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Martina Navratilova
She was the most daring player in the history of tennis; her attacking style and superb athleticism revolutionized the sport.

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By Steve Kettmann

April 18, 2000 |  If it weren't for the quick cut to the tennis court, you might at first have trouble recognizing Martina Navratilova in the new Subaru commercials. Only six years have passed since she wrapped up the greatest career ever in women's tennis -- whether in terms of victories or just plain style -- but already Navratilova's tennis playing seems incidental, because there's simply no one out there now to remind us of her dynamic, attacking, serve-and-volley style (and that goes even for the amazing Williams sisters and for Navratilova's namesake, Czech-born Martina Hingis).

Navratilova, once too controversial for TV ads because she talked openly about her love of both men and women, is today as well known for her intelligence and willfulness as for her tennis game. This is the joke behind the TV spots, in which Navratilova plays off the idea that only men know cars. "What do I know about performance?" Navratilova says with easy, tart sarcasm, and then, at the close of the commercial, featuring her and other prominent female sports stars: "What do we know? We're just girls?"

Not so long ago, Americans saw Navratilova as the embodiment of otherness: the mysterious, left-handed Soviet-bloc athlete using her obviously state-manufactured prowess and strength to do battle with lovable blond American sweetheart Chris Evert and her wicked two-handed backhand. Like other athletes from Communist countries, Navratilova faced an inconsistent blend of bias -- hatred and scorn mixed with resentful awe. Yet as far back as when she was growing up outside of Prague, twig-thin and tiny but even then ready to swing big, Martina in many ways thought of herself as American.

"I was so stubborn, so independent, that I was more American than Czech, even as a little kid," she reflects in her autobiography, written in 1985 with New York Times sportswriter George Vecsey. "I didn't feel I belonged anywhere until I came to America for the first time when I was 16. I'm not a mystic about many things -- I tend to be pretty pragmatic about life -- but I honestly believe I was born to be American."

Now, long after she became a naturalized citizen, Navratilova's American identity is firmly established, so much so that when she shows up in the Czech Republic, as she did last year to receive a medal from Czech President Vaclav Havel, it's a big event. And that's fitting, because Navratilova is as American as Jay Gatsby, self-created in the way of people who take seriously the idea that they are free to live as they wish.

Navratilova retired in 1994 with a record 167 singles championships, still the all-time women's record, and was ranked No. 1 in the world seven different years, including 1982 to 1986 consecutively. She won the Australian Open three times and the French twice, but it was before the rowdy, vocal crowds at the U.S. Open (which she won four times) and the respectful, proper crowds at Wimbledon that she made her most enduring mark. Wimbledon intimidated her at first with its tradition, its all-white clothes and strawberries and cream, but she ended up winning there an amazing nine times, including every year from 1982 to 1987.

"Martina revolutionized the game by her superb athleticism and aggressiveness, not to mention her outspokenness and her candor," Evert told Women's Sports and Fitness magazine when Navratilova retired. "She brought athleticism to a whole new level with her training techniques -- particularly cross-training, the idea that you could go to the gym or play basketball to get in shape for tennis. She had everything down to a science, including her diet, and that was an inspiration to me. I really think she helped me to be a better athlete. And then I always admired her maturity, her wisdom and her ability to transcend the sport. You could ask her about her forehand or about world peace and she always had an answer. She really is a world figure, not just a sports figure."

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Navratilova's parents divorced in 1959, when she was 3 years old, and Martina moved from a ski lodge in the Krkonose Mountains to her mother's childhood home in the village of Revnice, just outside of Prague. These were Communist times, of course, and people did not have their own tennis courts. But Navratilova's mother's family had once had a 30-acre estate, and when the Communists took power in 1948, they took the land and left the family the house and a red-clay tennis court in the yard.

Tennis history owes a lot to the Czech Communists' small show of restraint in leaving the court outside of what would be Martina's window, but the loss of so much of what had been theirs left a mark on the family. Martina would sneak into the grove across the street and steal apples, consciously seeking to reclaim a little of what was lost. "I think my mother and my grandmother carried a sense of litost, a Czech word for sadness, that I picked up, a feeling of loss at the core of their souls," Navratilova writes in her autobiography.

Agnes Semanska, Martina's maternal grandmother, a tennis player herself, had beaten the mother of Vera Sukova in a national tournament. (Sukova reached the finals at Wimbledon in 1962.) Martina was athletic even as a toddler, and still remembers zipping downhill on skis when she was 2. Showing the local boys she could compete with them in ice hockey and soccer also made an early impression. But tennis was impossible to ignore. Her mother and father (her "second father") spent most of their time at the town tennis club, except in winter, and Martina was given one of her grandmother's old wooden rackets. It had no grip tape, was a little crooked and was ridiculously oversized for puny little Martina, but even at age 4 she would spend hours hitting balls against the wall as her parents played matches.

"I remember the first time I played tennis on a real court," she wrote in her autobiography. "The moment I stepped onto that crunchy red clay, felt the grit under my sneakers, felt the joy of smacking a ball over the net, I knew I was in the right place. I was probably about 6 years old when that happened, but I can remember it as if it was yesterday."

Next page | Her father would say, "Make believe you're at Wimbledon"