Evert Beats Navratilova.

Evert Beats Navratilova. During much of the 1970s and 1980s, American tennis player Chris Evert competed against Martina Navratilova, the Czechoslovakian player who defected to the United States, for the top ranking in women's tennis. Their battle at the 1985 French Open is detailed here. . Evert Beats Navratilova No list of the greatest women tennis players would be complete without the inclusion of Chris Evert. Her credentials are impeccable. During a career that spanned from 1972 to 1989 Evert won more than 1300 matches and posted a winning percentage of .900--the best in tennis history. Evert claimed 18 Grand Slam singles championships (third-best in women's tennis history when she retired in 1989), and she won at least one Grand Slam singles title for 13 years in a row. Evert's total of 157 career singles titles stood as a record until it was broken in 1992 by Martina Navratilova. From August 1973 to May 1979, Evert won a record 125 consecutive matches on clay. She won more matches at the United States Open--101--than any player, male or female. From 1972 until her retirement she never ranked lower than number four in the world. Whether one considers her the greatest player or not, Chris Evert was undisputedly the most popular of the great women players. "The United States has never before had a sports heroine quite like Chris Evert Lloyd," wrote Herbert Warren Wind in the New Yorker in 1986. "What is it about [Evert] that makes her so special? To begin with there is her awesome record.... And even when she was struggling, her respect for the game of tennis took precedence over her frustration.... She had the character to place sportsmanship above triumph and disaster." One match that stands above the rest is her 1985 French Open triumph over arch rival and close friend Navratilova. The three-set thriller helped Evert reclaim the number-one position in women's tennis, a ranking she had lost in 1982. The match was one of the most memorable matches in the rivalry between the two players. The two began as tennis partners. Following Navratilova's defection to the United States from Czechoslovakia in 1975, she teamed with Evert to win the 1975 French Open doubles championship and the Wimbledon doubles the following year. Although they once played together, the two women competed against each other to become the top-ranking player in women's tennis. For a time Evert was on top. Evert held the number-one ranking through the first half of 1978, for most of 1979, and from November 1980 until she was knocked down to second in May 1982 by Navratilova. Afterward, Navratilova seemed unbeatable. Just before their match in the finals of the 1985 French Open, Navratilova had beaten Evert in 13 of their 14 previous head-to-head meetings (13 straight before Evert ended Navratilova's streak early in 1985 in a tournament at Key Biscayne, Florida). Because Evert had occupied the number-two ranking for so long, she began to question how much longer she would play. "I was becoming comfortable being No. 2," she told the New York Times later that year. "I even stopped looking at the rankings." The 1985 French Open, however, proved a turning point for Evert although not without some effort. In the opening set of the finals, Evert breezed to a relatively easy 6-3 win and then staked herself to a 4-2 lead in the second. But Navratilova fought back to take the seventh game after trailing 15-40. The second set reached 6-6, and Navratilova outlasted Evert in the tiebreaker to even the match at one set apiece. In the deciding set Evert raced to a 5-3 lead and served for the match once during the 9th game, but Navratilova took both the 9th and 10th games to knot the set at 5-5. In the New Yorker, Herbert Warren Wind described the conclusion of the match. "[Evert] needed all her pertinacity to regain the initiative. Trailing love-40 in the 11th game, she managed to mount a rally and eventually pulled the game out. In the 12th game, Navratilova moved to game point on her serve, but [Evert] held her off, got to match point herself, and won it by moving swiftly across the court to a sliced backhand approach shot that Navratilova had hit and whipping a backhand down the line." The final tally was 6-3, 6-7, 7-5, in favor of Evert. The victory was especially sweet for Evert. It lifted her back to the number-one ranking (a position that she held for another five months), and it marked the beginning of the final flurry of her great career. She reached the finals of Wimbledon that year, and in 1986 she topped Navratilova at the French Open once again. The championship--her last at a major tournament--gave her at least one Grand Slam title in 13 straight years. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.