The True Story of Chris Evert’s Tennis Bracelet

In celebration of the U.S. Open starting today, and to stay ahead of the flood of stories about the history of tennis bracelets that accompany it each year, I am republishing this post from The Adventurine Archives. The error detailed and corrected here is still going as strong as a serve from Aryna Sabalenka.

I don’t know when it happened, but the story about how Chris Evert’s diamond bracelet came to be known as a tennis bracelet has gotten mixed up.

When I originally wrote this post about the iconic style in advance of the 2017 U.S. Open, I did a digital dive to check my facts and was surprised by what people were reporting.

Almost every story I came across said when Chris Evert was playing a match in 1987 her diamond line bracelet flew off her arm. She stopped to find it and from that moment the jewelry style became known as a tennis bracelet.

One writer from a respectable outlet got so specific, saying the incident happened “during an exceptionally long rally” at the 1987 U.S. Open, that I thought, if she's right, I don’t know how the finer points have passed me by.