<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  The &amp;quot;Ice Maiden&amp;quot; suffered panic attacks. The world traveler was terrified of flying. America&amp;#039;s Sweetheart felt her marriage slipping away, very publicly fell in love with one of her husband&amp;#039;s closest friends, then realized\u2014after the divorce and remarriage\u2014that she had made a big, big mistake. Then came another divorce, her third. That&amp;#039;s when one of international sports&amp;#039; most enduring icons of grace under pressure, grit, perseverance, and determination basically fell apart. She wept. She saw a shrink. She took antidepressants. She wept some more. Things got so bad that for six months, it was all she could do to crawl out of bed in the morning, make her three teenaged boys breakfast, and get them off to school before crawling back into bed with a movie to spend the afternoon until they returned home. That&amp;#039;s when Christine Marie Evert realized that all the fame, money, success, and adulation in the world didn&amp;#039;t make her happy. That it never had. That&amp;#039;s when Little Miss Perfect (she was the rare athletic superstar who inspired multiple nicknames\u2014&amp;quot;Remorseless&amp;quot; among them) figured out that holding things in, always pushing forward, ignoring difficulty, and focusing solely on the moment\u2014the emotional building blocks of her professional greatness, essentially\u2014had also brought her close to personal ruination. She says she&amp;#039;s delighted to have learned her lesson. &amp;quot;I know it&amp;#039;s a clich\u00E9,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;but my whole thing this past year was, whatever doesn&amp;#039;t kill you makes you stronger. Now I know what that means.&amp;quot; The events leading up to Evert&amp;#039;s semipublic scandal are painfully well known. Married to Olympic downhill skier Andy Mill for 18 years, with three children, she fell in love with Mill&amp;#039;s friend, golfer Greg (&amp;quot;The Great White Shark&amp;quot;) Norman. Norman&amp;#039;s ex-wife has said that Evert pursued the golfer. Evert&amp;#039;s ex-husband has said that Norman chased the tennis player. In any case, Evert left her husband, Norman left his wife of 25 years, and as tongues wagged and scolds tsk-tsked, the high-profile couple embarked on a glamorous, sun-kissed courtship. He sat with her at the U.S. Open; she caddied for him. They were married on Paradise Island, in the Bahamas, in June 2008. Fifteen months later, they separated, then divorced. Some said it was a case of two big egos refusing to compromise. Some said Norman was more interested in being famous than in being a husband. Others said Chrissie couldn&amp;#039;t stand a lesser athlete than herself getting more attention (Norman&amp;#039;s golf career had a brief, remarkable resurgence shortly after he hooked up with the retired tennis player). Evert didn&amp;#039;t say much. But now she wants to. &amp;quot;Was there passion? Yes. Was there love? Sure, uh, yes\u2014but we had two big worlds. Honestly, we had different priorities. I want roots\u2014I want to be with my kids, live in a nice, comfortable house, and be able to do my work. One of us would have had to give up a big part of our life. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t want this to be a slam on Greg, but our lifestyles were different. My priority was my kids. His priority was to build his business and travel.&amp;quot; Since the split, Norman has remarried. So has Andy Mill. Evert hasn&amp;#039;t been on so much as a date during that year and a half. That&amp;#039;s fine by her. It&amp;#039;s not that she&amp;#039;s given up on love. &amp;quot;But this time, I&amp;#039;m going to have a more independent relationship. If the guy&amp;#039;s in New York, I&amp;#039;ll fly there, he&amp;#039;ll fly here. It&amp;#039;s always difficult with strong, successful women. You don&amp;#039;t want to be dominated, but you don&amp;#039;t want to walk all over the guy. I think it&amp;#039;ll come when I&amp;#039;m not looking for it, when I&amp;#039;m not trying so hard.&amp;quot; She&amp;#039;s sitting in a couch on the patio behind her house, a sprawling, red-roofed Mediterranean-style place on five wooded acres in Boca Raton, Florida. Behind her is a swimming pool. Behind the pool is a gym, and to her left is a tennis court and guesthouse. Just outside the front door is the garage, which has been transformed into a half-pipe for her sons to skateboard on. Above that is the game room, with a ping-pong table and a television, also for the boys. It&amp;#039;s about 8,200 square feet altogether, and a lot of it seems to be taken up by the kitchen. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not a formal house. It&amp;#039;s kid-friendly, a place you can put your feet up,&amp;quot; Evert says. Evert&amp;#039;s in black sweatpants, white tennis shoes, and a shirt that matches her piercing hazel eyes. She has the trim figure of a woman decades younger (she&amp;#039;s 56), the loose, relaxed carriage of an elite athlete, and a demeanor more akin to the chastened survivor of a painful breakup (or three) than to the groundstroking teenager who seemed to never break a sweat. Which is to say, she is alternately hilarious, self-deprecating, reflective, angry (at her doctors, at others, at herself), bemused, anxious (her 19-year-old cracked his skull skateboarding a few weeks before\u2014&amp;quot;and he&amp;#039;s my easy one,&amp;quot; she adds ruefully), determined, philosophical, and tenacious. One thing she is not is Little Miss Perfect. The truth is, she never was. &amp;quot;I was labeled at a young age\u2014Miss Unemotional, Miss Cool,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;and that would carry over to my press conferences. I still have this image: I can&amp;#039;t be controversial, I can&amp;#039;t say things.&amp;quot; She takes a deep breath. &amp;quot;Being famous before you&amp;#039;ve formed your personality, before you have that self-esteem, is dangerous. Things obviously built up inside me. I competed and handled pressure well\u2014that was my strength. But I suppressed things off the court&amp;quot; as well, she says. No one knew it at the time, though. Her steadiness was too impressive, her precision too riveting. When she was 15, she beat the number one player in the world, Margaret Court, and over the course of a 17-year career, she won the Australian Open twice, Wimbledon three times, the U.S. Open six, and the French Open seven times\u2014a modern record. She also won three Grand Slam doubles titles. Her winning percentage of 90 percent (1,309-146) has never been matched by any tennis player, male or female. That she was a remarkable athlete in an era when female athletes were vaulting into the public consciousness is inarguable. But it&amp;#039;s probably not why she was so beloved, so idolized, and ultimately, so misunderstood. All that was surely more a function of her relentlessly polite demeanor, her supremely phlegmatic affect on court and off. While other champions of her generation (especially men like John McEnroe, Jimmy Connors, and Ilie Nastase) were snarling, cursing, making obscene gestures, and saying unprintable things, and while even her greatest rival, Martina Navratilova, was playing with obvious hunger and sometimes even what looked like rage, the &amp;quot;Ice Maiden&amp;quot; (or &amp;quot;Little Miss Sunshine,&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Ice Princess,&amp;quot; depending on who was writing the story or calling the match) would merely narrow her eyes to signal displeasure, or perhaps mutter something that everyone imagined sounded like &amp;quot;Aw, shoot!&amp;quot; Plus, she had those eyes. And that adorable two-fisted backhand (she first used it as a five-year-old, to compensate for her lack of power; now it&amp;#039;s a common sight and is used by both sexes, including Rafael Nadal). And that cute smile\u2014so pretty, so feminine. She wasn&amp;#039;t just Chris Evert, the polite baseliner with the perfect form\u2014she was Chrissie. Mothers wanted her to be their daughter. Girls wanted her to be their best friend. Boys wanted\u2014well, many of them probably wanted what boys often want. What no one knew was what she was keeping in, what she wasn&amp;#039;t saying, what was missing. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve had a lot of fear in my life, from fear of flying to fear of making a speech in front of a lot of people.&amp;quot; She had fears she didn&amp;#039;t even know about and wouldn&amp;#039;t discover until years later. These days, it&amp;#039;s accepted wisdom among sports fans and tennis aficionados that many athletic prodigies\u2014especially female tennis players\u2014end up paying a heavy emotional price for their early success and the obsessiveness it took to get them there. In 1980, when Andrea Yaeger was barely 15 years old, she became the youngest player ever seeded at Wimbledon; within three years, she was out of tennis and later claimed that she had thrown major matches because she couldn&amp;#039;t stand the spotlight. In 1989, Mary Pierce became the youngest American player to turn pro, at 14; shortly thereafter, she filed a restraining order against her coach, who was also her father. In 1990, Jennifer Capriati became the youngest player to crack the top 10, also at 14; a few years later, she was arrested for shoplifting and smoking marijuana. Things seemed more innocent in 1975, when Chrissie became the world&amp;#039;s top player at 15. But appearances were deceiving. For starters, there was her stoic coach-father, Jimmy, a former tennis pro himself. &amp;quot;I always idolized my dad,&amp;quot; Evert says. &amp;quot;He was very hardworking, strict. I wanted in the beginning to get his praise and his affection, but I didn&amp;#039;t get, `Chrissie, I love you; Chrissie, you look beautiful.&amp;#039; My dad&amp;#039;s approach to tennis was, `Don&amp;#039;t make errors,&amp;#039; not `That&amp;#039;s a beautiful shot.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; When little Chrissie would complain about her father not giving her more love, her mother, Colette, always said, &amp;quot;Oh, that&amp;#039;s just the way he is.&amp;quot; She also warned Chrissie, &amp;quot;If you don&amp;#039;t have anything nice to say, don&amp;#039;t say it.&amp;quot; Her legions of fans, and the media people who covered her, praised her politeness and gushed over her demeanor. She paid attention to them. She had always been good at paying attention. She was nice. She was polite. She was a liar. &amp;quot;Someone at a press conference would ask, `How&amp;#039;d you feel about your match?&amp;#039; and I&amp;#039;d say that my opponent played too well, that this was her day. The real answer was that I let her win the match because I was horrible, I was really bad out there.&amp;quot; Even on the court, being good wasn&amp;#039;t quite good enough. She had to be pleasing. She wore jewelry, and nail polish, and mascara. &amp;quot;I wore ruffled bloomers! I wanted to be `feminine.&amp;#039; Female athletes were rare and considered masculine and not celebrated when I was growing up.&amp;quot; She didn&amp;#039;t complain, though. She barely had the vocabulary.  &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#039;t speak what I felt, I didn&amp;#039;t want to be controversial. I was the opposite of John McEnroe. John said, `If I had been a little bit more like you and you had been a little more like me, it would have been perfect.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Finally, there were the people who took care of her. &amp;quot;When you&amp;#039;re famous, and number one in the world\u2014you have a manager, a coach, someone handling your money, a secretary, people doing everything for you. They would say, `Chrissie, just play your matches, we&amp;#039;ll take care of you.&amp;#039; I didn&amp;#039;t have the tools to lead a normal life. I didn&amp;#039;t do my wash. Entitled is not a very pretty word, but that was me. I had a sense of entitlement.&amp;quot; Evert makes clear that she&amp;#039;s not complaining\u2014&amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m done with the pity party for me. I&amp;#039;m done. I&amp;#039;m lucky. There are people who have it a lot worse than I do&amp;quot;\u2014but she also makes clear, intentionally or not, that what was forged by her relentless training and incandescent fame, her determination to be not just a good girl but the best girl, was not simply an intense, and intensely pleasant, nearly error-free athlete who seldom if ever insulted an opponent, much less complained to a linesman. What also emerged was a beautiful young woman who craved male approval, an expert at keeping her needs to herself, an accomplished and successful champion who had very little idea of how to be alone. In many awful ways and for all the wrong reasons, she was the perfect partner for a fine romance. And she had a few. She was engaged at 19 (&amp;quot;Love Match!&amp;quot; screamed the tabloids) to fellow tennis phenom Jimmy Connors (he was 21). There were dalliances with Burt Reynolds, British rocker and actor Adam Faith, and President Ford&amp;#039;s son, Jack. She married British tennis player John Lloyd in 1979 when she was 24, after she read an article in which he described the loneliness of the professional athlete. She could relate to his message. She was lonely too. &amp;quot;I had a girlfriend ask him if he would want to go out with her and me to Tramp in London, to go out dancing. Yeah, he was all over that. That was our first date, and we hit it off.&amp;quot; What she didn&amp;#039;t know then, she knows now. &amp;quot;It was doomed from the start, because he was on the men&amp;#039;s tour, and I was on the women&amp;#039;s tour, and we never saw each other. I was married to my tennis. My aspiration was to become number one. I had no emotion left when I got home.&amp;quot; In 1987, two years after she had been named &amp;quot;Greatest Woman Athlete of the Last 25 Years&amp;quot; by the Women&amp;#039;s Sports Foundation, Evert and Lloyd divorced.  There was little criticism from Evert&amp;#039;s fans (nor was there much blowback after the Mill or Norman divorce: &amp;quot;My fans were always respectful,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I never felt anything but positive things from them&amp;quot;). But there was other criticism. &amp;quot;Both my parents were really sad at the divorce, and disappointed. My mom wrote me a letter. My dad didn&amp;#039;t talk to me for a while. Life is so funny. It was because my dad wasn&amp;#039;t talking to me that Martina invited me to Aspen.&amp;quot;  Martina was, of course, Martina Navratilova, Evert&amp;#039;s archrival and close friend. At a New Year&amp;#039;s Eve party in the ski town, at the Hotel Jerome, Evert spotted Olympic ski champion Andy Mill as he walked into the room. He sat down next to her and asked, &amp;quot;What are you doing here?&amp;quot; She told him she was there to ski, of course. The next day, skiing backward the whole way, holding her hands, he helped her down the mountain. They were married in July 1988 and in fairly short order had three sons.  They were a golden couple: the skiing champ and the tennis star. They split time in Aspen and Boca Raton\u2014and traveled a lot in between. They loved their children. They were famous, accomplished, good-looking, and rich. How could anything go wrong? What people didn&amp;#039;t know was that Evert felt alone. What people didn&amp;#039;t know was that she felt frightened\u2014of flying, of speaking in public, of playing in exhibition matches. What they didn&amp;#039;t know was that what with the distractions and demands of raising the boys, and Andy&amp;#039;s travel, and her travel, she had a sense that something was wrong but didn&amp;#039;t know what to do about it.  One afternoon in 2001, while Evert was getting her hair highlighted at a Florida salon, she suddenly felt intensely cold. She felt her pulse racing. An ambulance was called, and the attending doctors at the hospital measured her blood pressure at 180/110 and concluded that hypertension was the cause of her symptoms. They put her on medication, and for more than a year she felt groggy all the time, and weak, and yet still had the cold, pulse-racing episodes. After a year, a friend mentioned that it sounded like it might be not high blood pressure, but high anxiety. That&amp;#039;s when she stopped the blood-pressure medication and started on the antidepressant Paxil. That helped. The frightening episodes stopped. Her blood pressure went down. But none of it stopped the deepening gulf she felt in her marriage. Friends suggested professional help. But the tennis champ wasn&amp;#039;t used to asking for help. What champion needs a shrink? &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d go, `God, can&amp;#039;t you figure out your own problems?&amp;#039; &amp;quot; By the time she and her husband did see a therapist, it was too late. By then, Greg Norman, her husband&amp;#039;s pal, was wooing her. Or she was wooing him. It didn&amp;#039;t really matter.  &amp;quot;The counselor said, `If you&amp;#039;re in love with somebody else, it&amp;#039;s not going to work.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; She was, and it didn&amp;#039;t.  When she and Norman married, it was yet another storybook scenario. This time, though, she barely knew the leading man.  &amp;quot;Basically,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;I married my affair.&amp;quot; (Though she is quick to point out that she didn&amp;#039;t sleep with Norman while she was still married to Mill.)  When Evert and Norman divorced all too shortly thereafter, she fell apart. She thought about the huge mistake she had made, the pain she had caused Mill, whom she had described as &amp;quot;my husband and best friend and soul mate.&amp;quot; She thought about what she had done to her children. She thought about what she had done to Norman&amp;#039;s ex-wife. The woman who was always in control, who always looked forward, had lost control. Now she couldn&amp;#039;t stop looking backward.  &amp;quot;My conscience and my guilt and my grief kicked in. I was a little bit of a mess then.&amp;quot; Friends tried to help. &amp;quot;People would say, `You gotta get busy, you gotta keep busy.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; She didn&amp;#039;t get busy. She cried. She took to her bed, watched a lot of movies, read self-help books. And then she got better. She doubled her exercise. She practiced yoga. She read more self-help books. And she saw a shrink. In therapy, she realized that she had misperceived her own feelings, elicited by the attentions of a man other than her husband. She realized that it wasn&amp;#039;t love she&amp;#039;d been feeling but rather excitement at receiving attention and approval\u2014things she had been searching for her entire life and had never gotten enough of.  &amp;quot;When you go into therapy, you go back to your childhood. You realize it, and you get over it. You don&amp;#039;t continue that relationship into your next relationship, like I did. You don&amp;#039;t look for that confidence from others. It wasn&amp;#039;t a need for love, because I had that. What I needed was approval, affirmation. I think that&amp;#039;s probably why I always needed to be in a relationship. A lot of it was my neediness. In a way, I&amp;#039;d always gotten my way. I wasn&amp;#039;t as independent as I should have been\u2014a quality I wish I had developed at a younger age. It wasn&amp;#039;t Andy\u2014it was all me. &amp;quot;I haven&amp;#039;t been alone since I was 21,&amp;quot; Evert continues. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve had boyfriends and husbands\u2014if I was an addict in anything, I was a relationship addict.&amp;quot; She says she knows now that the kind of affirmation she sought\u2014the affirmation that she had never really known she was missing\u2014wasn&amp;#039;t going to come from a new romance, or from having a man flirt with her.  &amp;quot;My therapist told me, when you&amp;#039;re feeling down, be of service to people. So I went to my tennis academy, to the hospital\u2014it builds back both a sense of self-worth and of humility.  &amp;quot;Everybody took care of everything\u2014of me\u2014since I was 15 years old,&amp;quot; Evert says. &amp;quot;Now I&amp;#039;m trying to take care of myself.&amp;quot;  She&amp;#039;s been spending time with her sons. In the weeks ahead, she&amp;#039;ll spend more time at her tennis academy and coach the tennis teams at Boca Raton&amp;#039;s Saint Andrew&amp;#039;s high school. She&amp;#039;ll raise money for the Chris Evert Children&amp;#039;s Hospital in Fort Lauderdale. This summer, she is set to serve as an ESPN commentator at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open\u2014&amp;quot;After five years,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;it&amp;#039;s time to get back to work. I gotta get the juices going again.&amp;quot; In the coming weeks, she&amp;#039;ll schedule an exhibition match and fly to New York to introduce Billie Jean King at an awards dinner. All of it\u2014the flying, the public speaking\u2014will scare her, but that&amp;#039;s all right, because nobody&amp;#039;s perfect, and nobody can be perfect, no matter how hard one tries. She&amp;#039;s happy to have finally figured that out. She&amp;#039;s sorry she hurt people, and it&amp;#039;s not like she would choose to have made the mistakes she did, but if the cost of self-knowledge and at least a measure of peace is mistakes, she&amp;#039;s okay with that.  She rarely wears jewelry these days, certainly not when on the court. She doesn&amp;#039;t wear makeup, either\u2014and absolutely no ruffled bloomers. &amp;quot;My hair&amp;#039;s in a ponytail most of the time, and I&amp;#039;m fit, and that&amp;#039;s me,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;You might have youth and looks, but you don&amp;#039;t have a clue. When you get older, you feel beautiful inside when you have that wisdom and you can teach others. That&amp;#039;s when you feel beautiful. That&amp;#039;s when I feel beautiful.&amp;quot; Asked why she has chosen to talk about all this now, she pauses\u2014a rare thing, because the teenaged Ice Princess, the preternaturally laconic adolescent, has grown into quite a chatterbox.  &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s a good question. No one&amp;#039;s ever asked me that before.&amp;quot; After pausing some more, she says she&amp;#039;s talking because she hopes she might be able to help someone else who believes in fairy tales, someone else who believes that love will conquer all, that romance will make a woman whole, or that keeping things in is a way of keeping things together. She would like to disabuse people of some dangerous notions. &amp;quot;I have something to say to women and married couples out there: I was with Andy for 18 years. It was a good, solid marriage. When we were growing apart, I should have nailed it right then and there, and communicated, but I didn&amp;#039;t. And when someone came into my life, I just left. I broke a lot of hearts. I broke Andy&amp;#039;s heart and broke my kids&amp;#039; hearts. And I brought that into my next marriage; those issues that weren&amp;#039;t resolved. What I have to say is, marriage is up and down. If you sense that you&amp;#039;re drifting apart, you&amp;#039;ve got to confront the issue then and there. You can&amp;#039;t wait until five years later, because then it might be too late.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/life-love/sex-relationships/advice/a2463/chris-evert-marriages/>