They waited together, sometimes ate together and entered the arena together. For so many years, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova were almost invariably the last two, left alone in a room so empty yet intimate that they could practically hear what was inside the other’s chest. At first the locker room is a hive of 128 competitors, milling and chattering, but each day their numbers ebb, until just two people are left in that confrontational hush known as the final.
There is an audible rhythm to a Grand Slam tennis tournament, a thwock-tock, tock-thwock of strokes, like beats per minute, that steadily grows fainter as the field diminishes.
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