Word: everts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...business at hand: deciding who are the world's finest tennis players. For the first time since 1972, the two top-seeded men and the two top-seeded women in the game survived to do battle on Centre Court for the singles titles. On successive days, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova and Bjorn Borg and Jimmy Connors -great young tennis stars in fine form -treated Wimbledon to rousing games of king and queen of the mountain. When it was over, Navratilova and Borg stood alone...
...women's final between Chris Evert, 23, and Czech Defector Martina Navratilova, 21, offered drama of a different sort. Evert was coming back from her first tennis vacation since her debut as a 16-year-old at Forest Hills in 1971. She won the first of her two Wimbledon singles titles at 19, and has ruled the game with icy consistency ever since. But sated and weary, she temporarily abandoned the sport this winter. While Chris went home to her parents, Martina came home to her talents. Mastering an emotional temperament and harnessing her formidable gifts to new-found...
...issue was determined, for now at least, in a three-set match of alternately brilliant and shaky tennis. It took Evert just 27 minutes to win the first set, 6-2, over an obviously nervous Navratilova. It was the Czech's first singles final, and she played its opening games as if in a daze. With Navratilova leading 1-0 in the second set, Wimbledon fans witnessed one of the oddest turning points in the history of Centre Court. Evert lofted a desperate return high over the net, and Navratilova leaped to kill it. But what ought to have...
Navratilova carried the second set, 6-4, on the strength of her powerful serve-and-volley game. Down two games to four in the final set, she rallied once more while the ever cool Evert began to make mistakes. With the match tied at five games each, Evert's seeing-eye baseline shots suddenly went blind. Three forehands and a backhand went out of court, and Evert lost her serve. It was she, not the temperamental Czech, who had cracked: Evert won just 1 point in the last three games. Martina Navratilova became the new champion of women...
...Evert made no excuses, conceding that she had simply been outplayed: "If I'm going to be No. 1, I'll have to want it more." As for Navratilova, she was ecstatic. "I came through," she said. "I don't know if I should cry or scream or laugh. I feel very happy that I won, and at the same time I'm very sad that I can't share this with my family...