Shortly after Pam Shriver woke up Thursday at the Marina del Rey DoubleTree, where she has been staying the past week since fleeing the Pacific Palisades fire in Los Angeles, she realized her son’s car, containing her collection of Grand Slam trophies, had been stolen.

Shriver spent the day trying to deal with that unfortunate event while sending messages to Donna Vekic, the top Croatian tennis player she helps coach. Vekic, the No. 18 seed at the Australian Open, was preparing for her third-round match in Melbourne, 7,000 miles away.

By Thursday evening she was attending a virtual school board meeting on one screen while watching and intermittently praying during Vekic’s three-set nail-biter against No. 12 seed Diana Shnaider.

Someone might have been listening. Vekic prevailed 7-6(4), 6-7(3), 7-5. In the meantime, one of Shriver’s sons called to let her know that she had packed her five Wimbledon doubles trophies in a racket bag that had ended up in a different car to her son George’s Dodge Durango, which was stolen.

The Los Angeles Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“It’s so crazy,” she said, in a phone interview from Los Angeles after Vekic’s match. “I’m not religious but I felt like I needed one.”

Shriver said she’d lost track of where her family had packed away the belongings they gathered as the fires crept closer to the peak of Mandeville Canyon, about a mile from her home. The car that was stolen held 11 trophies from the U.S. French and Australian Opens, but not those five from Wimbledon.

Shriver, 62, stayed behind in Los Angeles as Vekic traveled to Melbourne after arranging accommodation for her support staff, friends and pets at the Marina del Rey hotel.

Vekic, who reached last year’s Wimbledon semifinal with Shriver in her box, drew a heart symbol and wrote “LA” on a camera lens after her first-round win at the Australian Open.

“It’s a very difficult situation for her. She’s home in L.A. Her house is OK for now, but so many have lost everything, and it’s a horrible situation,” Vekic said of Shriver in her news conference.

Shriver won 22 Grand Slam doubles titles in total, 21 in women’s doubles and one in mixed doubles. She and partner Martina Navratilova are the only women’s doubles pair to win all four majors in a calendar year, and Shriver won Olympic gold in women’s doubles for the U.S. at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, partnering Zina Garrison.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

Tennis, Women's Tennis

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