No Doubt, She Graced This Game

They called her “the Ice Maiden.” Penguins could live on her, they said. She had the mean average annual temperature of an iceberg.

She was so shining white, it hurt to look at her. She was like a ski slope in the sun.

She played tennis as if she were pouring tea. No one ever saw her perspire.

She was a throwback to the days when women played in hobble skirts and flowered bonnets.

She never left the baseline. She knocked everybody out at long range like the USS Missouri. She played tennis the way an orchestra played Beethoven, deftly, lovingly but with intense concentration on the notes. Other players might be rock ‘n roll or bombast. Chris Evert was a Moonlight Sonata.

It irritated some people. They wanted more dash and fire. They wanted Chris to come to the net, to slash more, serve and volley, lose her temper, come apart. Be human.

She wouldn’t. She was as cold as a marble statue. She never dove for a ball, skidded into a net. She looked as easy to beat as a pair of treys.

You couldn’t get a ball by her in a tank. She had the patience of a schoolmarm. She made Job seem impetuous. She would hit balls back at your feet till you wanted to scream.

The crowd wanted Dempsey and they got Willie Pep. Sugar Ray. Chris jabbed you to death.

She was at pains not to look like it, but she was a tremendous athlete. She made the two-handed backhand popular, which made the Establishment need smelling salts. Chris just smiled sweetly. She didn’t run on court, she’d glide. She’d remind you of a great center fielder. DiMaggio in his prime. When the ball came down, she was there. And when she hit it back, it had hair on it.

But she elevated defense to a high art. No linebacker ever had a surer instinct for the ball than Chris Evert. She once won 125 consecutive matches on clay. She won seven French Opens. She was unbeatable where the ball bounced true.

She walked with the graceful little mincing steps of a belle at a cotillion. You half-expected her to have a parasol. She didn’t appear to have a nerve in her body. I once wrote that she played with the bored detachment of a pro giving a lesson to an old dowager. It was true to the end.

She played a heady game. She had to. “My serve was not a weapon,” she laughs. “I put it in there to start a point, not to ace anybody off the court.”

She resisted temptations to turn into a serve-and-volleyer. She stuck to what brought her. Not even when Martina Navratilova came along with a game modeled after Marines storming the beaches did Chris leave the baseline.

She won nine of every 10 matches she played. She won 157 singles titles, 1,309 matches in all, more than any female player. She won 18 Grand Slam titles, which as it happens, is one more than Martina.

Whatever she was doing must have been right.

But I always thought Chris Evert’s enduring contribution to the game was not tenacity, it was femininity. Not since Helen Wills Moody Roark had the game seen anyone with the aloof, dedicated perfection of Evert. They used to call Wills “Little Miss Poker Face.” Chris Evert presented the same unruffled confident exterior. You could never tell from looking at her whether she was down four-love or up two sets to none.

Chris Evert never managed to look as if she just got off a tugboat or just put out a cigar. She wore ponytails and earrings and hair ribbons. Even necklaces. She played in bracelets till they got in the way. Louisa May Alcott would have loved her.

Chris Evert has left the baseline. She put away the rackets and 19 years of cross-court volleys, drop shots and two-handed backhands last fall at the U.S. Open when she lost in the quarterfinals to Zina Garrison, a player who stood in line for an hour to get Chris’ autograph only nine years before.

It was only the second time in her career that Evert failed to make at least the semifinals there. She played in 113 U.S. Open matches. She won five Opens and was a finalist three times and a semifinalist eight.

There is no senior tour as such for tennis. Will Chris Evert now retire with her clippings, her trophies, her ski-slope husband, Andy Mill, to a condo in Aspen?

Hardly. As a matter of fact, she’s going to the net. “Don’t make me out to be a dynamo,” she pleads. But she will do tennis commentary for NBC Sports, her Evert Enterprises is active in the sports fashion business, and on March 3-4 at the Hyatt Grand Champions Resort in Indian Wells, she will head the pro-celebrity phase of the Virginia Slims of Indian Wells tournament to benefit the Women Sports Foundation.

She spanned the era from Billie Jean King to Steffi Graf with grace and taste. She kept Martina from swallowing the game whole.

King and Graf were/are great players. But could they have won wearing an evening gown and a diamond tiara?

Chris Evert could. All but did.