Natalia Zvereva

Natalia Zvereva

Natalia Zvereva was seventeen when she reached the 1988 Roland Garros final, and thirty-two minutes of court time later she had lost it 6-0, 6-0 to Steffi Graf, the shortest Grand Slam final of the Open era, and her only major singles final. The following spring, freshly ranked a career-high world No. 5, she went public with a demand no Soviet athlete had made before: the right to keep her own prize money instead of handing it to the state federation, which had taken most of what she earned in 1988 and paid her a weekly allowance in return. She signed with an agent and forced the system to bend.

Singles was never where she left her mark. Paired mostly with Gigi Fernandez, and later with Martina Hingis, Zvereva won 18 women's doubles majors plus two more in mixed, twenty in all, a total behind only the very best of her era. She retired with 4 career titles and reached the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2010 alongside Fernandez.