Hundreds of people gathered yesterday for the dedication of the Chris Evert Stadium Court at the Jimmy Evert Tennis Center in Holiday Park. Evert - introduced by Chris Fowler as "the greatest champion ever to come out of South Florida" - said in her speech that in the early '70s six juniors from Holiday Park made it to Wimbledon.
She recalled that, when she was #1, she asked her father why he had taught all of his kids to play tennis. She expected him to say something like, "So you could see the world." Instead he replied: "To keep you off the streets." She didn't understand that, she said, until she had her own children. She added that he worked ten-hour days, every day of the year. He never took a vacation; never traveled to watch her play. (He got too nervous.)
Jimmy Evert was still teaching when we moved to Fort Lauderdale in 1989. For years I would see him and his wife Colette hitting in the evening - "the ball sailing smoothly over the middle of the net before its clean, untroublesome return - in a session that was as much a conversation, and the semblance of a marriage, as it was an exercise ritual" (from my essay "Florida Man" in the Winter 2024 issue of The American Scholar).
