Johnette Howard - The Rivals: Chris Evert vs. Martina Navratilova Their Epic Duels and Extraordinary Friendshi p

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Praise forTheRivals

Together, match by match, final by final, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova changed womens tennis forever. I watched their rivalry with pride: two remarkable athletes, fierce competitorsand good friends. Its hard to remember what it was like for women, and women athletes in particular, back then; Johnette Howard captures it all in vivid detail. The Rivals is must reading for anyone with a passion for tennis and for anyone curious about Evert and Navratilovas utter transformation of the womens side of the game.

Billie Jean King

For all our seeming familiarity with Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, Johnette Howard takes us deep inside the greatest rivalry in tennis history to reveal how it took the two champions the length of their twenty-year tennis war to truly know and love each other and themselves. With diligence and skill Howard chronicles their magnificent battles on the court, turbulent times off the court, and the civil wars they waged within their own fragile psyches. It makes the journey taken, the destinations reached all the more remarkable.

Mary Carillo, CBS Sports

With Chrissie and Martina as the leading ladies, Johnette Howard insightfully takes us on a marvelous tour through the panorama of the rise of professional tennis. She digs well below the surface of a tennis court to probe celebrated psyches as never before.

Bud Collins, Boston Globe/NBC

Finally, here is the definitive, inside-out look at one of the most gripping rivalries and relationships in sports. Johnette Howards insightful and writerly book is the story of friendly enemies, and enormous friends; [the] two women were alternately competitors and confidantes. It places Evert and Navratilova alongside Palmer and Nicklaus, Magic and Bird, and Ali and Frazier, but it also, rightly, sets them apart, historically inseparable and unique.

Sally Jenkins, coauthor of Its Not About the Bike and Every Second Counts

Newsday columnist Howard captivatingly tells the story of how [Evert and Navratilova] came together from disparate worlds and founded a complicated though lasting friendship... This work makes a fine contribution to the history of women in sports.

Publishers Weekly

Howard nimbly alternates Everts and Navratilovas stories like a riveting baseline rally, making a convincing case that their friendship and intertwined careersthey faced each other eighty timesconstitute sports greatest and longest-running individual rivalry. For tennis fans, this book is as gripping as the action at center court.

People (Critics Choice, four stars)

An uplifting read.

Chicago Tribune

Brings a great rivalry to life amid the backdrop of gay rights, Title IX, and the fall of communism.

The Advocate

Johnette Howard reveals the ways in which womens tennis was changed for good by the thrilling competition between Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert.

Vogue

Johnette Howard unravels a lot of mythology about the two champions, presenting the reader with two fleshy, complicated personalities who still very much deserve their place on a pedestal.

San Francisco Chronicle

An opportunity to go behind the scenes and into the minds of two of tenniss best to see what made them tick and what drove them to the heights they reached.

Daily Tennis

Player or not, anyone who follows professional tennis will likely want to get the scoop on two of the games legendary stars.

Ottawa Citizen

It is wonderful to read of the uniqueness of the Evert-Navratilova interplay, for when the last page is turned, one cant help but be moved how two players combined such complications from off the court with such simple combativeness and genuine affection on it.

Tennis Week

Armed with meticulous research and interviews, Howard sheds new light on the rivalry between the two playersbut also reveals the genuine friendship they shared.

Tampa Tribune

An intriguing, intelligent book about two great women, which anyone who loves tennis will read in one entranced sitting.

The Herald (Glasgow)

The Rivals is an invigorating story of athleticism, competition, friendship, and class, as displayed spectacularly on the tennis court during the long-running rivalry between Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova.

HoustonChronicle.com

Expertly written and has equal appeal to tennis buffs and non-sports fans.

nashvillecitypaper.com

Tennis, and the rest of sports, needs more rivalries like this one. And readers need more books like this one.

Fort Worth Star-Telegram

PROLOGUE

REMEMBER MY NAME

She used to sit on the tram to Prague on the way to her tennis lesson as a child, notice the other passengers watching her as she clutched her racket, and think to herself, One day youll know my name. But by the time Martina Navratilova earned her first trip from Czechoslovakia to America in early 1973, she was still an anonymous player on these shores. The iron curtain was still drawn. But she knew who Chris Evert was.

A poster of Evert, just eighteen but already a star, hung on the wall of Navratilovas tennis club in Revnice, a village just outside Prague. Evert was celebrated in the tennis magazines that Navratilovas cousin Martin mailed back to Czechoslovakia after he defected to Canada. Evert was the favorite player of Martinas grandmother, Andela Subertova. Youre the Chris Evert? an awestruck Subertova cooed when she met Evert for the first time, as if Evert were some mythic figure and not her granddaughters friend or flesh-and-blood tennis peer.

Navratilova was just sixteen when she left Prague on a bleak winter day, connected through Frankfurt and New York, and stepped off the plane in sun-drenched Miami. It was her first trip to the United States, and she felt exhilarated. One of the first things she did was pick a coconut off a palm tree near the Fort Lauderdale Tennis Club, where she played her first tournament. She ate her firstever hamburger there, as wellthe first of too many hamburgers, as it turned out. She gained twenty pounds before her six-week American tour was through.

As Navratilova walked across the tournament grounds in Fort Lauderdale one day, her heart leaped. There sat Evert, playing backgammon with the tournament referee. To Navratilovas astonishmenteven if she was gawkingEvert saw her and nodded. A few days later, Navratilova passed Evert again andlo and behold Evert smiled and said hello.

I was excited, I was mesmerized, Navratilova said. Chris was like a perfect blond goddess who was challenging Billie Jean King and Virginia Wade. Before I even met her, she stood for everything I admired about this country: poise, ability, sportsmanship, money, style.

I remember Martina was really aggressive, real emotional, and she screamed at herself on the court all the time, Evert said with a laugh.

Evert and Navratilova played the first of their eighty career matches in Akron, Ohio, three weeks later, to no fanfare. It was March 22, 1973, and Navratilovawho was merely hoping to make Evert remember her namelost the first-round encounter 76, 63 before a few hundred people. It wasnt until two years later in their sixth match, a 1975 quarterfinal in Washington, D.C., that Navratilova beat Evert for the first time. Navratilova was so thrilled, she didnt sleep at all that night. It wasnt until 1976 and their seventeenth meetingafter Navratilova had dropped weight and improved her gamethat Evert, by now Navratilovas friend and sometime doubles partner, publicly betrayed her first scintilla of concern. Navratilova had just beaten her in Houston for the first time ever in a final.