![]() ![]() The New York Times that year announced that homosexuality was “the most sensitive issue in the sports marketplace, more delicate than drugs, more controversial than violence.” Male sportswriters fixated on the veins in her arms. More prideful generations can’t comprehend how in the vanguard Navratilova was when she came out in 1981 or the price she paid in lost endorsements. Once, when asked whether she was “openly” gay, she shot back, “As opposed to closedly?” Advised to put a man in her box at Wimbledon, she refused. Her defection from communist Czechoslovakia in 1975 was an act of unimaginable bravery, and her struggle to win acceptance from Western crowds was compounded by her defiant inability to censor herself or mask her homosexuality. Navratilova was as overtly political as Evert was popular. Her game had an acrobatic suppleness that was also entirely novel - never had a female athlete moved with such airborne ease. ![]() Navratilova was her inverse, a gustily emotional left-handed serve-and-volleyer who challenged every traditional definition of heroine with an edgy militancy. 900 winning percentage remains virtually unrivaled in tennis history. Her composure cloaked one of the toughest minds in the annals of sport, and her. 1 ranking for five straight years, she reserved the right to court romantic danger with a bewildering array of famous men, not all of them suitable for a nice Catholic girl, from the surly Jimmy Connors to superstar actor Burt Reynolds - and to put them second to her career. She was a squinteyed, firm-chinned executioner who delivered strokes like milled steel. Audiences had never seen anything quite like the compressed lethality of this two-fisted young woman, who knocked off the legendary Margaret Court at the age of just 15 in 1970. It’s as if they were purposely constructed to test each other - and to whip up intense reactions from their audiences, the adorable blond American middle-class heroine with the frictionless grace against the flurrying Eastern European with sculpted muscles who played like a sword fighter.Įvert played from a restrained conventional demeanor, with ribbons in her hair, earrings in her ears. They are 26 and 24 years old, respectively, honed to fine edges. Call up highlights of Evert and Navratilova’s match at the 1981 U.S. On some slow or rainy day, when the tennis at Wimbledon is banging and artless as a metronome or suspended by weather, do yourself a favor. After a 15-year rivalry, they somehow reached a perfect equipoise of 18 Grand Slam victories each. They contested 80 matches - 60 of them finals - riveting for their contrasts in tactics and temperament. 1 in the world at the direct expense of the other. They first met as teenagers in 1973, became friends and then split apart as each rose to No. The shape of the relationship is an hourglass. No one else could possibly understand it. And afterward they would return to that small room of two, where they showered and changed, observing with sidelong glances the other’s triumphalism or tears, states beyond mere bare skin. Then they would play a match that seemed like a personal cross-examination, running each other headlong into emotional confessions, concessions. They waited together, sometimes ate together and entered the arena together. For so many years, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova were almost invariably the last two, left alone in a room so empty yet intimate that they could practically hear what was inside the other’s chest. ![]() At first the locker room is a hive of 128 competitors, milling and chattering, but each day their numbers ebb, until just two people are left in that confrontational hush known as the final. There is an audible rhythm to a Grand Slam tennis tournament, a thwock-tock, tock-thwock of strokes, like beats per minute, that steadily grows fainter as the field diminishes. Deep Reads features The Washington Post’s best immersive reporting and narrative writing. ![]()
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