This week TENNIS.com editor Kamakshi Tandon and I will be discussing Johnette Howard’s 2005 book The Rivals, about the lives and careers of Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert.
**Hi Steve,
What makes a rivalry great? A lot of answers are offered every time one comes along (or appears to) – contrasting styles, contrasting personalities, complementary games, antipathy, respect, clashing temperaments, similar temperaments, speed vs. power, skill vs. determination, new vs. old, new vs. new, old vs. old, white hat vs. black hat. But the real answer is much simpler: great matches.
It's also what makes great rivalries so hard to come by – you need good tennis, competitive contests and frequent meetings. The Williams sisters, for example, met frequently in Grand Slam finals, as did the 'Belgian sisters'. As matchups, they were compelling. As matches, however, they usually weren't.
On the other hand, almost any matchup between two human beings can become fascinating if the quality of play is there. Borg vs. McEnroe was a great rivalry (maybe we'll get to do a book about that one sometime), amplified by many of the contrasts traditionally cited as its vital components. Borg vs. Gerulaitis had a completely different dynamic: shared friendship, similar looks and a similar lifestyle. Yet it too could have been a great rivalry – a few more encounters like their classic semifinal would certainly have done the trick. The only thing it didn't have enough of was... great matches.
The Rivals has a nice description of the way two players start to catch the public imagination when they keep colliding on big occasions:
All the traits that would eventually characterize Evert and Navratilova's rivalry were slowly beginning to emerge like a photograph developing in a darkroom pan. The contrasts in their games and public images were all beginning to sharpen. their personalities were becoming familiar. Navratilova attacked, Evert counterpunched, hoping to wear Navratilova down like water over a stone. Navratilova was the athletic wonder who sent serves screaming off her racket, Evert the clinician who could have played in a lab coat. Navratilova raged at herself. Evert never let on what she was feeling.
In a nutshell, the anatomy of this rivalry's greatness was having two complex and wildly different protagnonists who clashed so often and for so long that their meetings on the tennis court became a prism of their personal and professional evolution.
The book's tagline is 'Their Epic Duels and Extraordinary Friendship.' It follows through on the second half of that promise: I especially liked the way their childhoods and the early parts of their career are fleshed out by Johnette Howard in the first half of the book. While there's some unavoidable retreading of well-known material, there's also enough that's new (or was to me, anyway) to give the story dimension and a behind-the-scenes feel.
But I would have liked to get more of a feel for the 'epic duels' -- only a few of their 80 (80!) contests really come under the spotlight, and strangely, the number gets smaller after Howard says the rivalry "was about to hit unprecedented heights." To a certain extent, it's inevitable in a book that the on-court suffers relative to the off-court – not only does it not lend itself quite to the medium, but examining matches in too much detail tends to make people's eyes glaze over (I have a premonition that this may come up again). Still, it would have been interesting to get a greater sense of the reception each accumulating encounter received – not only is impossible to see two top players going at it for 16 (16!) years these days, but today's media fragmentation makes it difficult to imagine a sporting rivalry having the cultural resonance of Chris and Martina even if it were to happen again.
One of their most famous matches – the 1985 French Open final won by Evert – is recounted in some detail:
The match they played was dazzling – not for its perfection, necessarily, but more for the stomach-gnawing tension, and the stirring determination they displayed. Later, piercing the details back together was hard for both of them. The emotions were what lingered. There had been so many gasp-inducing shots and disasters avoided by each of them, so many narrow escapes and cliffhanger moments in which one of them gouged out a service break or won a couple of games in a row, and then, as if disoriented by the sudden lightness and shedding of pressure, the distracting thought of victory, each of then would give back a game or two... And the drama would begin all over again...
