Chris Evert speaks exclusively to Woman’s Day, as Dylan Howard in Florida investigates the clash of wills that doomed the star couple.
With its nine huge bedrooms, guest wings, wine cellars and $US60 million price tag, Greg Norman and Chris Evert’s estate, ironically named Tranquility, hardly seems a house worth ending a marriage over.
But this Florida waterfront mansion has emerged as the final tension that severed the highly passionate – and public – love affair between sporting super couple Greg and Chris.
Even Greg’s recent addition of tennis courts to the sprawling waterfront palace, a final peace offering in the effort to keep the 15-month marriage strong, was not enough to keep the couple together.
The first hints that things weren’t well with the pair came at their most recent public outing last month.
Gone were the physical fireworks – the long embraces, the dip and kiss, the adoring gazes. Instead, while they sat close together at the US Open tennis tournament in New York, the closest onlookers got to witnessing their famed chemistry were some shared smiles and a lukewarm declaration from Greg that he’d “been a big tennis nut for my whole life”.
It was a long way from April, when the twosome hugged and kissed like teenagers in love at the Masters Augusta National tournament, with Chris even acting as her husband’s caddy.
In fact, throughout the couple’s very public courtship, their displays of affection have been almost as noteworthy as the way they got together – through the dramatic break-up of their long-time marriages.
Little wonder then that two of those hurt most by the Norman-Evert implosion – his former wife of 25 years Laura Andrassy and Chris’s Olympian ex-husband of 18 years Andy Mill – remain bitter.
“They had been telling everyone how much in love they were, so everybody thought it would last a little longer than this,” Laura says.
“I said to Andy [Chris’s ex-husband] when I spoke to him today, ‘It’s like a bad movie – and we’re in it!’
For his part, Andy was barely able to hide his disgust, exclusively telling Woman’s Day, “The culmination of our marriages is over 50 years, and to break up two families for a three-year fling is just horrible.”
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