THE FINAL SET: Chris & Martina: Rivals, Friends, Survivors

For fifty years, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova were opponents. Then they became something the English language has no clean word for. This is the story of the greatest rivalry in sports history, the friendship it secretly always was, and the cancer diagnoses that finally made them say so. They first met in Fort Lauderdale in 1973: Chris Evert, nineteen years old and already the most celebrated young player in American tennis, and Martina Navratilova, a sixteen-year-old from Czechoslovakia who had come to the West on a visa and would leave it as a defector. What followed was eighty matches, sixty of them in finals, across fifteen years of ferocious competition that produced the greatest rivalry in the history of sport. They were opposites in every way that mattered. Evert was the cool American baseline technician, patience so precise it felt like its own form of aggression. Navratilova was the serve-and-volley defector from behind the Iron Curtain, a body so trained and conditioned that sports scientists wrote papers about her. Between 1975 and 1987, one of the two women held the world number one ranking for all but twenty-three weeks. Each retired with eighteen Grand Slam singles titles: a symmetry so perfect it feels like fate. Then the competition ended, and the friendship that competition had been holding in suspension finally had room to breathe. And then cancer arrived: Evert diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2022, a disease her sister Jeanne had died of two years before; Navratilova diagnosed with both throat and breast cancer simultaneously in late 2022. For a significant stretch of 2023, both women were in treatment at the same time. The Final Set is a narrative non-fiction account of one of sport's most extraordinary stories: not just the rivalry, but everything that grew out of it. Written for readers of all backgrounds, it is a book about what rivalry, at its deepest, can become. About what it means to have had the greatest opponent of your life become the person you call when the world falls apart. And about two women, now in their seventies, who are still on court. Eighty matches. Eighteen Grand Slams each. Two women. Two diagnoses. One friendship that survived all of it. One necklace that never came off. The greatest rivalry in sports history was also a love story. It just took fifty years to say so. Read the complete story.