You want to meet an opponent who draws you nearer in mutual understanding? Try having cancer at the same time. At the ages of 68 and 66, respectively, Evert and Navratilova have found themselves more intertwined than ever, by an unwelcome factor. “It’s been up and down, the friendship,” Evert says. Aside from blood kin, Navratilova points out, “I’ve known Chris longer than anybody else in my life, and so it is for her.” Lately, they have never been closer - a fact they refuse to cheapen with sentimentality. They have known each other for 50 years now, outlasting most marriages. “She knew me better than I knew me,” Navratilova says. No one else could possibly understand it. And afterward they would return to that small room of two, where they showered and changed, observing with sidelong glances the other’s triumphalism or tears, states beyond mere bare skin. Then they would play a match that seemed like a personal cross-examination, running each other headlong into emotional confessions, concessions. They waited together, sometimes ate together and entered the arena together. For so many years, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova were almost invariably the last two, left alone in a room so empty yet intimate that they could practically hear what was inside the other’s chest. At first the locker room is a hive of 128 competitors, milling and chattering, but each day their numbers ebb, until just two people are left in that confrontational hush known as the final. There is an audible rhythm to a Grand Slam tennis tournament, a thwock-tock, tock-thwock of strokes, like beats per minute, that steadily grows fainter as the field diminishes. From a Washington Post story by Sally Jenkins headlined “”Bitter rivals.
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