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开 本: 16开纸 张: 胶版纸包 装: 平装是否套装: 否国际标准书号ISBN: 9780767918855
“Together, match by match, final by final, Chris Evert and
Martina Navratilova changed women’s tennis forever. I watched their
rivalry with awe and pride: two remarkable athletes, fierce
competitors—and good friends. It’s hard to remember what it was
like for women and women athletes in particular back then; Johnette
Howard captures it all in vivid detail. The Rivals is must
reading for anyone with a passion for tennis and for anyone curious
about Evert and Navratilova’s utter transformation of the women’s
side of the game.”
—Billie Jean King
“For all our seeming familiarity with Chris Evert and Martina
Navratilova, Johnette Howard takes us deep inside the greatest
rivalry in tennis history to reveal how it took the two champions
the length of their twenty-year tennis war to truly know and love
each other and themselves. With diligence and skill Howard
chronicles their magnificent battles on the court, their turbulent
times off the court, and the civil wars they waged within their own
fragile psyches. It makes the journeys taken and the destinations
reached all the more remarkable.”
—Mary Carillo, CBS Sports
“With Chrissie and Martina as the leading ladies, Johnette Howard
insightfully takes us on a marvelous tour through the panorama of
the rise of professional tennis. She digs well below the surface of
a tennis court to probe celebrated psyches as never before.”
—Bud Collins, Boston Globe/NBC
“Finally, here is the definitive, inside-out look at one of the
most gripping rivalries and relationships in sports. Johnette
Howard’s insightful and writerly book is the story of friendly
enemies, and enormous friends—two women who were alternately
competitors and confidantes. It places Evert and Navratilova
alongside Palmer and Nicklaus, Magic and Bird, and Ali and Frazier,
but it also, rightly, sets them apart, historically inseparable and
unique.”
—Sally Jenkins, coauthor of It’s Not About the Bike and
Every Second Counts
intensity, longevity, and emotional resonance of the one between
two extraordinary women: Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova.
Over sixteen years, Evert and Navratilova met on the tennis court a
record eighty times—sixty times in finals. At their first match in
Akron, Ohio, in 1973, Chris was an eighteen-year-old star and
Martina, two years her junior, was an unknown Czech making her
first trip to the United States. It would be two years before
Martina finally beat Chris, and another year—after Navratilova had
dropped twenty pounds and improved her game—before Evert publicly
betrayed her first hint of concern. By then, the women were already
friends and sometimes doubles partners, and the colorful story that
would captivate the world was under way.
The Rivals is the first book to examine the intertwined
journey of these legendary champions, based on extensive interviews
with each. Taking readers on and off the courts with vivid,
never-before-published material, award-winning sportswriter
Johnette Howard shows how Evert and Navratilova came of age during
the rambunctious golden age of tennis in the 1970s, and
how—together—they redefined women’s athletics during a time of
volcanic change in sports and society. Their epic careers unfolded
against the backdrop of the fight for Title IX, the gay rights
movement, the women’s movement and the fall of the iron curtain.
Howard draws entertaining, intimate, and myth-shattering portraits
of Evert and Navratilova, describing the personal migrations each
woman made, and showing how enmeshed their lives became.
Navratilova and Evert’s ability to forge and maintain a friendship
during sixteen years of often-cutthroat competition has always
provoked wonder and admiration. They were a study in contrasts, a
collision of politics and style and looks. Chris was the crowd
darling while Martina, her greatest foil, was often cast as the
villain. Chris was the imperturbable champion who proved toughness
and femininity weren’t mutually exclusive; Martina was portrayed as
both emotionally fragile and some fearsome Amazon. Chris’s
off-court life was presumed to be bedrock solid, the stuff of Main
Street America; Martina’s was derided as outrageous and sometimes
chaotic, even during her invincible years. Yet, through it all, the
two remained friends who lifted each other to heights that each
says she couldn’t have reached without the other.
Women’s tennis now is more popular than ever, thanks in large part
to the trailblazing of Evert and Navratilova. A rivalry like
theirs, filled with so many grace notes, is unique in sports
history.
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