Martina Navratilova

Martina Navratilova: The Defector Who Rebuilt Her Own Body

In September 1975, an eighteen-year-old Czechoslovak tennis player, fresh off a US Open semifinal loss to Chris Evert, walked into an immigration office in New York City and asked for political asylum. She had a green card within a month. What followed was not just a career but a total physical reinvention: Martina Navratilova, once considered talented but soft, turned herself into the most conditioned athlete women's tennis had ever seen and, over the next two decades, into a player with more major championships than anyone but Margaret Court.

A Divided Childhood in Prague

Navratilova was born Martina Šubertová on October 18, 1956, in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Her parents divorced when she was three; her stepfather, Miroslav Navrátil, became her first coach after marrying her mother in 1962, and she took his surname. She was hitting a ball against a concrete wall by age four and won the Czechoslovak national championship at fifteen, turning professional in 1975 — the same year she chose exile over returning home, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1981 and only reclaiming Czech citizenship in 2008.

Reinventing the Athlete

Navratilova's early career established her as a gifted but inconsistent player; her transformation into the sport's dominant force in the 1980s is usually traced to her decision to overhaul her diet and adopt an intensive fitness regimen, borrowing training methods from basketball player Nancy Lieberman. The result was a serve-and-volley game built on speed, reach, and aggression at net that her rivals simply could not physically match. Her most dominant stretch, from 1982 to 1986, is remembered as one of the most one-sided periods any player has produced in the sport: in 1983 alone she went 86–1, a 98.9 percent winning percentage that remains the best single-season record of the professional era. In 1984 she won 74 consecutive matches across all surfaces before Helena Suková ended the streak at the Australian Open, and she simultaneously held all four Grand Slam singles titles at once after winning the French Open that year — a sequence tennis's governing body controversially declared a "Grand Slam" even though it did not fall within a single calendar year.

Eighteen Singles Titles, Fifty-Nine Majors Combined

Navratilova won 18 Grand Slam singles titles, including a record nine Wimbledon championships, four US Opens, three Australian Opens, and two French Opens. Adding her record 31 women's doubles titles and 10 mixed doubles titles, her combined total of 59 major championships is second only to Margaret Court's 64. She held the world No. 1 singles ranking for 332 weeks and the doubles ranking for a record 237 weeks, and finished her Open-era career with 1,442 singles match wins, the most of any player in the sport's history, at an 87 percent winning percentage. She remained competitive astonishingly late into life: in 2003, at 46 years and 8 months old, she won the Australian Open and Wimbledon mixed doubles titles with Leander Paes, becoming the oldest Grand Slam champion in history, and won her final major title, mixed doubles at the 2006 US Open, weeks before turning 50.

The Rivalry That Defined a Sport

Navratilova's rivalry with Chris Evert is widely regarded as the greatest in the history of women's tennis, spanning 80 matches over 16 years with Navratilova ahead 43–37 overall and 14–8 in Grand Slam meetings. Their most extreme contrast came in 1984, when Navratilova's dominance was so complete that broadcaster Bud Collins suggested the sport needed to create a separate league just to give Evert a fair contest. A younger rivalry, against Steffi Graf, was closer: Navratilova won 9 of their 18 meetings and, at 34, beat Graf in a deciding US Open match in 1991 that stood as their last.

Coming Out and Public Life

In 1981, shortly after gaining U.S. citizenship, Navratilova came out publicly as gay, becoming one of the first prominent professional athletes to do so while still an active competitor — a decision that cost her some endorsement income at the time but that she never reversed. She became a long-standing advocate for LGBT rights, addressing the 1993 March on Washington and later opposing discriminatory legislation in court. In more recent years she has been a prominent, and publicly contested, voice on questions of transgender participation in women's sports. She has also faced serious health challenges, surviving breast cancer diagnosed in 2010 and both throat and breast cancer diagnosed in 2023, declared cancer-free that same year.

Why Martina Is Called a Genius

The word attached to Navratilova is rarely about shot-making alone; it is about the deliberate, almost scientific reconstruction of an athlete's body and game that no rival of her generation replicated to the same degree. She recognized, ahead of most of women's tennis, that fitness and diet were themselves competitive weapons rather than incidental habits, and rebuilt her physical conditioning so completely that her level of dominance in the mid-1980s — an 86–1 season, a 74-match win streak — has never been matched before or since in the professional game. Billie Jean King called her simply "the greatest singles, doubles and mixed doubles player who's ever lived," a judgment resting specifically on the breadth of Navratilova's mastery across three distinct formats of the game that most specialists never attempt to combine at an elite level. The International Tennis Hall of Fame frames her legacy the same way, emphasizing that unmatched versatility over any single statistic. The honest counter-case is that her rivalry with Chris Evert, while historically close overall, tilted so heavily in Navratilova's favor during her fitness-driven peak that some contemporaries argued the competitive balance of the sport itself was temporarily distorted rather than simply outmatched — and that longevity late in her career, aided by doubles specialization rather than singles dominance, inflates her total title count relative to peers who retired earlier. What remains uncontested is that no other player in the sport's history has combined singles dominance, doubles dominance, and mixed doubles dominance across four different decades.

Legacy

Navratilova was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2000, and in 2005 Tennis magazine named her the greatest female player of the sport's previous forty years. Tennis historian Bud Collins called her "arguably the greatest player of all time." Beyond tennis, she has written instructional books, an autobiography, and mystery novels, and has remained a fixture of televised sports commentary for decades. Nearly fifty years after her defection, the arc of her career — from a teenager seeking asylum to the most decorated player of her era — remains one of the sport's most complete transformations.

Achievements

• International Tennis Hall of Fame — 2000
• Worked as tennis player, autobiographer and novelist