The True Story of Chris Evert’s Tennis Bracelet

Because the details have been seriously mixed up

*This story from the Archives was originally published on The Adventurine website in 2017.

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.