FORT LAUDERDALE — It was Diana Nyad’s day, her moment, her stage as a plaque was unveiled honoring her life achievements at the same Fort Lauderdale beach she played on a child. She pointed up East Las Olas Boulevard to a bridge she’d walk over each day from her home on Desota Drive.

“This plaque is right where I’d come with my family from the time I was in second grade through high school,’’ Nyad, now 76, said Thursday morning.

There was another girl she who grew up a few miles away that she met in that Fort Lauderdale of the 1960s. They’d read about each other in the paper. Nyad remembers them often being the only two girls at athletic awards banquet and so would sit together.

“Chris, come in here for a picture,’’ she said to Chris Evert, the tennis legend, as a photographer waited.

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