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The Rivals: Chris Evert vs. Martina Navratilova: Their Epic Duels and Extraordinary Friendship
By Johnette Howard
Broadway Books (cover: $24.95; Amazon: $16.47)

Venus vs. Serena? Anticlimactic to the point of painfully boring. Clijsters vs. Henin-Hardenne? Not feisty enough. Anyone vs. Davenport? Please. The Williams sisters vs. Sharapova? Still too early to tell.



In 1999, when Venus Williams started her climb to the top of women’s tennis, she and Martina Hingis looked as if they might offer a rivalry to savor. The diminutive Swiss’ tart tongue paired with her geometrically pinpoint baseline game versus the Amazonian Venus, with her aloof manner and extraordinary power, was a dream matchup for WTA officials and fans alike. And the snarkiness of both the players and their loony-tunes parents in the locker room and the press just fanned the flames. But once Venus won Wimbledon in 2000, Hingis had pretty much faded into the background, a victim of injury and the explosive power that’s now de rigueur on the women’s side. Still, the two, along with Serena Williams and Anna Kournikova, made for some good, albeit brief, tennis theater.

Oh, how desperate we are for something even the least little bit resembling the titanic 11-year clash between Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova!

Newsday columnist Johnette Howard returns us to that era in her new book about the long-time No. 1s and their disparate lives. The duel profile itself mirrors a tennis match, going back and forth as if across a net to look back at Evert, then Navratilova, and back again. Though Martina holds a 43-37 edge over Chrissie in their on-court battles, Evert wins their face-off in the book, as Howard admits in her acknowledgements to having had more access to the now laidback wife and mother than to Navratilova, who – at 48 – is still busy playing doubles on tour.

Still, Howard provides a valuable review of women’s tennis at the beginning of both the Open era and Title IX. And it’s a pungent time, as reporters then didn’t hesitate to ask a player if she’d worn a bra and Arthur Ashe revealed his misogyny rather than the famous humanity we’re so familiar with when asked to help the cause. Early on, we see Billie Jean King arguing, cajoling and wheedling her way to creating the Virginia Slims Tour, the first pro women’s circuit, and to winning bigger paychecks for women players. Though King and her allies increasingly came to be seen as pushy harridans – and insufficiently feminine to boot – they paved the way for the first amply-paid women’s tennis superstar: Chris Evert.

Evert, a reserved blond Floridian from a middleclass Catholic family, broke through to the semifinals at 16 in her 1971 U.S. Open debut. From there through the 12 seasons she spent at either No. 1 or No. 2 in the world, she played her quiet and determined all-American ingénue role to the hilt. And America fell in love.

To Evert’s "Ice Maiden" Navratilova played the spasmodic and mannish foil. Martina turned pro in 1975, the same year she defected from Communist Czechoslovakia. Soon after, she came out about her homosexuality. Navratilova was anything but reserved. Her personality as well as her attacking serve-and-volley game served as the perfect cross-court contrast to the cool Evert’s metronomic baseline precision. And in their time, an era in which female athletes’ won their first real release from the strictures of traditional gender discrimination, Evert and Navratilova played out this freedom both on the court and off.

It’s the behind-the-scenes tales of these tennis champions’ careers and lives during that time which make for the most interesting reading here. Howard wants to wedge into this equation the idea that Evert and Navratilova had an "extraordinary friendship," but I’m not convinced. Sure, they were friendly – they were long-time colleagues and competitors who shared locker rooms and hotel rooms and even doubles courts. But there’s no mistaking the psychic distance between the two, whether that’s a measure of their dissimilar backgrounds and personalities or a result of 18 years of trying everything physically, strategically and emotionally possible to beat each other into submission. Certainly the two weren’t the wicked adversaries the press painted them to be – but neither were they bosom buddies. They were professional athletes at the top of their games, each with a lot to lose if the other took her down.

"No matter how catty we get with each other in private or public," Martina said after Evert retired in 1989, "I still have a closeness with her that I will never have with another human being because of what we went through together, on and off the court."

"Closeness" may be a necessary quality for friendship, but given such familiarity, the intimacy of friendship doesn’t always follow.

Howard’s portraits of each player work much better. She finds the early Evert just as condescending as you might imagine. Chrissie’d always had an edge there, an itch to prove she was one-up. For example, Howard describes three occasions when Evert patted Navratilova on the head like a child, ostensibly as a gesture of good will. Imagine if Ali patted Frazier on the head after "Smokin’ Joe" put him on his rear. Imagine Palmer patting Nicklaus, or Bird Magic. Even in the short-lived rivalry between Martina Hingis and Venus Williams, had the "Swiss Miss" been so patronizing, Venus would have slapped her silly. Chrissie got away with it because Martina read such gestures as supportive rather than demeaning – and near-hysteric that she was at the time, she needed all the support she could get. Evert proved callous in other ways as well, such as repeatedly calling John Lloyd "gutless" when his tennis career hit the skids after their marriage.

But the picture softens as Evert ages. The 50-year-old wife and mother of three now talks about feeling relieved to let go of the arrogance and selfishness she believed she once needed to be the world’s No. 1 tennis player. Still, Evert expresses disappointment in her waning renown, and worries that someday she won't be sufficiently recognizable to get a table at a good restaurant. Whatever the years have taken from Evert, her acerbic wit remains.

We don’t get a sense one way or the other about Martina’s growth. In fact, as Howard tells it, Navratilova hasn’t changed a bit.

"Unlike Evert, who grew over time into the person she became, Navratilova created a dramatic sense of herself from the start. And she stuck to it – no matter what."

The biggest difference, Howard points out, is that the career of a woman who once defeated opponents so badly she was accused of being "unfair" has "lasted long enough for her to feel the appreciation" of fans everywhere. Not only is Navratilova arguably the best female tennis player of all time, but she’s become something of a social heroine. Navratilova never shied away from the political tumult she wrought from her desire to live by her own rules. And just as people worldwide have come to worship Muhammad Ali for his brilliance in the ring but also for his struggle outside of it after taking an unpopular stand, they have also taken to Martina.

If Howard’s book accomplishes anything outside of making us nostalgic for great rivalries between singular tennis players, it’s to remind us that not so long ago, female athletes could never have expected to reach the heights these two women have found.
 

 
In opening "Without Apology: Girls, Women and the Desire to Fight" with Joyce Carol Oates' rant against women fighters in "On Boxing," Leah Hagar Cohen gets right to the heart of the matter -- there's a squeamishness in our culture about physically demonstrative women which reads female boxers as "monstrous." As a boxing aficionado, a jock and a woman, I'd dismissed Oates' misguided proclamation years ago: How dare a weasely little pipsqueak of a woman writer think she can settle for all time that women’s instinct to express themselves physically paired with their natural aggression is aberrant?



Cohen, herself an admitted pipsqueak, delves deeper into Oates’ charge in "Without Apology" in two ways. First she profiles a group of adolescent girls from Boston’s inner-city and their female boxing coach – and follows their training for most of a year. Also, Cohen chronicles how she succumbs to the visceral hunger to test herself in the ring.

The second half of this equation would seem to have been done before, with Kate Sekules' "The Boxer's Heart," in which the author comes to admire the craft of boxing, then also takes up the sport for its physical challenges and release. Sekules' book is good, but in boxing she never allows herself that release -- rather, she never unleashes herself. And ultimately the reader can't make out the whys of Sekules' angst about that holding back, mostly because the writer herself never figures it out; instead, she gives up, hoping her appreciation of boxing will be enough to sustain her.

Cohen never gives up. Which is surprising because she tells us from the outset that she's spent her life avoiding sports and competitive exertions just as she intellectualizes away her body's need to exist and assert itself in the world. Cohen draws herself here as a disappearing act; she tells us she avoids confrontation, starves in the vain hope that her carnal and emotional needs will dissipate, and prides herself on her civilized, fainting-violet view of the world. We see the rationalizations of a wimp at work.

We discover over the course of her awakening, though, that Cohen is one tough cookie. The way she deadeyes her subject matter -- not just boxing, but the myth of women's inherent fragility -- shows her depth of insight and her willingness to work through rough patches. Cohen digs deep to understand her prickly teenaged fighters and their coach’s quiet ferocity, and each of these women’s hard-boiled need to fight. But this writer makes her bones in owning up to middleclass women’s dispossession of their animal selves, though perhaps she didn't know this until she surprised herself by climbing into the squared circle and putting up her dukes. In doing so, Cohen accomplishes something Sekules couldn’t push through to, something most women refuse even to consider for fear of upsetting the gender-role status quo.

The girls Cohen follows aren’t so determined. One by one they fall away from boxing, as one suspects they might from the beginning. The Rodriguez girls – Jacinta, who’s 15; Sefina, 12; and Candi, 10 – are far more interested either in being kids or in acting as the feminine nurturers to whoever’s having a bad day at the gym. Jacinta’s best friend, Nikki, whose high spirits and deep reservoir of fury could be the perfect combination for a fighter, nonetheless quails in the two sanctioned fights she gets. With a helpless but abusive mother as well as her own budding lesbianism piloting the ship, Nikki can’t find her way to take boxing seriously. By the end, all of the girls drift away, though one could argue none had been fully there from the start. The girls’ trainer, Raphi, loses her fire too, transferring her energies as a coach into motherhood and her increasingly troubled marriage.

Cohen and the reader want more from these women, and are disappointed when their boxing stories crumble under the slightest pressure. Though it doesn’t help the storytelling aspect of “Without Apology,” women’s boxing is still in its infancy, and without the facilities, structure, training and sparring opportunities necessary to sustain it, young women like the Rodriguez sisters will have a hard time hanging in there. Cohen also knows that, ultimately, women must find their own paths to being alive and vital. And just as we see the Rodriguez girls and Raphi tethering themselves to traditional feminine roles, both Nikki and Cohen herself bravely strike out in search of how much more they can be. “Each time I return to the gym,” she writes, “it’s as though I recover substance, ferocity, vigor.” Truly this is a woman’s work, and it’s never done.

Cohen’s writing itself is a joy. This is a book at once light on its feet but still cogent, measured and deliberate. A novelist and author of two nonfiction books, Cohen writes about boxing as if instinctually, her prose perfectly paced and always packing the right punch. Also, she's as observant a student of the human psychology of power and weakness as Angelo Dundee or Cus D'Amato, however more tempered her reactions are to it. And just as Cohen is being seduced into the fight game, so are we captivated by this woman’s reach into the furthest recesses of herself for what it means to be human.