LONGTIME British tennis reporter Richard Evans will be honoured this July when he is inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island. Evans, who will be recognised as a “contributor” for his long service to the sport, joins some illustrious inductees from the recent and deeper past including Andre Agassi, Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova and Rod Laver. 

Evans wrote for the Evening Standard, the former Evening News, The Sunday Times and numerous other magazines and newspapers and provided radio commentary, including play-by-play at Wimbledon. At 85, he is still travelling the tennis circuit and was covering the French Open in Paris when we spoke, before going on to Wimbledon.

Evans fell into tennis more or less by accident — his beat was mainly football, cricket and rugby when he began his career in London as a 17-year-old with Hayter’s news service. But in 1960, at 21, he joined the Evening Standard and was abruptly assigned to ghost-write American Althea Gibson’s Wimbledon coverage.