I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Hope I didn’t forget anybody…
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Chris Evert [USA]Born: 21 December 1954
Career: 1970-89
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1975)
Peak Elo rating: 2,451 (1st place, 1976)
Major singles titles: 18
Total singles titles: 157
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Chris Evert always had a game plan. More than perhaps any player before or since, she stuck with it.
In the 1986 French Open final, she met Martina Navratilova for the 69th time. Navratilova had taken the upper hand in the rivalry, winning 19 of 21 meetings in a span of three-and-a-half years. At least Evert still had an edge on clay. She was the defending champion in Paris. Navratilova had won the French title in 1984, but that was the outlier. Neither woman would ever forget a 1981 match on Florida dirt that Chrissie won 6-0, 6-0.
The trick was to pin Martina to the baseline and force her to hit backhands. It was no secret: Navratilova’s one-hander had improved enormously, but it was still her more fragile side. No one could expose a weakness like Evert. She would spend all day searching for cracks in her opponent’s backhand, if that’s what it took.
“Chris played points like a siege war during the Middle Ages,” said long-time tour player Julie Heldman.
That day in Paris, Evert slowly battered her rival into submission. On one point, she hit 15 consecutive shots to the Navratilova backhand. Over the entire match, she hit 77% of her forehands cross-court. Not simply in the general direction of Martina’s left-handed backhand–into the corner to force a backhand reply.
Chrissie so nullified Navratilova’s game that the final winner tally was in her favor. Evert, the conservative baseliner, hit 31 winners. Martina, the frenetic serve-and-volleyer, managed only 29.
The 31-year-old American won the match, 2-6, 6-3, 6-3. With it, she secured her 18th and final career major title.
Evert played three more years after that. Even in her declining years, only a handful of women survived the siege. She reached eight semi-finals in her final eleven majors. In her last seven matches as a pro, she defeated three members of the Tennis 128: Conchita Martínez, Jana Novotná, and a young Monica Seles. Nearly two decades after she first rocked Forest Hills as a 16-year-old sensation, the game plan still worked.
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Evert’s legacy will forever be tied up with Navratilova. The two women are roughly the same age, and they towered over the first 15 years of the WTA tour like no other duo. They played each other 80 times, 14 of them in major finals.
Chrissie does well by the comparison. Martina is unquestionably one of the very best of all time, and they roughly split their record-setting number of encounters. Both women collected 18 major singles titles. The netrushing lefty posted more than her share of winning streaks and near-undefeated seasons, but it was Chris who went nearly six years without a loss on clay, a stretch of 125 matches.
Viewing Evert through the prism of the rivalry, though, misses the point. Martina was an outstanding player by 1975, the year she defected from Czechoslovakia. The two women met eleven times that year, five of them in finals. But Navratilova didn’t draw even with the American until the summer of 1978, and it took another year for her to pull ahead.
Chrissie reigned over a crowded field. Between 1971 and 1979, she also grappled with Billie Jean King, Margaret Court, Evonne Goolagong, and–at the end of that span–a young Tracy Austin. She struggled against Nancy Richey, a veteran baseliner who did everything the youngster did, only a bit better.
Evert held off those rivals, and in the process, she came to define the sport. She arrived at the 1971 US Open as an unknown in pigtails, a 16-year-old clay-courter getting her first taste of the big time. She saved six match points in the second round to upset Mary Ann Eisel, then advanced to the semis on the back of wins against Françoise Dürr and Lesley Hunt. Billie Jean stopped her there, but it took an inspired performance and all the veteran wiles King had accumulated in more than a decade on the circuit.
The fans fell in love immediately. She was “Little Miss Sunshine,” “Cinderella in Sneakers.” Fellow players weren’t so sure. Chrissie seemed standoffish, and she had a bad habit of beating her elders.
One star had no doubts at all. Billie Jean knew that she couldn’t lose to the newcomer–it would make her entire fledgling Virginia Slims tour look bad. But she also recognized that the unsmiling girl from Florida held the future in the palm of her hand. “That kid is our next superstar!” King said. “She’s the one! She is it!”
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The Evert game was based on rock-solid groundstrokes, including a two-handed backhand that launched a million imitations.
Chrissie wasn’t the first player on tour with a double-hander; Peaches Bartkowicz and Australian standout Jan Lehane O’Neill got there first. But Evert was the woman who proved it could be a devastating weapon, more than just a stopgap for little girls who weren’t strong enough to hold the racket with one hand. It didn’t hurt that Björn Borg and Jimmy Connors came along at the same time to drive the message home.
Evert’s groundstrokes, in turn, were based on unshakeable fundamentals. Chris’s father Jimmy was a national-level competitor turned coach. He began teaching Chrissie when she was six years old. He believed in the basics: feet set, racket back, follow through. There was more to it than that, but when things went off course, he always went back to square one.
You can see the legacy of Jimmy Evert in any match video or highlight reel from Chrissie’s career. She’s always in position. She’s always ready. We often hear players talk about the game slowing down for them; with Evert, you can watch as she plays a more relaxed brand of tennis than the woman on the other side of the net. Only Navratilova could consistently rush her, and that was far in the future.
The result of that impeccable preparation is that Chris could do whatever she wanted with the ball. Herbert Warren Wind wrote in a 1986 profile:
She reminds one of a frontiersman sighting down the barrel of his rifle at a distant object when she fastens her eye on the approaching ball for what seems like several full seconds before hitting it in the center of her racquet and drilling it back over the net.
She picked a spot, and she rarely missed. Against a netrusher, she painted the lines. One journalist wrote in 1975, “It seems that Evert’s ground strokes land only within a two-foot-wide strip on either side of the court.” Facing a fellow baseliner, she nudged her opponent out of position, an inch at a time if necessary.
Evert’s precision was so ingrained that she didn’t understand it when other players couldn’t do the same. No one wanted to practice with her–they were “petrified,” to use Billie Jean’s word. She would ask a sparring partner to feed her balls in some particular spot. When the human inevitably proved inferior to a ball machine, Chrissie would just glare.
No one could glare like Chris Evert.
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When the public got to know Chrissie a little better, the love affair cooled. The other thing Jimmy Evert taught his daughter was to keep her emotions in check. She didn’t throw tantrums or even berate herself aloud. A bad line call elicited a raised eyebrow, at most.
Chris’s imperturbability kept fans at a distance. It also led to a new set of nicknames: “Little Miss Poker Face,” “Ice Maiden,” and “Little Miss Metronome.”
If you haven’t noticed already, there’s more than a passing resemblance between Evert and the player right behind her on my list, Helen Wills. A half-century earlier, Wills was the original Poker Face; others called her the Ice Queen. Opponents said that facing her was like playing a machine. Both women set fashion trends and graced the covers of national magazines.
Evert, like her predecessor, was as strong between the ears as she was in the right arm. “Concentrating was just something I always had,” Chrissie told biographer Johnette Howard. “On every point.”
Virginia Wade faced Evert more often than anyone else save Navratilova. She won just 6 of 46 meetings. “Her mind is what made her great,” said Wade.
Fans can learn to admire a strong mind, but they only fall in love when an idol shows a glimpse of underlying humanity, some sign of weakness. Starting in 1973, there wasn’t much of that. Evert won ten titles as a 19-year-old and handed Margaret Court her only defeat that year at a major. From 1974 to 1978, she was even better. She won at least 93% of her matches in each of those five campaigns, including two French Opens, two Wimbledons, and four straight US Opens.
Evert, understandably, got sick of having the crowd against her for every match. Abroad, fans backed their own. At home, well, Americans love an underdog. Between 1972 and 1980, she played 24 finals against Evonne Goolagong, whose unpredictability charmed the fans that Evert left cold.
While it wasn’t ideal, Chrissie could always play for herself. In 1976, perhaps her best season of all, Sports Illustrated asked her what appealed to her so much about tennis. “The winning,” she said. “I always liked the winning.”
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Evert never stopped the winning. She picked up at least one grand slam singles title every year from 1974 to 1986, an unbelievable 13 straight seasons. But the victories did slow down a bit.
Ted Tinling, the dress designer who spent six decades around women’s tennis, said in 1981, “A woman champion is hard-pressed to survive more than six years.” He even pointed to Wills as an example of a superstar who faded. Chrissie would charge through that barrier, but in the late 1970s, right around that six-year mark, she hit some bumps.
Struggling after a loss to Wade at Wimbledon in 1977, Evert took a four-month sabbatical before rejoining the tour in March 1978. She took another break in early 1980, dealing with both a new crop of contenders and the challenge of mixing a full-time tennis career with her recent marriage to British player John Lloyd.
The main problem, on court, was Tracy Austin. Evert faced her teenage clone five times in 1979 and beat her only once. One of those losses ended the 125-match clay court winning streak. Another prevented her from picking up her fifth straight US Open title. Austin’s steadiness tested even Chrissie’s patience. One reporter claimed that the two women slogged through 28 strokes per point for an entire match. I’m pretty sure that’s wrong, but the Match Charting Project has documented that the average rally length of the 1979 US Open final exceeded nine shots. That’s long enough to make most people question their career choices.
At the same time, Navratilova was getting better. Martina lost weight, put the stress of defection and statelessness behind her, and developed an increasingly sturdy backhand. Evert lost the Wimbledon final to the lefty in both 1978 and 1979.
Early in her career, Evert often said that she imagined herself playing for only a few years before settling down and having a family. The more titles she won, the murkier that timetable became. But when Chris left the tour in 1980, it wasn’t entirely clear she’d be coming back.
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We know now that Evert’s career was only half over. Not only did she return, she lost only three matches between May and November. She won the 1980 French Open–her fourth–and beat Austin en route to a US Open crown as well.
She didn’t lose on clay all year. Her 125-match win streak between 1973 and 1979 is the headline number, but even more impressive to me is what came next. After losing to Austin at the 1979 Italian, Chrissie won another 64 in a row.
Austin got hurt, and her career was essentially finished. Andrea Jaeger briefly arose as a challenger–she beat Chris at Roland Garros in 1982–but her body didn’t hold up, either. A new crop of starlets was only a few years away, but in the meantime, it was the Chrissie and Martina show. In 1984, Navratilova went 78-2. Evert’s more modest mark of 75-8 was deceptive: six of her eight losses were to Martina.
Chris eventually got her rival back in her sights. She regained the number one position on the WTA computer in mid-1985, though my Elo ratings insist that Martina never gave up the prime spot between 1982 and early 1987. Evert picked up her last two French Open titles against Navratilova in 1985 and 1986 and added four more victories against the lefty in the two years after that. When Chrissie retired in mid-1989, she remained among the top four on the official ranking list.
Gradually, through bumpy years on and off the court–not to mention an unfathomable ten runner-up finishes to Navratilova at majors–the tennis world learned to look past the ice. Fellow players had long known that the champion had a wicked sense of humor. That side of her finally–if only occasionally–popped out in public.
Most of all, after nearly two decades in the spotlight, Evert’s strongest qualities were recognized for what they had always been. Emotionlessness sounds bad, if you put it like that. Call it implacability, and you start to understand how she won so many matches, for so many years.
There’s another near-synonym for the quality that her father drummed into her: dignity. Ted Tinling called Chris “the most gracious world champion I’ve ever seen.”
In 1976, named Sportswoman of the Year by Sports Illustrated, Evert admitted her game wasn’t yet perfect. But: “Mentally I don’t think I could get much tougher. I’d just crack.” While she might not have ever gotten any tougher, the nerves of steel kept her going for twelve more years. There were a couple of ripples, but she never did crack.
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