Chris Evert remembers his first trip to Holiday Park in Fort Lauderdale.
She remembers her father, Jimmy, picking her up from school that day, ending her fun routine of going to classmate Kara Bennett’s house to swim and barbecue daily.
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“I was really angry with my father,” she said.
She was 5 years old and the anger dissipated. She started hitting tennis balls at Holiday Park.
“This place changed my life,” says the tennis legend, now 70 years old.
Holiday Park might be a shrine to what it meant to Fort Lauderdale and international tennis, but it’s something better than that today. The park’s tennis center has reopened. He suffered a year-long, $9.5 million renovation of the Jimmy Evert Tennis Center to upgrade the 20-court venue, build a 700-seat stadium named in honor of Chris Evert and reopen in time for the annual Orange Bowl international junior tennis championships this weekend. There is a ceremony on Monday.
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It’s also a public court, meaning anyone can play on Court 10, which was Jimmy Evert’s office for 49 years. You can hit tennis balls there like Evert’s five children, Hall of Famer Harold Solomon and his brother, Brian, Jennifer Capriati, Laurie Fleming and so many others did in their youth. Well, you can try anyway.
What you need to understand is the history beneath your feet. Holiday Park was such a rare intersection of time and place that six teenagers who practiced on its courts played at Wimbledon in 1976.
“It was the mecca of tennis in the 1970s,” says Evert.
It was as much the spiritual creation of his father as the success of his students. He took over the city courts at Holiday Park in 1958 as one man – teaching lessons, stringing racquets, reserving courts, all with the same love, grace and humor as he ran his family.
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“He made us all play there, the kids, not with the idea of becoming champions,” Evert says. “He wanted to keep his family together.”
You can see the idea of who Jimmy was and the Holiday Park he built through the prism of his daughter’s high tennis life. It was at Holiday Park that, as a youth, without the strength to hold the racket for a normal one-handed backhand shot, she created a two-handed backhand that became a signature of her game.
It was at Holiday Park that Evert, 13, had a tennis epiphany after losing to fourth-place Mary-Ann Eisel at the annual Austin Smith Championships. “I won a set against her and I remember thinking, at 13, ‘Wow, there’s not a big difference between us,'” she says.
Holiday Park is where Dad would get his daughter’s phone calls from all over the world to see how she was doing at a game. He didn’t like to travel or watch in person, so his wife, Collette, did that. Chris’ first call came in 1970, when she was 15 and had just beaten two-time Grand Slam champion Margaret Court at the Charlotte Open. She had to repeat the result to him.
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“He didn’t know what to say,” Chris says. “He says, ‘I have to get off the ground.’ »
It was a time when agents and promoters were starting to spend money on the Everts. Jimmy once told a promoter who opened a briefcase containing $25,000 to leave his house. He made sure Chris remained an amateur and graduated from St. Thomas Aquinas High School before turning professional.
He was the father of the original tennis, the best version of the idea, one that future generations could have followed if they had had the principles and discipline to go beyond the quest for fame and money. None of this is necessary for hitting tennis balls at Holiday Park. But it is necessary to grasp the spirit of the place and appreciate its value all these years later, 10 years after the death of Jimmy Evert.
Watch Chris Evert in her third chapter, as she calls him, to see her father too. His first 30 years were focused on his tennis career. Her next 15 hours were spent raising her children (“the pinnacle of my existence,” as she called it). Now she’s in her “giving back” chapter, as she put it.
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She went beyond the annual pro-celebrity tournaments that raised more than $20 million for charity. As a cancer survivor, she strives to spread awareness about early detection. As president of the United States Tennis Association Foundation, she helps 250 programs bring tennis to underprivileged youth, like current pros Hailey Baptiste and Frances Tiafoe.
As the namesake of Boca Raton’s Evert Tennis Academy, run by her brother John, she spends her mornings observing and working with young players.
“When John came up with the idea, he wanted to have the same philosophy and mission statement that we had growing up at Holiday Park,” Evert says. “It was obviously about working hard, but also being a good person with good sportsmanship, supporting each other with camaraderie – we honored my father with that ideal.”
As time passes, much of South Florida’s sports history is abandoned. The Orange Bowl is gone. The golf tournaments that were once a PGA Tour destination don’t exist. The list is long. But here’s a renovated gem in the heart of Fort Lauderdale that will be officially welcomed back during Monday’s ceremony at 10 a.m.
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Evert deliberately did not go to see the renovated Holiday Park.
“I want it to be a surprise,” she said.
It was a surprise, in a wonderful way, this park that has raised so many young people that Evert is often stopped by people who say her father taught them lessons. She can tell the story of this 5-year-old girl taken there one day after kindergarten and then climbing the highest peaks of the sporting world.
And now she’s back – if she ever really left.
“It’s always been a part of me, all the memories,” she says, “And now, to have the renovation of the Jimmy Evert Tennis Center and have my name on center court, it’s come full circle.”
