AMERICA AT LARGE: On the evening of June 14th, 1949, Philadelphia Phillies first baseman Eddie Waitkus received a note inviting him to meet a young lady at a certain room in Chicago's Edgewater Beach Hotel.
Visions of carnal delight no doubt bubbling through his head, Waitkus arrived at the assignation, but moments after he entered the room the 19-year-old girl in question, Ruth Ann Steinhagen, produced a pistol and announced, "I have a surprise for you," and shot him in the chest.
Beyond fan obsession, no logical motive was ever advanced for the shooting. Waitkus recovered and went on to play a pivotal role on the Phillies' "Whiz Kids" who successfully captured the National League pennant the following year. Steinhagen was indicted on criminal charges, but never went to jail: she was confined to a mental institution for three years.
The episode so intrigued the young writer Bernard Malamud that it became the centrepiece of his 1953 first novel, The Natural. A dozen years after Waitkus died in 1972 without ever having read the book, The Natural was made into a successful film starring Robert Redford.
Al Stump, the Georgia sportswriter whose reminiscence of the baseball curmudgeon Ty Cobb was also made into a film (Robert Wuhl portrayed Stump in Ron Shelton's 1994 Cobb), was also moved to write about the episode. Unlike Malamud's artistic treatment of the subject, Stump's True magazine article on l'affaire Steinhagen cut to the heart of the matter: it was entitled "Baseball's Biggest Headache - Dames!"
During a changeover at the 1993 Hamburg Open, Monica Seles, then 19 and the world's top-ranked female tennis player, was stabbed in the back by a knife-wielding 38-year-old German tennis aficionado, Guenther Parche.
If the behavior was every bit as irrational as Steinhagen's, Parche's motive was a bit clearer. The object of his obsession was not Seles at all, but Steffi Graf. By creating an indisposition to Ms Seles, Parche correctly supposed Graf would be able to reclaim the world's number one ranking.
A German court gave Parche a two-year sentence (suspended on the grounds of "dementia"), but he was never imprisoned for the attack, an oversight which caused Seles to stage a one-woman boycott of German tennis events. "What people seem to be forgetting is that this man stabbed me intentionally and he did not serve any sort of punishment for it," Seles explained two years ago.
The two aforementioned episodes came to mind last weekend when 34-year-old Albrecht Stromeyer, the son of a wealthy Frankfurt psychiatrist, was arrested and taken into custody by New York police, who spotted him watching through a fence as Serena Williams played a third-round US Open match against Nathalie Dechy of France at the National Tennis Centre.
This is the same Albrecht Stromeyer who was arrested for stalking Serena Williams at Wimbledon two months ago. After declining to contest charges of breaching the peace and disorderly conduct on the grounds of the All England Tennis Club, he was released after posting a bond of £300.
Stromeyer had been previously apprehended by authorities in Rome and deported from Italy after harassing Serena Williams at the Italian Open in May. Two months before that, he had materialised at an Arizona hotel where the tennis player was staying and asked to see Ms Williams. When his request was denied, Stromeyer disrobed in the lobby. On that occasion he was charged with disorderly conduct and indecent exposure.
The Wimbledon and French Open champion has been travelling with a bodyguard for most of the summer, and photographs of Stromeyer are distributed at venues where she is playing, which is how NYPD officer Michael Esposito came to recognise him last Saturday. Stromeyer was taken into custody on $3,000 bail, and ordered to refrain from contacting or coming near Serena Williams.
"The bail is so low, I think it encourages him to keep doing what he's doing," complained the player's father, Richard Williams.
Stromeyer has a court appearance scheduled today, and just in case he makes bail, the United States Immigration and Naturalisation Service will have its own representatives waiting in the wings, and has promised to take him into custody and initiate deportation proceedings should he be released on the criminal charges.
At least a couple of questions leap to mind here.
One is that, well, given the fact beyond their obsessive behavior, Steinhagen, Parche, and Stromeyer also share an ethnic heritage, what is the deal with these Germans, anyway? The other is, given the allegedly meticulous security measures in effect as we advance toward Wednesday's anniversary of last year's September 11th attacks, isn't it unsettling people like Stromeyer keep getting into the country?
Richard Williams found himself wondering the same thing, even as his daughters were steamrolling their way to another possible meeting in this weekend's US Open final.
"This guy could have got in and hurt Serena," Williams pere told reporters the other day.
"I don't think Serena takes it seriously enough. She's 20 years old. As a father, it really concerns me."
As fathers, it should concern all of us.
