Chris Evert’s health news revives the tennis bracelet spotlight

Chris Evert, the player who gave the tennis bracelet its nickname, is back in the spotlight as Netflix released Chris & Martina: The Final Set and Evert said her ovarian cancer has returned. The documentary, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 10 before arriving on Netflix on June 26, revisits the rivalry and friendship that defined an era of women’s tennis and gave jewelers one of the sport’s most enduring style references.

The bracelet story still begins with a single image: Evert on court at the 1978 U.S. Open, her diamond-and-gold bracelet broken and the match briefly halted while she looked for it. JCK has long credited that moment with making the “tennis bracelet” name stick, turning a practical piece of flexing line-set diamonds into a cultural shorthand for polish, speed and composure under pressure. In jewelry terms, the category’s appeal has always rested on that balance between movement and structure, the stones linked so closely they read as one continuous ribbon.

Evert’s health news has made the story feel newly personal. On June 25, Evert said her ovarian cancer had returned and that treatment would keep her from attending Wimbledon this year. That detail changes how the bracelet reads now: not simply as a court-side accessory, but as a piece tied to a specific life and a very public memory. Evert later worked with Monica Rich Kosann on a tennis-bracelet line inspired by her on-court recollections, extending the connection from an accidental break on the baseline to a designed piece meant to carry the same association.

The documentary gives the revival more weight because Evert and Martina Navratilova remain two of the sport’s defining names. From November 1975 through August 1987, either Evert or Navratilova held the WTA No. 1 ranking for 592 of 615 weeks, with Evert at No. 1 for 260 weeks and Navratilova for 332. They met 80 times in their careers, and Navratilova later described Evert as the rival she had to beat to reach the top. Evert’s own record, 18 Grand Slam singles titles and 154 WTA singles titles, is why her name still has enough cultural force to pull a classic jewelry category back into view.