin during the interrogation, and that he wanted to put her adversary out of action out of love. Günter Parche is 38, a trained lathe operator from Thuringia, but now he is unemployed and doing casual work. Steffi Graf is the object of his obsession. He is said to have occasionally sent her money anonymously on her birthdays, and whenever she loses, his world collapses. After the defeat of his countess against the new child prodigy Seles at the German Open in 1990, he is said to be having suicidal thoughts, and when the woman of his dreams loses the throne as the world’s best to her rival in 1991, his frustration turns into aggression, and the glowing Fan becomes a fanatic time bomb.
The film “The Fan” (1996) later shockingly addressed this terror of lost passion. Robert De Niro plays a knife salesman who is only kept alive by his baseball club with superstar Bobby. He adores Bobby, and to secure his place on the team, he murders his rival. But when his idol disappoints him afterwards, the devotion suddenly turns to hatred and he takes on his own darling. De Niro got so into the derailed character that he has since suspected: “Stars should be more afraid of their fan mail than threatening letters.”
Female tennis players have repeatedly found themselves in the crosshairs of dangerous worshipers
In real life at this time, tennis players in particular find themselves in the crosshairs of dangerous worshipers. The American William L. longs so much for a future together with Anna Kournikova that he throws himself naked into the sea in Miami Beach and swims across Biscayne Bay to Kournikova’s villa – in the neighboring garden he is arrested just in time.
The ship engineer Dubravko R. also falls in love, the unfortunate woman is the world number one Martina Hingis. He follows the Swiss woman across the world until a judge puts an end to his activities and misses him two years. When the German Anke Huber regularly finds lingerie in her mail and the admirer finally reveals himself intrusively, she scoffs: “Steffi’s crazy is prettier than mine.”
Monica Seles survives the Hamburg attack. But after that she is no longer the carefree teenager, but an injured, insecure young woman.
Seles (recording from 2022) never played in Germany again, she ended her career in 2003. Today she lives in Florida, in 2014 she married billionaire Tom Golisano (81)
Quelle: Getty Images for AYS Sports Marketing/Jason Koerner
During her forced two-year break, she often seems bitter, feels robbed of her crown and says a few uncharming things about Steffi Graf. That is also a curse of this act: that the two best tennis players in the world, as Monica Seles later regrets, “lose the impartiality in dealing with each other”.
After Graf’s victories, the name Seles keeps coming up
Steffi Graf even loses the impartiality in dealing with herself. She quickly becomes number one again in the absence of the Serb, but after her victories she sits uncertain and shy in the press conferences and knows that the inevitable name will soon come up again: Seles. Once, in Wimbledon, her collar bursts: “The questions about Monica are superfluous. I know myself that she’s missing and that’s why I’m so successful.” After two years, the Serbian returns from her post-traumatic stress disorder and depressive moods, makes her comeback and plays again – but never as well as before. “This man,” she says, “has achieved his goal.”
Steffi Graf (right) and Seles often played against each other after the assassination, like here in the quarterfinals of the Australian Open 1999. Seles won 7:5 and 6:1.
Source: pa/dpa/Stefan_Hesse
The assassin Parche is certified in the process of a “highly abnormal personality structure” and limited ability to control. Due to reduced criminal responsibility, he is sentenced to two years probation for dangerous bodily harm. He spends the rest of his life inconspicuously in his Thuringian homeland. He died in a nursing home last August, at the age of 68, and is said to have said again and again: “I only wanted to help Steffi.” Instead, he temporarily drove her into inner emigration. She played and won, but she suffered. “It was horrible for Steffi,” says Paul Zimmer, “she stood there as if she were profiting from this act of a madman.”
On that Black Friday, while the assassin was being questioned and the victim taken to the hospital, Zimmer rushed to the Axel Springer publishing house with the camera around his neck and desperately asked for permission to use the photo lab at short notice. Shortly after eight, one hour after the assassination, the film was developed and the first large images then appeared in WELT AM SONNTAG. Next came Time magazine from New York. And 30 years later, while Zimmer is sifting through the old photos on his desk again, his phone rings. This time it’s the turn of “L’Équipe” from Paris. “Monsieur Zimmer,” says the Frenchman, “you were there at the time…”
“Yes, I was there,” says Paul Zimmer and tells him again from the beginning – that day when the sport became a fight to the knife.
2023-04-30 08:55:58
#Tennis #Blood #Center #Court #thought #weirdo #autograph
