Word: everts
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...girls with braces and pigtails pounding two-handed backhands, that one tends to forget: until 1971, just ten years ago, there were none. When the U.S. Open Tennis Championships began at Forest Hills that year, there was merely a name in small print on the list of competitors: Chris Evert, Fort Lauderdale, Fla. She was 16, a champion junior player, the kind of promising youngster who is invited to play the tournament to gain a bit of big-time experience while being soundly thrashed in the opening round...
...didn't happen quite that way. Chris Evert demolished Edda Buding, 6-1, 6-0, then beat the fourth-ranked American woman, Mary Ann Eisel, in the second round, saving six match points with finely honed strokes that would soon become famous: cross-court forehands and sweeping, two-fisted backhands down the line. Suddenly she was "Little Chrissie, Cinderella in Sneakers," enthroned on center court. She whipped the fifth seed, Franchise Durr, and Australian Lesley Hunt. She reached the semifinals, the youngest player ever to climb to the final four, before finally losing to Billie Jean King, the eventual...
...decade later, Chris Evert Lloyd is, for the fifth time, defending U.S. Open champion. At Flushing Meadow, she will have a lot of competition for the spotlight, not just from all those teen-age terrors but from the likes of defending Men's Champion John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg, who, incredibly, has yet to win the American crown after nine tries. She has long since yielded her claims to the title of "the youngest ..." to the girls in pigtails: Tracy Austin won the finals of the U.S. Open at 16; Kathy Rinaldi played at Wimbledon at 14; Andrea Jaeger...
...prestigious tournaments, she has never failed to reach the semifinals, winning 145 matches and losing just 14. She has held the world's No. 1 ranking in six of the nine years she has played as a professional. Says Martina Navratilova, one of the few foes to challenge Evert Lloyd successfully over the years: "Billie Jean King built the car, and then Chris drove it faster than it's ever been driven. She got the vehicle and propelled it to the masses...
...winning last year's U.S. Open and this year's Wimbledon, she has regained her top ranking from Tracy Austin. Some day one of her three-month breaks will stretch into a genuine retirement, and tennis will lose a great and gracious champion. But right now Chris Evert Lloyd is at the top of her game-and not ready to yield. "I've been in the public eye since I was 16, and that's hard. But when you struggle with something and come through, it means more. It means more now when...