LONGTIME British tennis reporter Richard Evans will be honoured this July when he is inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island. Evans, who will be recognised as a “contributor” for his long service to the sport, joins some illustrious inductees from the recent and deeper past including Andre Agassi, Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova and Rod Laver. 

Evans wrote for the Evening Standard, the former Evening News, The Sunday Times and numerous other magazines and newspapers and provided radio commentary, including play-by-play at Wimbledon. At 85, he is still travelling the tennis circuit and was covering the French Open in Paris when we spoke, before going on to Wimbledon.

Evans fell into tennis more or less by accident — his beat was mainly football, cricket and rugby when he began his career in London as a 17-year-old with Hayter’s news service. But in 1960, at 21, he joined the Evening Standard and was abruptly assigned to ghost-write American Althea Gibson’s Wimbledon coverage. 

In 1957 and ’58, Gibson had become the first black player to win the Wimbledon title. Evans’s articles with Gibson were co-by-lined, giving him his first real notoriety in the sport. Thus emboldened, he offered to escort Gibson to the Wimbledon ball. She accepted.

Many in the sport know the debonair Evans as a walking tennis encyclopaedia — although he can tell you plenty about cricket and Arsenal if asked and is happy to give you an earful on the despicability of Donald Trump. Evans makes his home in Florida where his son also lives.

But they might not picture the suave and dapper Brit dodging police batons at the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami, (unsuccessfully, “the blow caught me behind my right ear and the lower part of my neck”); standing on the Memphis hotel balcony the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated there (“there was still blood on the ground”); languishing in an opium den in Cambodia while covering the Vietnam War (“sex was part of the equation but not essential”); or peering over a Soweto fence to snap a photo of the newly released Nelson Mandela (“there was next to no security”).

As a foreign correspondent, Evans accompanied Robert F Kennedy on his ill-fated 1968 presidential campaign, although he was not present on June 5, the night of Kennedy’s assassination in a Los Angeles hotel. 

Evans firmly believed Kennedy would have attained the presidency and that the world would have been a better place as a result. “He was just a remarkable person,” Evans recalled. “The more you were with him, the more you liked him.”

Evans made three trips to south-east Asia to cover the Vietnam War, the second time venturing into Cambodia with the swashbuckling British war correspondent, Jon Swain. At the time, President Nixon was denying the presence of US troops in Cambodia despite the emergence of a photograph showing a US officer getting out of a helicopter there.

Evans was then travelling with a Cambodian officer who was in constant radio contact in French with helicopter pilots circling above. Suddenly the officer switched to English. Evans quickly pressed his tape recorder to the man’s earpiece. When he played back the tape, Evans heard the unmistakable accent of an American co-pilot. “We rushed back to Phnom Penh and got the audio on air via ABC, which backed up the photograph,” Evans recalled. “It was quite a scoop.”

However, despite describing his time overseas covering politics as “exhilarating,” it was to tennis that Evans ultimately returned for the remainder of his now long career. “I got sick of being lied to,” he said of the political beat. Evans went on to produce numerous books including biographies of two of the sport’s most volatile characters — the Romanian Ilie Nastase, and American John McEnroe.

It was the personalities that drew him to write their stories, Evans said, even though their frequent explosions cost both the chance to win more titles.

While researching his aptly titled biography, John McEnroe, A Rage for Perfection, Evans visited McEnroe’s old school in Manhattan, asking the principal if John had had problems with umpires during school matches. There were no umpires, the principal said. “He told me that any close call John gave to his opponent, which tells you everything you want to know about John McEnroe,” Evans said.

Although vilified in the press, Evans saw a side of McEnroe that cared deeply about fair play. “He doesn’t want any gifts but try and take something away from him that he thinks is his and he couldn’t handle it. A guy who probably didn’t have as good an eye as he did, sitting in a big chair calling something out that was in? Temperamentally he could not handle it because it was wrong.”

However, when asked who he views as the greatest player ever, it is Roger Federer’s name that immediately comes up and before that Lew Hoad, the rugged Australian who won championships as an amateur in the 1950s but whose professional playing career endured until 1971.

Hoadie, as he was known, was the player his rivals agreed would be the one you picked “to play for your life, provided he hadn’t had too many beers,” Evans said. “But Roger Federer is the best player I’ve ever seen. Aesthetically and technically, Roger is in a class of his own.”

On the women’s side, “it’s a mixed bag but I would be tempted to say Martina Navratilova, a serve-and-volley player par excellence.”

Evans was particularly close with Arthur Ashe, the pioneering African American tennis player who won Wimbledon in 1975 in a seminal match in which he out-strategised a younger, more powerful Jimmy Connors. Evans was in Cameroon in 1972 when Ashe discovered a young Yannick Noah, who went on to be a great French tennis champion.“Mmm, kid can play,” Evans recalled the ever understated Ashe saying.

The following year, Evans accompanied Ashe on his first — and controversial — trip to South Africa, where the American had to face a room full of sometimes hostile black South Africans angry that he was not boycotting the apartheid regime. 

But it was a decision to return to South Africa in 1990 to cover a “rebel” cricket tour led by former England captain Mike Gatting, defying the sports boycott there, that put Evans in that country at its most historic moment.

“We were driving towards Durban and stopped for a drink,” recalled Evans, “and one of the photographers said ‘they’ve released Mandela. They’ve made communism legal.’ Talk about a country completely changing within a stroke of a pen.”

Mandela later said that sport had the capacity to change the world, which Evans felt validated his choice to focus on sport over politics. But despite his long association with tennis, Evans is disappointed that the sport has not done more to better promote itself. 

In his 2017 autobiography, The Roving Eye, Evans lamented that tennis “has remained fragmented with too many governing bodies,” who are too preoccupied with “guarding their own nests and jostling for the limelight.” Rather like some of the politicians he also covered.

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.