From War to Wimbledon

LONGTIME British tennis reporter Richard Evans will be honored in July when he is inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island. Evans, who will be recognized as a “contributor” for his long service to the sport, joins some illustrious inductees from the recent and deeper past, including Andre Agassi, Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova and Rod Laver.

Evans wrote for the Evening Standard, formerly the Evening News, The Sunday Times and many other magazines and newspapers, and provided radio commentary, including play-by-play at Wimbledon. At 85, he still travels the tennis court and was covering the French Open in Paris when we spoke, before moving on to Wimbledon.

Evans fell into tennis more or less by accident – his pace was mainly football, cricket and rugby when he began his career in London as a 17-year-old with Hayter’s news service. But in 1960, at 21, he joined the Evening Standard and was suddenly commissioned to ghostwrite American Althea Gibson’s Wimbledon coverage.

In 1957 and ’58, Gibson had become the first black player to win the Wimbledon title. Evans’ articles with Gibson were co-by-lined, giving him his first real notoriety in the sport. So encouraged, he offered to escort Gibson to the Wimbledon Ball. She accepted.

Many in the sport know the debonair Evans as a walking encyclopedia of tennis – although he can tell you a lot about cricket and Arsenal if asked and is happy to give you an earful about the despicability of Donald Trump. Evans lives in Florida where his son also lives.

But they may not imagine the suave and dapper Brit who dodged police batons at the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami, (failed, “the blow caught me behind my right ear and the lower part of my neck”); standing on a Memphis hotel balcony the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated there (“there was still blood on the ground”); languishing in an opium den in Cambodia while covering the Vietnam War (“sex was part of the equation but not necessary”); or peering over a Soweto fence to take a photo of the recently released Nelson Mandela (“there was almost no security”).

As a foreign correspondent, Evans accompanied Robert F Kennedy on his ill-fated 1968 presidential campaign, although he was not present on June 5, the night Kennedy was assassinated in a Los Angeles hotel.

Evans firmly believed that Kennedy would have achieved the presidency and that the world would have been a better place as a result. “He was just a remarkable person,” Evans recalled. “The more you were with him, the more you liked him.”

Evans made three trips to Southeast Asia to cover the Vietnam War, the second time he ventured into Cambodia with the dashing British war correspondent, Jon Swain. At the time, President Nixon denied the presence of American troops in Cambodia despite the emergence of a photograph showing an American officer exiting a helicopter there.

Evans then traveled with a Cambodian officer who was in constant radio contact in French with helicopter pilots circling overhead. Suddenly the officer switched to English. Evans quickly pressed his tape recorder to the man’s earpiece. When he played the tape, Evans heard the unmistakable accent of an American co-pilot. “We rushed back to Phnom Penh and got the audio on the air via ABC, who backed up the photograph,” Evans recalled. “It was a real scoop.”

But despite describing his time abroad covering politics as “invigorating”, it was to tennis that Evans ultimately returned to for the rest of his now long career. “I got tired of being lied to,” he said of the political battle. Evans went on to produce many books including biographies of two of the sport’s most volatile characters – Romanian Ilie Nastase and American John McEnroe.

It was personalities that drew him to write his stories, Evans said, even though their frequent outbursts cost both the chance to win more titles.

While researching his fitting biography, John McEnroe, A Rage for Perfection, Evans visited McEnroe’s old school in Manhattan and asked the principal if John had had problems with referees during school matches. There were no judges, the principal said. “He told me that every close call John gave to his opponent, that tells you everything you want to know about John McEnroe,” Evans said.

Although maligned in the press, Evans saw a side of McEnroe that cared deeply about fair play. “He doesn’t want any gifts but try to take away from him something he thinks is his and he couldn’t handle it. A guy who probably didn’t have as good an eye as him, who sat in a big chair and called out something that was in? Temperamentally, he couldn’t handle it because it was wrong.”

But when asked who he sees as the greatest player of all time, it is Roger Federer’s name that immediately springs to mind, and before that Lew Hoad, the rugged Australian who won championships as an amateur in the 1950s but whose professional career lasted until 1971.

Hoadie, as he was known, was the player his rivals agreed would be the one you picked “to play for your life, provided he hadn’t had too many beers”, Evans said. “But Roger Federer is the best player I have ever seen. Aesthetically and technically, Roger is in a class of his own.”

On the women’s side, “it’s mixed but I’d be tempted to say Martina Navratilova, a serve-and-volley player par excellence.”

Evans was particularly close to Arthur Ashe, the pioneering African-American tennis player who won Wimbledon in 1975 in a breakthrough match where he knocked out a younger, more powerful Jimmy Connors. Evans was in Cameroon in 1972 when Ashe discovered a young Yannick Noah, who went on to become a major French tennis champion. “Mmm, a kid can play,” Evans recalled the ever-understated Ashe saying.

The following year, Evans accompanied Ashe on his first – and controversial – trip to South Africa, where the American faced a roomful of sometimes hostile black South Africans angry that he did not boycott the apartheid regime.

But it was a decision to return to South Africa in 1990 to cover a “rebel” cricket tour led by former England captain Mike Gatting, despite the sporting boycott there, that put Evans in that country at its most historic moment.

“We were driving towards Durban and stopped for a drink,” recalls Evans, “and one of the photographers said they’ve released Mandela. They’ve legalized communism.’ Talk about a country completely changing within the stroke of a pen.”

Mandela later said that sport had the ability to change the world, which Evans felt validated his choice to focus on sport over politics. But despite his long association with tennis, Evans is disappointed the sport hasn’t done more to promote itself better.

In his 2017 autobiography, The Roving Eye, Evans lamented that tennis “has remained fragmented with too many governing bodies”, too busy “guarding their own nests and hogging the limelight.” Rather like some of the politicians he also covered.

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.

#War #Wimbledon

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