The tennis ball, an undisturbed artifact of a horrific wildfire, sat just off the Pacific Palisades court and was so covered in gray ash that its Penn logo was only faintly visible.
Pam Shriver studied it the way she might a precious archaeological discovery.
“I find that so moving,” the Hall of Fame tennis player said. “The ball survived.”
All of this is intensely personal to Shriver, as it is to millions of Southern Californians. She lives in Brentwood and though she was evacuated in the January fires, her home was spared. Still, more friends and families than she can count were not so fortunate.
That has been the driving force for her the past eight months, how she can use tennis and her influence to help rebuild the communities most severely affected by the catastrophic flames.
“Tennis brings people together,” said Shriver, part of ESPN’s U.S. Open broadcast team. “It gets families moving. It creates a sense of normalcy.”
Normalcy has been in short supply during the past eight months, and Shriver has been keenly aware of that living amid the cleanup of the Palisades and touring the devastation of Altadena. It’s so meaningful to her, almost poetic, that the sport courts escaped relatively unscathed.
“The nets, the wind screens, the fencing is gone,” she said. “But the courts themselves are intact. There’s something symbolic about that. It’s the promise of resilience.”
Shriver and friend Ilise Friedman are the driving force behind Village Rising, a foundation created to revitalize communities disrupted by crisis or disaster.
Friedman, whose background is in fundraising, started the nonprofit in 2018 in response to the Woolsey fire, and later helped victims of the Getty fire in 2019 before pausing the operation during the pandemic.
When friends from around the world began calling to donate after the January fires, Friedman restarted Village Rising with Shriver, now the organization’s president. It’s predominantly a volunteer operation with improving schools and sports programs at its core.
“Tennis is our through line,” Friedman said. “Our mantra is, ‘Build a court, build a community.’”
Shriver was in Kona, Hawaii, with her sons when the fires broke out, on her way to cover the Australian Open. When the severity of the situation became apparent, she came back to Los Angeles and checked on her home before evacuating to a hotel in Marina del Rey.
While she was staying there, her son’s Dodge Durango was stolen from the parking lot. In the back of the heisted SUV were many of her major championship trophies, including five from the French Open, seven from the Australian and one from Wimbledon.
The car was never recovered, but about 10 days after the theft someone dropped off the trophies behind the hotel.
“If it was either the car or the trophies that would never come back, it worked out much better for me,” she said. “My son might argue otherwise.”
Compared to what others have lost, the stolen car is a mere inconvenience. Enter Village Rising, whose goal is to identify overlooked parks and schools damaged by the fire, raise funds and distribute grants quickly.
“We want the money to flow through to where it’s needed quickly,” Shriver said. “We don’t want to sit on it.”
The tennis connection is obvious, but Shriver also has served on four private school boards, and her boys attended local schools in the Palisades. She’s particularly focused on underfunded schools in the Altadena area where fire damage has waylaid rebuilding efforts.
“It’s about lifting up places that were left behind,” she said.
In her storied playing career, Shriver reached the women’s singles finals of the U.S. Open in 1978 at age 16, won an Olympic gold medal in 1988, but is best known for her doubles play, mostly with Martina Navratilova. They won seven Australian Open, five Wimbledon, four U.S. Open and four French Open titles.
Now, a new challenge to conquer alongside Friedman.
“This is like doubles,” Shriver said.
And the strength of her game back then?
Naturally, service.
The post Tennis legend Pam Shriver working to rebuild communities affected by fires appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
