- Jun 09, 2026
- Story
What Chris Evert’s Career Teaches About the Long Game – Netflix Documentary
Chris Evert, 18-time Grand Slam champion and co-founder of Evert Tennis Academy is the subject of Chris & Martina: The Final Set, the new Netflix documentary releasing June 26. The Netflix film traces her decades-long rivalry with Martina Navratilova and the friendship that grew out of it: two of the greatest competitors in tennis history reflecting on what kept them at the top of the sport for nearly two decades. For anyone who watched Chris Evert play, or who watches young players coming up today, there’s a thread inside the Netflix documentary worth pulling on: the long game.
“Official trailer – Chris & Martina: The Final Set, streaming June 26 on Netflix.”
The trailer makes clear what the documentary will show in full: a story that extends well beyond what happened on the court. The fifteen-year rivalry that defined women’s tennis is one chapter of it. What Chris and Martina each built through that rivalry and what they’ve drawn on in the years since is the deeper story. The discipline of becoming a great competitor isn’t only about how to win matches. It’s about what you have to draw on when matches stop being the point.
Chris Evert won her first Grand Slam in 1974 at the age of 19. She won her last in 1986 at 32. In between, she made the final of every Grand Slam tournament she entered at least once, reached at least the semi-final of 52 of them, and held the world number-one ranking across seven different years. She finished her career with 18 Grand Slam singles titles, 157 career singles titles, and a match win rate of 89.97% across 1,455 professional matches, the highest of any player, male or female, in the open era.
Those numbers don’t happen because of one shot, one match, or one season. They happen because of a way of playing tennis that prioritises consistency over flair, patience over urgency, and discipline over inspiration. Thirty years after she co-founded Evert Tennis Academy in Boca Raton, that philosophy is still the foundation of how we develop junior players.
The point isn’t the winner. It’s the next point.
Most junior players, when they start, want to hit winners. Big forehands down the line. Aces. The shot that ends the point. It’s the most visible part of tennis, the part that shows up on highlight reels, the part that feels like playing well.
Chris Evert played differently. Her baseline game was built on rhythm, depth, placement, and the patience to construct a point over six, seven, ten shots until her opponent gave her something to attack. She wasn’t trying to hit a winner on shot three; she was setting up shot eight. She’d hit a thousand crosscourt forehands in a match if that’s what the situation called for, and she’d hit the thousand-and-first the same way.
For a junior player, the implication is significant. Tennis isn’t won by the biggest shot you can hit on a good day. It’s won by the seventh shot you can hit reliably on a bad day. Coaches at Evert Tennis Academy build practice plans around that principle: drill the patterns, build the consistency, and let the winners come naturally when the situation actually calls for one. The point isn’t the winner, it’s whether the next point is set up the right way.
Reading the match, not just playing it
One of the most striking things about Chris Evert’s career, looking back, was how often she beat players who hit harder than she did. Big servers, big forehands, players with more raw weapons. She found ways to neutralise them by changing the height of the ball, by changing the rhythm, by reading what her opponent didn’t want and giving them exactly that.
That’s a coaching point we come back to often with our players. Tennis at every level above the casual is a thinking game as much as a hitting game. The player who reads the match, who notices early in the second set that her opponent’s backhand is breaking down, or that her serve is landing shorter on the break points than at deuce, wins matches that the better hitter loses.
Reading the match isn’t a talent you’re born with. It’s a habit you build, and it’s built deliberately. Match-play sessions at the academy include explicit moments of pause where coaches ask players to articulate what’s working, what isn’t, and what they’re going to change. By the time those players hit competition, the analysis has become automatic.
Mental toughness is built, not granted
Chris Evert was famous for her on-court composure. Whether she was up a set or down match-point, she looked the same, the same expression, the same routines between points, the same calibrated breathing before serves. Opponents found it unnerving. Commentators called it “ice.” She called it something simpler: practice.
The mental game in tennis is the part of training that gets undersold most often. Players spend hours on technical drills and conditioning, and then walk onto a match court hoping their nerves will hold up. They sometimes do. They sometimes don’t.
At the academy, mental conditioning is a scheduled part of every player’s week, not an afterthought. Players work with our director of strength and conditioning on the physical side, but they also work explicitly on what to do when they’re down a break, how to reset after a bad call, how to manage the gap between points where matches are actually won or lost. The goal isn’t to feel nothing. The goal is to have a routine you can return to when you feel everything.
The longer arc
There’s something the Netflix documentary will surface, even though it’s not the headline point: Chris Evert is still here, still involved in tennis, still showing up. Her relationship with the sport didn’t end when she retired in 1989. It transformed into co-founding this academy with her brother John in 1996, into commentary work, into giving back and mentoring players who are now themselves established professionals.
The reason this matters for any young player watching tennis isn’t a sprint. The career arc of a great player isn’t four years on tour and done. It’s a relationship with the sport that lasts a lifetime and the choices made at 12, 14, 16 either set up that long relationship or shorten it.
We see this in alumni outcomes. The Evert Tennis Academy players are rarely the ones who hit the hardest at 13. They’re the ones who built the foundations early: sound technique, consistency, the mental game, the body that doesn’t break and who let their natural strengths emerge on top of that base. The flashy junior who burns out at 17 is a real and sad pattern in our sport. The patient junior who’s still developing at 20 is the long game working as designed.
ETA has established a strong worldwide reputation as a nurturing environment where young juniors develop lifelong skills both on and off the court. The program is carefully designed to prepare participants for successful college careers and lays the foundation to reach the next level, the Pro Tour.
John and Chrissie uphold their father’s coaching legacy by emphasizing four core values: Excellence, Resilience, Integrity, and Leadership. These principles guide and influence the Tennis & Academics Program and contribute to the family-oriented atmosphere, a trademark of the Academy.
“Our core values are the roadmap to coaching all student-athletes toward reaching their full potential.” – John Evert
What the Netflix documentary may bring out
For many viewers, Chris & Martina: The Final Set on Netflix will be about more than tennis. The fifteen-year rivalry that defined women’s tennis is the setting; what came after the friendship, and what both women have faced since is the substance. That’s a story we won’t try to retell here. The people who lived it will tell it best.
But the underlying truth that lets that story exist, the reason Chris Evert is still standing on a tennis court today, still talking about the game, still co-running Evert Tennis Academy thirty years after starting it is the long-game philosophy that shaped her playing career. Consistency. Patience. Discipline. The willingness to do the unglamorous work, day after day, for years.
It’s a philosophy that’s harder to sell than instant-results coaching. Junior players want to see progress on Tuesday from work they did on Monday. Tennis doesn’t always work that way. The compounding happens slowly and then all at once, the way good tennis always does.
For parents, coaches, and young players who watch the Netflix documentary on June 26 and find themselves thinking about Chris Evert’s career in a new light, there’s a real takeaway worth holding on to. The greatness wasn’t in any one shot. It was in showing up to hit the next one, and the next one after that, for twenty years. That discipline, the willingness to keep showing up, the patience to keep building, the refusal to quit on the long arc outlasts any single match, any single season, any single career. That’s the long game. That’s what we still teach at the academy she built.
Read more about Chris Evert and our founding story.
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