Shriver is the youngest player to compete in the tournament’s women’s final. And while experience can be a wonderful advantage, there is always the danger of the psychological scale tipping in the direction of the player who is not carrying the burden of great expectation. Though Evert survived the three aces and six service winners off the oversize Prince racket Shriver wielded like a paddle, even Evert expressed some mental weariness from the pressure hardly visible on her face.
“It was more fun when I was coming up,” she said after depositing the $38,000 winner’s prize into her ever-growing account. “Tennis is a business. Pam and Tracy will learn that someday.”
In addition to Shriver, Evert was referring to Tracy Austin, the 15-year-old she dispatched with relative ease, 7-5, 6-1, in the quarterfinals before making Wendy Turnbull disappear, 6-3, 6-0, in 48 semifinal minutes. At a seasoned 23, Evert is long past the adolescent histrionics that enveloped the nascent Austin-Shriver rivalry when Shriver called the 5-5 Austin, her moonballing stylistic opposite and thus far tormentor, “a little twerp.”
Shriver smartly showed Evert the respect she deserves and demands. On a practice court earlier in the day, her nerves showed as she tossed her racket after some errant serves and needed her coach, the former Davis Cup player Don Candy, to calm her down.
By match time, Shriver had regained her tactical calm, waiting for the Evert groundstroke to land short and allow for an approach behind her under slice forehand. It was the right play against Evert, as Navratilova would agree, but of the 45 times Shriver got to net, she won only 18 of the points. Increasing her pace and working more angles as the match progressed, Evert hit 24 winners in acclimating her game to the green hard court.
If anyone had a right to lament the move from the clay courts at Forest Hills three miles away, it was Evert, who hasn’t lost a set on clay since 1975 and hadn’t dropped a match on the slower surface since 1973. But in the post-match ceremony, she stayed the diplomatic course after receiving the trophy from Slew Hester, the U.S.T.A. president who engineered the move to the roomy new National Tennis Center smack dab in the middle of the La Guardia Airport flight pattern from the cramped but genteel West Side Tennis Club.
Source : NYtimes
