The first time Chris Evert went to Wimbledon she was 17, full of innocence and a two-fisted backhand that was just starting to open the world to the St. Thomas Aquinas High senior.
“I remember, gosh, I remember a lot of things of that first time,” she says. “I remember the tabloid press more than anything. I was so innocent going over there, and they’d follow you, headlines every day.
“The first year they couldn’t understand why Chris Evert wasn’t a giggly schoolgirl, because I was only 17. I was like, ‘Because I’m serious. I keep my emotions inside.’ They dubbed me, ‘The Ice Maiden’ and things that were not that flattering.”
Fifty summers later, she’s 67 and preparing to return to Wimbledon in her career as an ESPN broadcaster. She’s neither innocent nor too serious now, and it’s not her emotions that friends first mention with her. It’s her health.
“How are you feeling?” broadcast partner John McEnroe asked at the start of a Zoom call Wednesday.
“On top of the world,” she said.
“I hope that’s true,” McEnroe said.
“No, I’m feeling OK,” she said. “Thanks.”
The ovarian cancer she fought since last December with two surgeries and six chemotherapy treatments, that made her buy a library of wigs for her hair loss — that battle seems under control with her being given a “90 to 95 percent success rate,” she says.
It’s the COVID that hit recently and made her isolate in her Aspen, Colo., home that’s the added issue. It’s been 10 days now.
“I’m just trying to get my strength back up,” she said. “One thing after another was dumped on me.”
She chuckles now, as if to dismiss that idea, but it’s amazing after all this time around center court that she remains as good a story as Wimbledon offers. It’s a comeback story now. More than that, it’s a story anyone can relate to, because everyone’s been touched by cancer in some form. Family. Friends. Maybe themselves.
“Thousands and thousands of people have cancer,” as Evert said on HBO’s Real Sports show that followed her treatments. “I’m just like everybody else.”
That was always the wonder of the Everts, appearing like everyone else, from the time Jim Evert taught his daughters the game at the public Holiday Park in Fort Lauderdale. Younger sister Jeanne played pro, too, once notably winning a doubles match against Chris and her doubles partner, Martina Navratilova.
This was early on in her career, and Chris was so competitive she didn’t talk to her sister for three days — “and we were roommates,” she said on the HBO show.
That was before Chris became a tennis legend, before adulthood and marriages, before children and perspective — long before all the recent sadness to come with Jeanne Evert passing away in February of 2020 from ovarian cancer.
The geneticist who treated her sister told the rest of the family to get checked. Chris was diagnosed with Stage One ovarian cancer. That’s the message Evert seems to want out and why she allowed HBO’s Mary Carillo to follow her through treatments.
Her cancer ultimately was treatable because her sister’s illness allowed it to be detected early.
“Her death saved my life,” Evert says.
Now she’s sitting in her Aspen home, isolated with COVID, waiting to be cleared to fly to another Wimbledon. It’s a tournament unlike any other in tennis — “the only grand slam bigger than the players,” she says with its grass court, all-white clothing demands and box for royalty.
“When I’d walk on it in a final, there was a hush of reverence and a tingling of excitement — something that would explode with noise at any minute,” Evert said. “But you stand there and think of all the past ghosts and spirits. I only do that at Wimbledon. I didn’t do that at any other grand slam.
She says she feels lucky to still have a voice in tennis — “to have a voice is a real privilege to me,” she said. Tennis is just as fortunate to have her voice of class and perspective.
“We’ll see you at Wimbledon in the first week,” McEnroe said.
“Doubtful,” she says, referring to delays from COVID.
“The second week then,” he says.
It doesn’t matter when. It just matters she’s there again. She won three Wimbledon titles in her youth. Now she’s beaten a bigger opponent. She’s still as good a story, all these years later, as tennis offers this summer.
