Evert vs Navratilova, Roland-Garros 1985: The Year She Changed Frames

Saturday, 8 June 1985. Nobody in Paris expected the match that followed, least of all the woman who won it. Chris Evert Lloyd — No. 2 seed, thirty years old, and on a run of thirteen straight defeats to the woman across the net — beat Martina Navratilova 6–3, 6–7(4–7), 7–5 in two hours and fifty-two minutes. It was the sixty-fifth time they had played. Navratilova called it the best Grand Slam final they had ever played.

What makes it a story for an equipment site is that the thirteen-match losing run and the racquet in Evert's hand are the same story.

The two frames

This is the rare 1980s match where a published source names what was in both players' hands, and names it for this final specifically rather than for the era in general. Wikipedia's page on the Wilson Pro Staff sets the two years side by side: Evert reached the 1984 Roland-Garros final with the Jack Kramer, a wooden model, and lost in straight sets. She came back in 1985 with the graphite-and-Kevlar Pro Staff 85 and won.

Read the bottom two rows before the top four. No source we could find records what either woman had in her frame, or what she had it strung at. Not the tournament, not the contemporaneous reports, not the gear press. For the Borg–McEnroe final five years earlier we can print two tensions thirty pounds apart; for this one we can print nothing, and inventing a figure to fill the row would be worse than the gap.

What the top rows do say is unusually pointed. Both women arrived in 1985 having changed frames, and they changed in opposite directions. Evert went up in stiffness — out of wood and into a graphite composite with Kevlar in it. Navratilova went down, switching back from the R-27, a graphite-and-boron frame, to the less stiff graphite-and-fiberglass R-22.

A conflict we are not going to resolve

Our sources disagree about the Yonex. Wikipedia's Pro Staff page says Navratilova played the 1984 Roland-Garros final with the R-27 and had gone back to the R-22 by 1985. Tennis.com's history of important racquets says the R-22 is the frame she won Roland-Garros, Wimbledon and the US Open with in

1. Those cannot both be right about 1984. Both are in the figures above

with their URLs, flagged, because a reader checking this page should see the disagreement rather than our guess at the answer.

The shape of the match

Evert took the first set 6–3 by doing the thing her husband had told her to do: hit the ball high, so it sat outside Navratilova's forehand strike zone. On clay, against a serve-volleyer, height buys time — and a stiffer frame returning a heavy first serve gives a little of that time back.

The second set was where the match nearly ended. A set up and leading 5–4, Evert served for the championship, and Navratilova broke her, forced the tiebreak and took it 7–4. In the third Evert broke for 5–3, could not hold the lead, and then stood at 4–5 facing triple break point and saved every one.

It finished on a two-handed backhand struck on the run from well outside the sideline, past a woman standing at the net with the court covered.

Navratilova afterwards: "This probably was the best Grand Slam final we've ever played. For sure, it was the closest and most suspenseful."

Why the frame mattered

Evert's own verdict on the win — that the title alone prolonged her career by four years — is the kind of claim that usually gets filed under sentiment. In this case there is a frame behind it. She had spent two and a half years losing to an opponent who was hitting a heavier, faster ball than a wooden racquet could comfortably answer, and the season she stopped losing was the season she stopped playing wood.

That is not the same as saying the racquet won the match. The passing shot at the end of it was hers, and she had been hitting that shot since 1972. But a frame is the thing that decides whether a shot a player can hit is a shot she can hit in time, and in 1985 the margin between those two was the margin of this final.

What is not on this page

No string, no tension, no gauge, no serve speeds, no winner counts, no first-serve percentage. None of it was published for this match. What can be checked — the score, the date, the duration, the seedings, the losing run, and the two frames — is in the figures above, each with the page it was read from.