"I Can See How Tough I Was"

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

When Christine Marie Evert strolled onto the grass of her first U.S. Open as a ponytailed, poker-faced 16-year-old amateur from St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Fort Lauderdale, a European journalist cracked, "Shirley Temple is alive and well and living in Forest Hills." Eighteen years later, the tournament is no longer played on grass or at Forest Hills, and teen wonders have become as common as imitation-Evert two-fisted backhands. But Evert is still playing, and she is still, like Temple before her, America's sweetheart.

Even now she sometimes wears a ponytail, and age has only crispened that aquiline, no-nonsense visage. But in a game dominated by youth, Evert, 34, has become the matron saint. Entering this year's Open, which she said would be her adieu to the big time, she all but renounced any chance to win. She is being judged, and is judging herself, by a different standard: the grace of her departure. Like all great athletes, she has not so much succumbed to the ravages of time as allowed its passage to burnish her achievements into legend.

Evert won 157 singles championships, more than any other player, male or female. She competed in more than 1,400 career matches and won almost 90% of them. For 13 straight years, she took at least one of the four annual Grand Slam titles; for 14 straight years, she ranked first, second or third in the world. Her favorite victory came at age 15 over Margaret Smith Court, mere weeks after Court completed a sweep of the Grand Slams. But her finest moment was probably in the final of the 1986 French Open, when she fought back from a set down to defeat her most esteemed rival, Martina Navratilova, and win the title for a record seventh time. The competition with Navratilova spanned 16 years, 80 thrilling matches (Martina leads, 43-37) and countless tears and friendly embraces.

Evert thinks it a great joke that she was not voted "Most Athletic" of her high school graduating class. In truth, her game relied more on mental agility than physical force. She paced the base line and outwaited opponents, rather than take high-risk shots or rush the net seeking quick winners. She was ordinary in strength of serve and speed of hand and foot. But she was extraordinary in the precision and timing of her passing shots, her high, looping moon balls, her lobs that landed as if by radar in unreachable corners of the court. Above all, she seemed nerveless. She did not fret about the point just past, however irritating her own error or an official's miscall, and she did not think about what would come next. She focused, with almost icy calm, on the moment and the ball. "My whole career," she recalled last week, "people have been talking about how tough I am. Now that I'm losing some, I can see how tough I was -- the killer instinct, the single-mindedness, playing like a machine. Boy, that's what made me a champion."

Evert's popularity has far transcended tennis. She may be the most famous woman athlete in the U.S. and is almost certainly the most respected. She is admired by her peers, who last week re-elected her president of the Women's International Tennis Association, the players' governing body, and by corporations, twelve of which have signed her as a spokeswoman. She is adored by fans.

Some of the appeal, surely, has been her wholesome country-club blond good looks, her impeccable clothes sense, her unmistakable femaleness, even as she conditioned, dieted, lifted weights and practiced against men. Her career, launched at a time when many still professed to find something unfeminine in getting into shape and wanting to win, has helped legitimize running and sweating as suitable activities for two generations of women. Moralists hail her sportsmanship. In victory, Evert is exultant but not arrogant. In defeat, she congratulates opponents; she does not whine about maladies and misfortune. She has delighted feminists by regarding herself as a career woman and traditionalists by caring so openly about marriage and future babies.

With nothing left to prove, Evert has made her final year a kind of royal circuit. Yet she remains competitive enough that she nearly derailed the yearlong stately procession. After losing in April to 15-year-old Monica Seles, Evert feared her skills and toughness were eroding so rapidly that she should quit at once. Bypassing her beloved French Open, she watched at home as Seles proved herself no fluke but a budding superstar by reaching the semifinals; then losing to her seemed less shameful and ominous. Evert went on to Wimbledon, a tournament that had been her nemesis (she lost seven of ten finals) but a place steeped in the traditions she reveres. She loves to quote the phrase from Rudyard Kipling's If that is inscribed above the doors to Centre Court: "If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/ And treat those two impostors just the same . . ." When Evert lost in the semifinals, the cheers were not for the victor of that match, Steffi Graf, but for the gallant loser as she waved in farewell.

Many people thought Wimbledon should be Evert's last bow. But after half her life encircling the globe on the tour, Evert wanted to exit at home, with the Stars and Stripes aflutter. She foretold an eventual defeat, if not disaster. Yet from the moment she took the court in the opening round, dressed in royal purple, her departure, like all that had gone before it, was triumph, triumph all the way.