Word: everts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sometime coach named Billie Jean King. She is also, in the far-from- isolated judgment of veteran NBC tennis commentator Bud Collins, "the best American player since Billie Jean." That accolade puts her above the likes of Pam Shriver, Tracy Austin and Capriati's friend and role model, Chris Evert, the sport's winningest player of all time...
...either physical or mental. The prime examples cited are Austin, who twice won the U.S. Open before departing at 21, and Andrea Jaeger, who made the finals of the French Open and Wimbledon before packing it in at 19. Yet the counterexamples of enduring grit can be equally persuasive: Evert, who began playing at the top level at 16, kept going until her September retirement at the age of 34; her equally precocious rival, Martina Navratilova, 33, is still playing about as well as ever...
When Capriati was three, her father Stefano, a self-taught tennis pro who emigrated from Milan, put a racquet into her hands; by the time she was four, she was fending off barrages from a ball machine and was delivered into the tutelage of Jimmy Evert, whose most famous coaching product was his daughter Christine Marie. Last year Capriati won the 18-and-under titles at the French and U.S. Opens and made the junior quarterfinals at Wimbledon...
...finished. I had to save up to make a phone call." Later, while coaching tennis at the University of Toledo, he played in professional tournaments with a group of six stars (Jack Kramer and Pancho Gonzalez, among others) and, in Braden's words, six "donkeys," including himself and Chris Evert's father Jimmy. "The donkeys made a lot of people famous," Braden recalls. "The stars would beat us fast and then go out and see the city...
Many people thought Wimbledon should be Evert's last bow. But after half her life encircling the globe on the tour, Evert wanted to exit at home, with the Stars and Stripes aflutter. She foretold an eventual defeat, if not disaster. Yet from the moment she took the court in the opening round, dressed in royal purple, her departure, like all that had gone before it, was triumph, triumph...