In the Booth, Evert Feels Like ‘Rookie’

Chris Evert needed to retire to feel like a kid again.

“I’m like a rookie coming in,” said Evert, a new member of NBC’s announcing team. “It’s like being 8 years old and playing in my first tournament.”

Evert, who made her debut during coverage of the Family Circle tourney in April, is working the French Open--a tourney she won seven times.

“Clay was my claim to fame,” Evert said. “It’s bittersweet for me. It’s been less than a year (since she retired).”

She said that although she has pangs of regret that her career as a player is over, she realizes that “I don’t want to put in the time and put in the effort full time.”

Evert, 35, has already found her new profession more taxing than she had imagined.

“It’s tough to articulate what’s going on on the court,” she said. “I was always more of a mental player more than anything else. I was always instinctive and never one who took notes on a player or talked to my coach for an hour before a match.

“I’m having to think more off the court than on.”

That thinking involves details Evert used to find extraneous.

“I never really needed a media guide,” she said. “When I played someone, I never had to know her mother’s name. Now I have to know all about the player--not just the style of the player, but the temperament and the personality.

“Playing tennis was a lot easier. Now I’m using my head more for articulating and doing research. It just came naturally to play tennis.”

Evert said she will be critical when the situation demands it.

“If it’s a fair comment, I have no problem with that at all,” she said. “I don’t want to all of a sudden have a good relationship and good rapport with the players, then become a broadcaster and be too critical. If I’m fair and logical, that’s fair criticism.

“If Martina (Navratilova) is playing awful, I’ll say it. I won’t say that she is choking like a dog. That’s not my style.”

Evert said she was pleased with her performance at the Family Circle.

“It’s hard for me to watch myself,” she said. “I’m very critical. I need to work on instant replays. They come up all of a sudden. NBC wants me to talk more of technique and to volunteer a little more information about the players and maybe my experience playing them. I need to do more matches. You have someone talking in your ear, giving you three seconds to finish and be quiet before a commercial. All of these things, I have to get used to.”