Totally epic
Mar. 30th, 2009 11:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
meteordustI've been a bit quiet about my recently rediscovered tennis obsession. But I have been doing a fair bit of reading, and I've been learning some surprising things. (Most of which are probably old hat to seasoned tennis fans, but anyway.) One is that Pete Sampras's much lauded Open era record of 14 Grand Slam singles titles? Is the *men's* record. *Not* the overall record. Which belongs to Steffi Graf, with 22 Grand Slam singles titles to her name. And she is followed by Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, who have 18 Grand Slam singles titles each. Not just one but *three* women have achieved these results.
So I've been reading The Rivals: Chris Evert versus Martina Navratilova by Johnette Howard, and it has been fascinating, both in terms of these two players as individuals and in terms of the era they played in.
On their rivalry:
Even for Chris Evert, an inscrutable athlete given to understatement, choosing the words "pretty good" to describe Navratilova seems comical now, given their eventual fixation on each other and the way their showdowns evolved into the greatest and longest-running individual rivalry in sports history--a captivating, seesawing eighty-match set piece that unfolded over sixteen years, included sixty finals, and is approached in individual sports annals only by Joe Frazier's fabled fights with Muhammad Ali.
"But how many times did Ali and Frazier fight?" Navratilova once asked, knowing the answer: just three.
For nearly two decades, Evert and Navratilova drove each other through storybook realms of pain and glory, epic duels and high-stakes drama. They defined an era. Evert and Navratilova came of age just as women's tennis was rising from backwater to big time, thanks to the whip cracking and cajoling of Billie Jean King. The tennis they played wasn't the polite pitty-pat game of the country club set. They played tough, grimacing, pressure-laden matches. Their lockstep career march, which began in the early 1970s, played out against the backdrop of contentious change: the women's movement; the gay rights movement; the 1989 fall of the iron curtain; and the fight for Title IX, the landmark 1972 federal law that led to the women's sports boom in America and beyond.
The performance standards and personal convictions that Evert and Navratilova evinced influenced female athletes for years to come. For twelve consecutive years, from 1975 to 1986, either Evert or Navratilova finished the season ranked number one in the world.
On their friendship:
How could two such supremely determined athletes indulge in niceties such as sharing bagels an hour before taking the court to compete for one of tennis's biggest titles? And then, match over, how could they return to the locker room together with the winner often consoling the heartbroken loser?
The answer is at the core of understanding Evert and Navratilova's remarkable story: They were two people who fervently wanted the same thing, found the other blocking the way, and ultimately forgave each other for it. They were bound by their athletic superiority. They were operating so far above everyone else on tour, needing to fear only each other, and they realized that they were the only two people who really, truly understood what the other was going through.
A sixteen year rivalry. Eighty matches. Sixty finals. I mean, guys, you are awesome, but it looks like you still have a ways to go...
So I've been reading The Rivals: Chris Evert versus Martina Navratilova by Johnette Howard, and it has been fascinating, both in terms of these two players as individuals and in terms of the era they played in.
On their rivalry:
Even for Chris Evert, an inscrutable athlete given to understatement, choosing the words "pretty good" to describe Navratilova seems comical now, given their eventual fixation on each other and the way their showdowns evolved into the greatest and longest-running individual rivalry in sports history--a captivating, seesawing eighty-match set piece that unfolded over sixteen years, included sixty finals, and is approached in individual sports annals only by Joe Frazier's fabled fights with Muhammad Ali.
"But how many times did Ali and Frazier fight?" Navratilova once asked, knowing the answer: just three.
For nearly two decades, Evert and Navratilova drove each other through storybook realms of pain and glory, epic duels and high-stakes drama. They defined an era. Evert and Navratilova came of age just as women's tennis was rising from backwater to big time, thanks to the whip cracking and cajoling of Billie Jean King. The tennis they played wasn't the polite pitty-pat game of the country club set. They played tough, grimacing, pressure-laden matches. Their lockstep career march, which began in the early 1970s, played out against the backdrop of contentious change: the women's movement; the gay rights movement; the 1989 fall of the iron curtain; and the fight for Title IX, the landmark 1972 federal law that led to the women's sports boom in America and beyond.
The performance standards and personal convictions that Evert and Navratilova evinced influenced female athletes for years to come. For twelve consecutive years, from 1975 to 1986, either Evert or Navratilova finished the season ranked number one in the world.
On their friendship:
How could two such supremely determined athletes indulge in niceties such as sharing bagels an hour before taking the court to compete for one of tennis's biggest titles? And then, match over, how could they return to the locker room together with the winner often consoling the heartbroken loser?
The answer is at the core of understanding Evert and Navratilova's remarkable story: They were two people who fervently wanted the same thing, found the other blocking the way, and ultimately forgave each other for it. They were bound by their athletic superiority. They were operating so far above everyone else on tour, needing to fear only each other, and they realized that they were the only two people who really, truly understood what the other was going through.
A sixteen year rivalry. Eighty matches. Sixty finals. I mean, guys, you are awesome, but it looks like you still have a ways to go...
