EVERT, Christine Marie ("Chris")

(b. 21 December 1954 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida), tennis player and sports commentator whose outstanding record and style of play contributed to the popularity of women's professional tennis in the 1970s and 1980s.

Evert is the daughter of James ("Jimmy") Evert and Colette Thompson. James was a former tennis player who became the teaching pro and manager at the Holiday Park tennis center in Fort Lauderdale; Colette was a homemaker active in local charities. Evert was the second of five children and the oldest of three daughters. A Roman Catholic, she graduated from Saint Thomas Aquinas High School in Fort Lauderdale in 1972.

Under her father's astute tutelage, along with her brothers and sisters, Evert started playing tennis at the Holiday Park courts. Her talent for the game was apparent at an early age. With her father's direction, she developed what became her signature stroke, the two-handed backhand. Because as a child she lacked the strength to hit the shot with only one hand on the racket, she relied on the two-handed stroke and stayed with it throughout her career. Evert also displayed the commitment to discipline and the willingness to practice that marked her game.

By her mid-teens Evert was gaining the notice of the top tennis players as a dangerous opponent. In the autumn of 1970 she defeated two top-ranked competitors at a tournament in Charlotte, North Carolina. One of her victims was Margaret Smith Court, then the number-one female player in the world. Evert lost in the final, but this event established her as one of the up-and-coming players in women's tennis. Her ascendancy continued during the first half of 1971, as she won the Virginia Slims Masters in Saint Petersburg, Florida, in April, and joined the winning American Wightman Cup team against Great Britain.

Evert burst upon the national sports consciousness at the U.S. Open that August. At the age of sixteen she won her first round match, survived a grueling three-set match in the second round against Mary Ann Eisel, and won two more matches before facing Billie Jean King in the semi-finals. Although King won in straight sets, 6–3, 6–2, Evert impressed a national television audience with her poise and all-around game. She became the sensation of the tournament and established an enduring popularity as "Chris Evert," she of the devastating baseline game and the punishing two-handed backhand. Her consistency and calm demeanor on the court attracted fans, as did her respect for the game and her opponents. "I'm very glad that I came along when I did in the '70s," Evert wrote in a 1993 article for USA Weekly. "It was the emergence of big-time tennis. It was still fun; there was camaraderie on the tour." Over the next eighteen years Evert was a model of consistency at the highest level of women's tennis. From 1971 to 1983 she entered thirty-four Grand Slam tournaments and in each one she reached the semifinals or better. For thirteen consecutive years she won at least one Grand Slam tournament annually, a record that still stands and is not likely to be equaled or excelled in the near future. From August 1973 through May 1979 she triumphed in 125 straight matches on clay, the surface on which she was most comfortable. During her career, her ranking never dropped below fourth in the world, and her match record in singles was a sparkling 1309–146.

The Grand Slams were Evert's showcase. She won the Australian Open twice (1982, 1984) and was victorious at Wimbledon three times (1974, 1976, 1981). The grass courts at Wimbledon were not suited to her game, and the British press, which styled her the "Ice Maiden," often provided unwelcome distractions. In the French Open, Evert dominated her contemporaries. She garnered seven titles (1974, 1975, 1979, 1980, 1983, 1985, 1986) as the red clay of Roland Garros Stadium accentuated her consistency from the baseline and the patience and depth of her ground strokes. She also won the U.S. Open six times (1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1980, 1982), and her overall record of 101 match wins remained the best for both men and women players at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Evert earned over $8,000,000 in prize money during her career.

What made Evert such a popular athlete were her two stirring rivalries with major contemporaries in women's tennis and her fascinating personal life. On the court, her first major foe during the 1970s was the mercurial star Billie Jean King. She and Evert met often in decisive matches in the major tournaments. But it was her many duels with Martina Navratilova that became the stuff of enduring tennis legend. Part of it was the sheer stylistic contrast between the two women as tennis players. Navratilova, an immigrant from Czechoslovakia, had an athletic serve-and-volley game. For sheer power, no woman of the time could match Navratilova's attacking style. Evert's game rested on the precision of her ground strokes from the baseline. This contrast of styles and competitive approaches led to a fierce rivalry that kept their fans riveted throughout their heyday.

As Evert later conceded, the physical and mental challenge from Navratilova helped her lift her game to a higher level to meet the demands and give her a realistic chance of winning. Although Evert ended up with a losing record to her friend and rival, she won her share of decisive matches in the major tournaments. In the 1982 Australian Open final she outlasted Navratilova in a searing three-set match, 6–3, 2–6, 6–3. She also pulled out dramatic consecutive victories in the French Open over Navratilova in 1985 and 1986, in matches that had the Roland Garros stadium crowd at a fever pitch of excitement. Through all of the ups and downs of being competitors, Evert recalled in USA Weekly that the two women "used to hit with each other and after the match go to a movie." During the height of their rivalry, the two players became identified with each other. Tennis fans simply had to say "Chris and Martina" to invoke the memories of their great matches and the potential of another encounter in a tournament final.

Evert's private life attracted almost as much press attention as her performance on the court. She had a highly publicized romance with the male tennis star Jimmy Connors, a romance that ended in 1974. In the years that followed she dated movie star Burt Reynolds. Evert married the British tennis star John Lloyd on 17 April 1979. Their union lasted seven years before the pressures of professional tennis led to a divorce in 1986. Two years later, on 30 July 1988, she married Andy Mill, an Olympic skier for the United States. They have three sons, Alexander James, Nicholas Joseph, and Colton Jack, and the family lives in Aspen, Colorado, and Boca Raton, Florida.

By the late 1980s Evert's game showed signs of her advancing age in tennis terms. After an appearance at the U.S. Open in 1989, she retired from competition. "In the last few years, I was trying to get out of myself things that weren't there anymore—the motivation, the single-mindedness," she noted in 1993. Retirement from tennis did not mean that Evert stepped away from the game she loves. She is a tennis commentator with the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) for the French Open and Wimbledon. She operates a tennis academy in Boca Raton, and sponsors a charity tennis tournament. She remains an active leader in the Women's Tennis Association. Early in 2001 she became publisher of Tennis Magazine in what she described as a "partnership" with the popular periodical. Her goal, according to the publisher's letter in the March 2001 issue of the magazine, is "to help elevate our endeavor to a championship level." From this editorial platform, she is likely to retain her pervasive influence over her sport.

Evert is one of the most important figures in women's tennis history. During her playing career she was the most celebrated athlete in the sport. In 1985 the Women's Sports Foundation designated her as the Greatest Woman Athlete of the quarter-century after 1960. Other polls have recognized her as the most famous female athlete in the nation. In some respects, Evert was an unlikely object of so much adoration. She did not express her emotions on the court and her demeanor was always businesslike. Nonetheless, her skill as a tennis player, her coolness under pressure, and her unrelenting will to win won over a legion of fans. In her 1982 autobiography Chrissie, she articulated her guiding philosophy: "I love tennis, I love the competition, the sheer challenge of playing to perfection." The extent to which Evert achieved her goals during her career accounted for her place in the affections of sports fans in the United States and around the world.

Evert's autobiography, with Neil Amdur, Chrissie: My Own Story (1982), traces her life through the midpoint of her tennis career. Her book with John Lloyd and Carol Thatcher, Lloyd on Lloyd (1985), can be read in light of the Lloyds' divorce a year later. Bud Collins, My Life with the Pros (1990), and John Feinstein, Hard Courts: Real Life on the Professional Tennis Tours (1991), assess Evert's place in the sport. "My Love Match with Andy," Good Housekeeping (Oct. 1990); "The Trouble with Tennis Today," USA Weekly (27–29 Aug. 1993); and "Publisher's Letter," Tennis Magazine (Mar. 2001), are examples of Evert's writings after retirement from competitive tennis.

Karen Gould