I could see the sparkle even without my binoculars.
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I was watching the 1988 Virginia Slims of Chicago tennis tournament at the UIC Pavilion, an event that may well have marked Evert’s last appearance in Chicago. It was the first time in seven years that the Wheaties-box star has played here, and by her own admission 1989 could be her last year in the game. The 34-year-old has a life with her new husband, Andy Mill, a former Olympic skier, waiting for her when she’s ready to hang up the racket for the last time.
Chicago tennis fans turned out in record numbers to see the mid-November tournament. The largest audience for a tennis match in the Pavilion’s history, 8,304 fans, filled all but a handful of the arena’s seats for the semifinal, which had Evert playing Bulgaria’s Manuela Maleeva and Martina Navratilova against Czechoslovakia’s Helena Sukova. Evert won 6-4, 2-6, 6-2, while Navratilova, who’s 32, won 6-4, 6-3, so the two old ladies could have at each other for the umpteenth time in the final.
