All this heightens the anticipation for Seles’ return. Every fan of women’s tennis wants to see Graf square off with Selesso Seles has a chance to recapture her crown, and Graf has a chance to erase the asterisk that accompanies her accomplishments of the past 27 months. Hasn’t it been made abundantly clear that no woman other than Seles is a significant threat to Graf? Graf’s own bad back threatens her more than any player.

Graf-Seles stacks up as the one compelling rivalry in women’s tennis, the latest in the line of King-Court, King-Evert, Evert-Navratilova, Navratilova-Graf. (Though Seles would be well served to show some sympathy for Graf. True, Seles was stabbed, and Graf wasn’t. But while Graf suffered no physical harm, she could certainly have suffered emotional harm from the incident. How could it not be traumatic knowing that one of Graf’s fans stabbed Seles because of her? Jodie Foster underwent a similar circumstance when one of her fans, the deranged John Hinckley, attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan to gain Foster’s attention. Unlike Foster, who was able to retreat out of the public eye for a while, Graf has remained front and center on the tour.)

In recent weeks, as it has become clearer that Seles was inching her way back to the tour, a hubbub has sprung up about where she should be ranked; she was, after all, No. 1 when she was forced to the sidelines through no fault of her own. To smooth over her return there was talk about giving Seles a co-No. 1 ranking, and granting her special exemption from the rules of how rankings are determined. But some highly ranked women on the tour, including Sanchez Vicario, balked at this. (Even Graf, who had once supported the co-No. 1 idea, backed away from it at Wimbledon, which must have really frosted Seles.) The pro-Seles forces point out how all these women have risen in the rankings and benefited financially from Seles’ absence, and conclude that these women feel threatened by Seles’ return. I think the ranking issue is a tempest in a teapot. Seles has been gone 27 months; any number they give her is going to be artificial. If she’s worried about seedings, the only tournament where that would matter is the U.S. Open, and like all majors the Open reserves the right to make its own seedings and ignore the computer rankings. If Seles is anywhere near as good as she was when she left tennis, she’ll be in the top five in no time.

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Seles is young enough, at 21, and talented enough to give away 27 months and not have it hurt her. She’s coming back ^before@ her prime. Nobody doubts that her skills are reclaimable. The question facing Seles is not about her ability to play tennisit’s about her ability to put the stabbing behind her and play tennis.

Will she come back as that fabulous, loopy, grunty Valley Girl and all she wants to do is have some fun until the sun comes up over Santa Monica Boulevard? Or as someone traumatized, and glancing skittishly over her shoulder at every changeover? Seles was physically fit to resume competitive tennis long ago; the extended delay was emotional. What happens when she gets away from the protective bubble of the practice court and the hedged-in life, and has to perform in a real tennis match with real (and possibly scary) fans surrounding her? Will she see Parche in every face? Will her psyche hold up?

With Michael Jordan, Mike Tyson and Monica Seles we’re in the midst of a Comeback Vogue to sternly test F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dictum that there are no second acts in American lives. It’s hard to say whose comeback is the most intriguing. But certainly among that group Seles is the only one who seems fragile. More than all our other sports, tennis babies its players. Their every whim is catered to, from courtesy cars to monetary guaranteeseven their demands that the court be as quiet as a library when they serve. Can you imagine John McEnroe and Andre Agassi playing a team sport? Seles was high strung and required high maintenance before the stabbing. (She changed her hair styles and colors so often that Dennis Rodman dedicated the fifth game of the Western Conference finals to her.) From the look of her security phalanx, she’s going to want even more sheltering now, understandably.