Shoulder Injury Forces Seles to Quit During Match

With her shoulder hurting and her father signaling for her to stop, Monica Seles quit in the opening set of her first-round match against Kimiko Date on Tuesday at the Chase Championships in New York.

Date, considered the greatest tennis player in Japanese history, is playing in her final tournament and was given a retirement ceremony after the match. She will face Martina Hingis, 16, in the second round.

“There were a couple of shots that made it even worse, and the pain just started shooting down my arm,” Seles said. “All you can really do is ice it and numb it at that point.”

The muscle tear in her left shoulder has bothered her since her Australian Open victory in January, her only Grand Slam tournament title of the year.

Top-seeded Steffi Graf, who quit after the first set of her last match on Sunday in the final of a Philadelphia tournament, had no problem defeating Karina Habsudova, 6-1, 6-4, in 48 minutes.

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Picking up where he left off a year ago, defending champion Boris Becker rewarded his fans with a 6-4, 7-5 victory over Yevgeny Kafelnikov in the ATP World Championship at Hanover, Germany.

After six years in Frankfurt, where Becker celebrated two emotional victories in the ATP season-ending event, the tournament moved some 200 miles north to Hanover.

Earlier, Wimbledon champion Richard Krajicek had 20 aces and defeated Michael Chang, 6-4, 6-4.

Goran Ivanisevic of Croatia had 21 aces in beating Thomas Muster, 6-4, 6-4, in 51 minutes. Muster has seven titles this year, but the Austrian is better on clay and had no chance against Ivanisevic on the fast indoor surface.

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There were no surprises when Sweden announced its squad for the Davis Cup final against France later this month.

Thomas Enqvist, Stefan Edberg, Nicklas Kulti and Jonas Bjorkman, the same players who beat the Czech Republic in the semifinals, were picked by captain Carl-Axel Hageskog.

Jurisprudence

Jose Lind, once a Gold Glove second baseman for the Pittsburgh Pirates, was charged with drug and alcohol violations after leaving the scene of an accident, the Florida Highway Patrol said.

Lind, 32, was “visibly drunk” and naked from the waist down Sunday when troopers pulled him over and found a gram of cocaine and seven cans of beer, said highway patrol Lt. Harry Mofield.

A man accused in the fatal 1993 shooting of former Dallas Cowboy kicker Colin Ridgway walked out of jail, while prosecutors said his trial may not be held at all because of a lack of evidence. Instead of beginning proceedings Monday in Kenneth Bicking III’s capital murder trial, state District Judge Mark Nancarrow reduced his bail from $500,000 to $20,000.

Miscellany

Plans continue for Michael Johnson and Donovan Bailey to settle the argument of who is the world’s fastest human in a race at the unconventional distance of 150 meters.

At a news conference in Toronto, it was announced the winner would get $1 million plus a $500,000 appearance fee and that the race would be held sometime in May in a North American city, possibly Toronto.

Former England soccer coach Terry Venables confirmed he will take over the Australian national team. . . . Glenn “Mooch” Myernick, assistant coach of the 1996 U.S. Olympic soccer team, was hired as head coach of the Colorado Rapids of Major League Soccer. . . . Backers of a planned $750-million domed stadium complex that would seat 110,000 people say they have closed a deal to buy 61.5 acres of prime downtown Las Vegas land for the project. . . . A former Formula One driver, Britain’s Jonathan Palmer, crashed head-on with a vehicle while testing a Honda passenger car on a mountain road in Lisbon, Portugal. The driver of the other car was killed and Palmer fractured his collarbone, arm and tailbone.