Announcement from Sports Editor Jason Murray and Deputy Sports Editor Matt Rennie:
We are thrilled to share that Sally Jenkins’ “Bitter rivals. Beloved friends. Survivors.” has won the 2024 Mike Berger Award, which is administered by the Columbia Journalism School and honors outstanding examples of in-depth, human-interest reporting. This is The Post’s fourth Berger Award win.
“Exhaustively reported and beautifully written, Jenkins’ piece is a great love story told with rigor, precision, and rare sensitivity,” the announcement of the win notes. It also recognizes the winning work as “a richly nuanced story of the entwined rivalry and friendship of two tennis icons, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova.”
Sally has been writing about Navratilova and Evert for nearly four decades, and the trust she built up with her subjects allowed her to craft an incredibly intimate and personal story that immediately resonated with readers. Over weeks of conversations, emails, text messages, and then a meeting in Miami, the two friends brought Sally inside their inimitable relationship: their friendship as teens; their years as adversaries; the hilarious, touching and painful ways in which their lives were intertwined; and then finally their joint cancer diagnoses, and the ways they leaned on each other through those trials.
It’s ultimately not a sports story about two of the best athletes to ever play, but a tale of friendship between two women who have shared joy and heartbreak and everything in between.
Please join us in congratulating Sally on this well-deserved honor.
