Steffi Graf

The Full Biography

Steffi Graf. Tennis player. Mannheim and Brühl. The girl with the forehand who did what no one has done in a single year, then left the tour while the tour still wanted her.

This is her story.

The image most people still carry is a blonde braid, a red clay stain, a forehand hit so early and so hard that the other side of the net looked late even when it was on time. The year is 1988. The feat is the Golden Slam: the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, and the Olympic gold medal in Seoul, all in one calendar. What the still cannot show is Stefanie Maria Graf of Brühl, a coach’s daughter who was a professional at thirteen, a woman who retired at thirty, and a mother who has spent the decades since building a foundation so other people’s children would have a tomorrow.

She was born on June 14, 1969, in Mannheim, West Germany, and raised in Brühl, a small town that did not look like a tennis factory. Her father, Peter Graf, had been a used-car dealer and a soccer player; he put a racket in her hand when she was a child and treated the game as a trade. Her mother, Heidi, was the quieter presence, a tennis player herself, the one who kept the household when the circuit became the family’s weather. The first pressure was not a ranking. It was a father who believed the girl was the work, and a girl who turned out to be as good as the belief.

She turned professional in 1982. She was thirteen. The women’s tour in those years still had room for a teenager who did not yet look like a campaign. She won her first major at the French Open in 1987, beating Martina Navratilova in the final, and on August 17 of that year she reached world No. 1 for the first time. Navratilova had owned the decade. Graf did not ask permission to take the keys. The inside-out forehand — Fraulein Forehand, the papers called it — was the weapon. The footwork was the secret. She got to balls other people admired from a standing start.

1988 is the year that will not come off the page. Australian Open. French Open. Wimbledon, over Navratilova again. U.S. Open. Then Seoul, on hard courts, a gold medal in a tournament the tennis calendar had not yet learned to treat as a fifth major. No man or woman has done it since. The calendar Grand Slam is rare enough. Adding the Olympics in the same year is a sentence that still has only one name on it. She was nineteen. She did not make a speech about destiny. She went to the next tournament.

The years after the Golden Slam were not a decline. They were a reign with interruptions. She won three of the four majors again in 1989. Gabriela Sabatini took her to the edge; Arantxa Sánchez Vicario learned how to make her uncomfortable on clay; Monica Seles, for a stretch at the start of the 1990s, was the only player who looked like a true second pole. Graf still won Wimbledon seven times in all. She won the French Open six times, the U.S. Open five, the Australian four. Twenty-two Grand Slam singles titles. She is the only player to have won each of the four majors at least four times. She spent 377 weeks at No. 1, a record that stood for both sexes until the next century’s arguments. She won 107 WTA singles titles. She played Fed Cup for West Germany and then Germany and treated the team week as a duty, not a rest. The slice backhand, which the public never loved the way it loved the forehand, was the stroke that kept her in points the forehand had no right to win. The numbers are a kind of violence against the idea that 1988 was a lucky weather.

The tour was not only trophies. In April 1993, during a changeover in Hamburg, a man named Günter Parche walked onto a court and stabbed Monica Seles, Graf’s great rival, in the back. Parche said he did it so Graf could return to No. 1. Seles was twenty-three. She did not come back the same, and for years she barely came back at all. Graf won majors in the space that crime opened and has never pretended the space was clean. She visited Seles. She said the right things. The file still sits there: a champion whose ranking was, for a time, altered by a spectator with a knife. Tennis has not produced a uglier sentence.

Her father’s tax troubles arrived in the mid-1990s like a second injury. Peter Graf was accused of evading taxes on her earnings. She kept playing while the German courts did their work. He served time. She had to become, in public, the adult in a household that had been built around her childhood. The forehand did not change. The face, in press rooms, did. She has spoken of those years as a weight she carried onto the court because there was nowhere else to put it.

You can’t measure success if you have never failed. I’ve failed. I’ve lost. I’ve been hurt.Steffi Graf

The last great run was 1996: three majors in a season, the old weather returning. Injuries — back, knee — had already begun to argue. In June 1999 she won the French Open for the sixth time, beating Martina Hingis in a final that felt like a handover and a refusal at once. She was two months shy of thirty. In August she retired. No long farewell tour. No year of losing in the second round for old time’s sake. She left while the name still meant the final on Saturday.

The turn is the retirement, and it is easy to miss because champions are supposed to be pried out of the game. Graf pried herself. She had done the thing that cannot be repeated. She had outlasted the knife, the taxes, the injuries, and the idea that she was only Peter’s project. She stopped.

The 1988 season is worth walking slowly, because the still compresses it. In Melbourne she won the Australian Open without dropping a set. In Paris she beat Natasha Zvereva 6–0, 6–0 in a French Open final that lasted barely half an hour, a scoreline that still looks like a typesetting error. At Wimbledon she took Navratilova, who had owned the grass. In New York she finished the calendar Slam. In Seoul she added the gold. She was not yet twenty. She went home to Brühl between some of those trips. The town did not become a theme park. Peter still ran the weather. Heidi still kept the quieter house. The girl who had been a professional at thirteen had just done a thing the record book would have to invent a name for.

Andre Agassi had been the other famous face of the 1990s tour: Las Vegas hair, a comeback, a memoir that would, in time, tell on itself. They married on October 22, 2001, in Las Vegas, a private ceremony that the old ads would not have known how to sell. Their son, Jaden Gil, was born that same autumn. Their daughter, Jaz Elle, arrived in 2003. Two careers that had been public property made a household that has been, by design, quieter than either serve. They live in Nevada. They raise children who have been allowed not to be campaigns.

The later years

The years after the tour have been a second profession, and she has treated them as work rather than as a personality. In 1998, while she was still playing, she had already founded Children for Tomorrow, a foundation in Hamburg that supports children injured by war and displacement — trauma care, clinics, a theory that a champion’s name can rent a therapist as easily as it once rented a billboard. The foundation is not a gala with a tennis exhibition attached. It is her civic job. She has kept it that way.

The International Tennis Hall of Fame took her in 2004, first year of eligibility, the way a record book takes a fact. She has played exhibitions — a set for a hospital, a hit with Agassi that the crowd treats as a reunion even when the household is just going to work. She has stood on the Wimbledon Champions’ Dinner dais as a guest rather than as the woman who has to win tomorrow. She has not become a weekly television voice. She has not become a fashion line that uses the braid as a logo. She has, when asked, hit with children at foundation events and then left before the photograph became the point. Agassi built a school in Las Vegas out of his own childhood. Graf built clinics out of other people’s wars. The marriage is two people who understood, early, that the tour will use you until you give it a replacement life.

Nevada is the address they chose so the children could have a grocery store that did not ask for an autograph in the cereal aisle. Jaden has played sport without being required to become a campaign. Jaz has been allowed the same courtesy. Graf has said, in the few interviews she still grants, that the relief of an ordinary school run is a kind of trophy. She appears at Roland-Garros when the tournament asks a champion to walk the clay one more time. She does not sit in a commentary booth dissecting a forehand she invented. Friends from the old locker room describe a woman who will still pick up a racket and will not stay for the party. The foundation’s clinics — Germany, and projects that have reached children from the Balkans to the Middle East — are the travel she still accepts. The travel she refuses is the one that would make her a talking relic of 1988.

Injuries that ended the career did not end the body entirely. She has spoken of the relief of not having to get up for a match. She has also spoken of the strange quiet when the ranking is gone and the day does not tell you who you are. Friends describe a woman who still moves like a player and no longer needs the result. She appears at the French Open and at Wimbledon when the anniversary or the friend requires it. She does not haunt the locker room.

She is in her fifties. The girl from Brühl, the thirteen-year-old professional, the nineteen-year-old who owned a calendar, the woman who played through a rival’s stabbing and a father’s prison term, the wife, the mother of two, and the founder of a children’s foundation are the same person. She has not asked the public to keep her at 1988. She has asked only that they remember 1988 correctly: not as a poster, as a year of work. The 1999 French Open remains the last major she wanted: a clay final against Hingis, a comeback inside the match, a trophy she could walk away with. She announced the retirement in August, at a press conference that had no farewell tour attached. The tour tried to keep her. She had already chosen the other calendar: a household, a foundation, and a record book that did not need another losing second round.

There is no death date on this life. There is a present tense: a Golden Slam that is still a unique sentence, a household in Nevada, a foundation in Hamburg, and a retired champion who left before the tour could write a sad last chapter for her.

After the spotlight moved

It moved to the foundation, the family, and the record book. New players who never saw her live still chase the inside-out forehand as if it were grammar. Seles’s name remains in the file beside 1993; so does Graf’s refusal to treat that year as a clean triumph. Agassi is in the living picture. Jaden and Jaz are the private one.

She came out of Brühl, took the tour at thirteen, did the Golden Slam at nineteen, collected twenty-two majors, spent 377 weeks at No. 1, married the other great face of her era, and then used the famous name on children the tour will never rank. If you only remember the braid, you have the still. If you remember Seoul, the French Open she won on the way out, and Children for Tomorrow, you have her.

Portrait: Mark Henckel · CC BY-SA 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

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