Thomas Muster: From a Car Park in Key Biscayne to No. 1 in the World

On 31 March 1989 Thomas Muster came from two sets down to beat Yannick Noah 5–7, 3–6, 6–3, 6–3, 6–2 in Key Biscayne. It put him in the final, against Ivan Lendl.

He never played it. In the early hours of 1 April he was taking bags out of his rental car when a drunk driver hit it head-on. The car was pushed back and Muster was trapped under its rear wheels. The anterior cruciate and medial collateral ligaments in his left knee were completely torn. He defaulted the final and flew home to Austria for surgery.

"I could have been dead in Key Biscayne," he said in 2017.

The bench

Within weeks, a photograph went around the world: Muster, his left leg in a cast, sitting on a specially built bench and hitting balls from it. The ATP calls it a chair, Tennis365 a bench. Either way, he was practising strokes while he could not stand.

For a player, the point of that picture is simple. He kept his arm and his eye working while his leg recovered, so that when the knee came back, the rest of his game had not gone anywhere.

The return

The sources differ on how long it took. The ATP says he returned to competition at the Barcelona tournament about five months after the crash. Tennis365 counts about six months and puts an exhibition against Lendl in Vienna first, then Barcelona, where he reached the quarterfinals. Both agree that the comeback was measured in months, not years.

In 1990 the ATP named him Comeback Player of the Year, and he reached his first Masters final, in Monte Carlo.

1995

Six years after the accident, Muster had the kind of clay-court season the tour had not seen since Björn Borg.

The ATP adds that the 12 titles stood as the season record until Roger Federer matched it in 2004.

On 12 February 1996 Muster became world No. 1. He held the ranking for one week, lost it, then regained it for five more in March and April: six weeks in all.

What was in the hand

Nothing in the sources we read names Muster's racquet, string or tension for 1995, and we have not filled the gap from memory. His career is about the knee, and the knee is documented. Anything we said about his frame would be a guess.

What it changed

Muster's career has two halves, and the first one ends in a car park. What makes the second remarkable is not only that he came back but that he came back better. His best season came six years after an injury that could have ended his career.

He finished with 44 tour-level titles, 44 wins from 54 finals and a 625–273 match record. Asked later what might have happened without the accident, he said: "We don't know what would have happened without the accident." And then: it has "turned out very well."