TENNIS STAR MONICA SELES STABBED IN BACK DURING MATCH IN GERMANY

Monica Seles, the world's top-ranked female tennis player, was stabbed in the back Friday and slightly injured by a spectator while she was playing a match in Hamburg.

Seles, 19, was sitting during a changeover in her quarterfinal match against Magdalena Maleeva of Bulgaria when she was stabbed in the back by a man wielding a 9-inch boning knife.After Seles was taken to a hospital, doctors said she had a slight muscle tear, which will cause her to miss three to four weeks of tournament tennis. Seles, who this week was returning to competition after being sidelined two months by a viral infection, will now likely miss the French Open, the Grand Slam tournament beginning May 24 that she has won the past three years.

After the stabbing at the Rothenbaum Tennis Club, security guards immediately restrained the attacker, then turned him over to the police, who rushed him away from the stadium. A police spokesman later said the man was a German citizen, 38, from Thuringia, a state in eastern Germany. Police would not release his name.

A police spokesman, Dankmar Lundt, told a German television station said the man is German and said "there were no political grounds" for the attack. Lundt said the man "appears confused" and might be mentally disturbed.

"He said he was a Steffi Graf fan," Lundt said, referring to the German player ranked No. 2 behind Seles. "He didn't want to kill Seles, only injure her to hinder her from playing."

It is believed that no tennis player had ever been attacked during a match.

Gerry Smith, chairman of the Women's Tennis Association, which oversees the professional tour, was in Hamburg.

"I think it's going to have a very dramatic effect," Smith said. "It's going to change the psyche of everyone associated with the sport. We've had threats before and tried to take all possible precautions. Somehow it seemed remote until this moment. It's no longer a threat; it's a reality."

Seles is an ethnic Hungarian who was born in Novi Sad, the capital of Vojvodina, an autonomous province in the former Yugoslavia claimed by Serbia. She has been the target of death threats over the last two years related to the strife in her homeland. But she had received no threats in Hamburg.

Seles has repeatedly expressed her view that sport and politics have nothing to do with each other. She has lived in Florida since 1986.