They sat alone in the small locker room, alternately trying to ignore each other and making awkward, nerves-concealing small talk. Even underground at Roland Garros—and then on the red clay tennis court above—there were contrasts that could not have been more obvious.
One was a lithe Floridian, then 20, a righty whose personality expressed itself in her precise tennis, predicated less on power than composure and calm. The other was 18, about to defect from what was then Communist Czechoslovakia. She was an athletic lefty, who, even as a teenager, had a hell of a risk threshold, charging forward on the court—and speaking her mind off of it—come of it what may.
