Chris Evert: Controlled Emotion
CHRIS EVERT might be the greatest tennis player who ever lived. She’s the only professional tennis player, male or female, who can say they won over 90% of their singles matches, in a long career. On clay courts, Evert won over 94% of her singles matches, and she won 18 Grand slam titles.
Nobody ever knocked off Chris Evert in a first or second round match. From the U.S. Open in 1971 to the 1983 French Open, she reached at least the semi-finals of 34 straight Grand Slam tournaments. And players learned she was especially dangerous if you’d managed to beat her the last time you played. No one on the women’s tour was better at coming back from a loss, and beating you 6–1, 6–1.
Her father, Jimmy Evert, taught Chris the game. He’d grown up in Chicago across the street from a tennis club. He captained his college tennis team, and served for 49 years as tennis director for the City of Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Chris’ mother, Colette, was quiet, very loyal, and never had a bad word to say about anyone. Jimmy always liked to be up and doing things; he didn’t like sitting around watching and he got too nervous watching his children play in tournaments; so it was Colette who traveled with her children to their junior, amateur and sometimes their pro events.
Jimmy and Colette were both devout Catholics, and missing church on Sunday was a mortal sin in the Evert home. Church and tennis were the bedrocks of the family. School was always Catholic school. Tennis came first, and then schoolwork. Playing with friends was a distant third, and it better not interfere with their tennis. Chris looked back at her childhood and thought that having fun was treated as trivial in the family. Laughter was a bit suspect. There was work to do; laughter was unserious, a distraction.
Jimmy Evert wanted his kids to compete hard in sports, to use sports to learn how to set goals and measure their progress. He pushed his five children into tennis, and all five played tennis at least at the college level. Jeanne Evert was a pro player for a while, and John Evert was good enough to go to Auburn University on a full tennis scholarship. But of the five children, Chris was always the best, the most gifted.
Chris was also the quietest of the Evert children, the shyest and most private. Someone once asked her about her childhood and Chris Evert said: “I was petrified of people.”
She resented a little how much her Dad expected of her as a tennis player. He started coaching her when she was five. He focused on her obvious talent, and ignored the little signs of resentment. One night when Chris was about 10, she got upset when he told her she couldn’t go to a slumber party with some friends. Jimmy Evert said ‘Well, you just can’t — you have a tennis session early tomorrow morning.’
Jimmy Evert also drilled into Chris that champions keep their emotions under strict control. Jimmy said that any time you show emotion, you give your opponent an opening — to play YOU as well as the game, to exploit your mood and coax you into poor strategic choices.
He told her tennis matches are usually lost, not won; one player leaves himself or herself vulnerable, and the other takes advantage. He promised Chris that if she controlled the tempo of the match, and forced her opponents to make shot after shot out of their comfort zone, they’d beat themselves.
Jimmy Evert also taught his children that you never gloat over a victory, or sulk in defeat. But you don’t forget losing, either. You carefully analyze what went wrong. Was the tempo too fast? Did you fail to understand your opponent’s weaknesses — or did you simply fail to exploit them? Then you make adjustments so that when you meet that player again, the conditions are different.
Over time, Chris found that being very good at tennis gave her a niche, an identity, and helped her to express herself. And she certainly loved winning.
But she still felt this was all childhood stuff. Many of the best 10-and-Under, and 12-and-Under players in Florida morphed into very average adult tennis players — or even gave up tennis entirely. Chris was only 4'11" in the 8th grade. She assumed that before long she’d cut way back on competitive tennis, and that she’d look back on tournament tennis as a core piece of her childhood that she put away when she became a woman.
But then at age 15, Chris beat Margaret Court, when Court was the top-ranked woman’s player in the world. People in Florida youth tennis circles were shocked, and a little in awe of Chris Evert after that.
Chris herself couldn’t help seeing it as a bit of a fluke.
When she was 16, she played the U.S. Open, in Forest Hills, New York. It had been a long trip, both in real terms and symbolically, from the cocoon of teenage tournaments in Florida to the big-time in New York. Colette flew up to New York with Chris.
And somehow 16-year-old Chris Evert, playing with a ponytail and a two-fisted backhand, beat the great Billie Jean King at the U.S. Open. When Chris and her mother flew back from New York to Florida, half the high school turned out at the airport to welcome them home.
Then her high school asked her to give a speech at school about how it felt to play in the U.S. Open. And Chris began to realize that the insular world of tennis was probably going to be her professional career, and that big money and missing out on “normal” life, and being recognized on the street, and having to give speeches, were all going to be part of it.
Damn, she thought. My childhood is over, and I never had enough freedom. But she couldn’t say that out loud, not with her parents and family friends so proud of her, and after all the work her father had put into building up her game.
Now she had fans and they seemed to expect her not only to win every match but to giggle and give out radiant smiles. That never happened. Chris was very businesslike — focused. She rarely smiled on the court. Then she read that someone had dubbed her “the Ice Maiden,” which didn’t seem fair.
At 19, she asked her parents to stay home and let her travel and compete without a family chaperone or cheering section. She needed her independence. A little reluctantly, her parents agreed.
Chris wasn’t the quickest woman on the women’s professional tour; among elite players, her reflexes and foot speed were only average. She wasn’t the strongest or hardest-hitting gal on the tour either, her serve wasn’t great, and neither was her overhead.
And she never rushed the net. (The joke was: When does Chris Evert go to the net? To shake hands when it’s over.)
What she had were impeccable ground strokes, powerful and precise, and a genius for feeling out the other player, finding her weakness and exploiting it. If the other gal had trouble with her backhand, Evert would hit hard, slicing shots deep to her backhand, again and again and again. She also had an effective sidespin on her forehand, and if an opponent showed any signs of mishandling it, they could count on seeing it all match long. Anyone slow to get to the net would meet Chris’ drop shot.
Chris felt she always had to be sharp, had to be hungry, and totally focused, as if every point was match point. Her father had drummed that idea into her — but it also came naturally. It made sense to her. The flip side of her shyness, her wariness of the outside world, was a rare ability to focus on HER world, to focus all of her energy and talents on making the next shot. She ignored everything else.
Once, as a teenager, Chris was playing a match on a court where someone had stupidly left a chair standing just behind the baseline. Several times, Chris ran into the chair while making a successful volley. She won the match.
Afterward, someone asked her: ‘Why didn’t you move the chair away from the court?’
“What chair?” Chris said.
She won the U.S. Open in 1975 and repeated as champion in 1976, 1977 and 1978. She won Wimbledon three times — and 18 Grand Slam singles titles in all.
Evert didn’t believe in challenging line calls. She played in an era when players like Ilie Nastase and John McEnroe made an art form, almost a whole second career, out of blowing up over disputed line calls — but you never saw Chris Evert throw a tantrum on a tennis court. When a close call went against her she might shoot the line judge a steely glare. But that was it; anything more would be unprofessional.
She prided herself on consistency and; of the 18 years she entered Wimbledon, she reached the semi-finals in 17 of those years. But in that sense, her three Wimbledon titles were a little disappointing to her. Seventeen times in the semis, ten times in the finals — and only three Wimbledon titles? This was the greatest prize of all, and she won it only in 1974, 1976 and 1981. All the other years, she fell short.
Part of her trouble was that she played during the prime of Martina Navratilova, one of the great grass court players of all-time. Chris felt she always had to play extra hard on grass, digging out low balls, and she felt a little clumsy doing that.
Martina was the only other player who could say she played at least 20 matches with Chris Evert and ended up with a winning record against her. Chris won almost all their early matches, but Martina won nearly all the late ones, and ended up 43–37 against Evert.
There was a lot of tension between the two of them early in Martina’s career. From 1974–1981, Chris was the #1 women’s player in the world, and Martina was a great athlete who was said to lack the “killer instinct” to put a match away. Then she hired a new coach, Nancy Lieberman, and Lieberman urged Martina to ‘Hate Chris, and you’ll play better.’ The tennis did rise to a higher level, as Martina turned more combative.
Actually Chris was convinced that she was a better, stronger player in the early ‘80’s than she’d been in the 1970’s when she was #1, but tennis fans thought she had slipped because she was now #2, behind Martina.
Evert used to see the tennis star Evonne Goolagong Cawley at tournaments, and Evonne had her two children along with her, and would chuckle as they scampered around the player’s lounge and in the locker rooms. Chris marveled at how Evonne could combine tennis with motherhood. Chris was married to her career.
Chris always noticed how much tennis tournaments changed in their emotional dynamics as they moved along. In the opening rounds, various matches were being played at once, so the attention of the crowds was diffused. The players were loose, and the locker rooms were filled with people chatting.
Then there was a middle stage, as the tournament went on, where the locker rooms began to clear out, the spectators were watching just one match, only the elite players were left, and they were much more focused.
By the time of the finals, the locker room was empty except for your opponent and perhaps a past winner of the tournament who didn’t know whether or not to approach with a greeting or a “Good luck.” Outside the locker rooms, the crowd was buzzing and you could cut the tension with a knife. As she got older, this dynamic seemed a little sad; excellence seemed to enforce a certain loneliness.
Faced with great rising players like Tracy Austin and Steffi Graf, Chris added one new piece to her game: a top spin lob off her forehand. But at age 34, she knew it was time to retire from competitive tennis. Her last year, 1989, was a grind. The mental aspect of the game had always been her specialty and now she found she had trouble focusing. Even if she could find a way to beat Martina Navratilova, Chris knew that in the years to come she was not going to be able to beat Steffi Graf.
The principle of strictly controlling her emotions had served Chris very well on the tennis court. But as a woman, in marriage and other relationships, she decided that strictly controlling her emotions had been a mistake. In tennis, only one player could win — but in relationships both people could, and it made no sense to treat a boyfriend or a husband as an opponent, to probe for his weaknesses, to not let him see what she was feeling.
She married three times — first to another tennis player, John Lloyd, then after a decade, to skier Andy Mill and finally to the golfer Greg Norman, one of Andy Mill’s best friends. All three marriages ended in divorce. After divorcing Greg Norman, Chris felt guilty and sad. The teenager who’d never had a chance to be free and make a mess had made something of a mess of her romantic life as an adult.
Chris has been an excellent tennis commentator for ESPN. She knows how to analyze a match and how to talk about tennis on television. Her commentary is smooth, smart and even, like her ground strokes.
Chris Evert gave birth to three sons during her marriage to Andy Mill, and coached all three in tennis at St. Andrew’s High in Boca Raton. But when her boys preferred snowboarding to tennis, that was just fine with her.