Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova. Tennis and life

Bitter rivals. Dear friends. Survived. Fifty years later, the two tennis champions know and understand each other better than a close-knit couple. And when the cancer hit, they already knew where to turn. An exclusive story

There is an audible rhythm in a Grand Slam tennis tournament, a knock-knock, knock-knock of strokes, like beats per minute, that fades as the court narrows. At first the locker room is a beehive of 128 contestants, who fuss and chatter, but every day their numbers dwindle, until only two people remain in that confrontational silence known as the finale. For many many years, Chris Evert And Martina Navratilov it was almost always the last two, left alone in a room so empty and at the same time so intimate that you could practically feel what was in each other’s chest. Knock Knock.