6 - Forty-Seven Attempts: Steffi's First Title

Before Steffi Graf became a 22-time Grand Slam champion, she was a teenager grinding through Futures events, qualifiers, and lonely early-round losses. In this episode, we zoom in on the moment everything changed: her first WTA Tour title in Hilton Head, 1986, where a 16-year-old Steffi finally breaks through and beats Chris Evert in the final.

We follow Steffi from the satellite circuit and junior dominance to the setbacks that almost sent her back to school, the thumb injury in Australia, the “I never want to play on grass again” meltdown, and the Olympic breakthrough in Los Angeles. Then we track her 1985 run of near-misses—constantly running into Evert—and how that all builds toward Hilton Head, where she turns the tables on the queen of the baseline and finally announces herself as a real threat to both Evertand Martina Navratilova.