The Full Biography
Martina Navratilova. Tennis player. The Prague lefty who defected at eighteen, made grass a private country, and turned a rivalry with Chris Evert into the sport’s longest true sentence.
This is her story.
The image most people still carry is a serve-and-volley on Wimbledon grass, a left arm high, a body that looks as if it were built for the net and then decided to live there. Nine singles titles at the All England Club. What the still cannot show is Martina Šubertová of Prague, a stepfather’s name, a defection in New York in 1975, a citizenship ceremony in 1981 that arrived in the same season as a public truth about whom she loved, and a woman in her sixties who still occupies a booth and a political argument and has already named two rounds of cancer out loud.
She was born on October 18, 1956, in Prague, then Czechoslovakia. The birth name is Martina Šubertová. Her mother, Jana, played tennis and taught it. After a divorce, Jana married Miroslav Navrátil, a teaching pro; the girl took the name Navrátilová. The first pressure was a left-handed talent inside a state that treated travel as a privilege and return as a duty. She was already a professional when the 1975 U.S. Open ended. After a semifinal loss to Evert, the eighteen-year-old crossed into Manhattan and told the Immigration and Naturalization Service she would not go home. Czechoslovakia stripped the citizenship. America became the workplace and, in time, the country.
The door the public still uses is Wimbledon, 1978. She beat Evert in the final and took the first of those nine singles titles on the Centre Court grass. The serve-and-volley was not a style note. It was a decision to end points at the net while a generation of baseliners was still constructing rallies. Nancy Lieberman, among others, helped rebuild the body in the early 1980s: weights, endurance, a professional’s fitness in a tour that had not yet agreed that women should look like that. In 1983 she went 86–1. Across 1983 and 1984 she held all four major singles titles at once. The count that lasts is larger than grass. Eighteen Grand Slam singles titles. Thirty-one major doubles. Ten major mixed. Fifty-nine majors in all, the usual and correct total. One hundred sixty-seven singles titles. Year-end world No. 1, again and again.
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The civic object is not a trophy. It is a rivalry. Chris Evert was the baseline and the public’s idea of composure. Navratilova was the net and the public’s idea of appetite. They played eighty times. The record is 43–37, Navratilova, which is close enough to be a marriage of a kind. Evert took the early years and the clay. Navratilova took the middle years and the grass. They have both said the other made them. A fan who keeps only one of them has cleaned the room. The room is the two of them.
On July 20, 1981, she became a United States citizen. In the same season she told the truth about her life with the writer Rita Mae Brown. The papers used the word bisexual; the tour and the endorsement men used the word problem. Contracts receded. She did not put the truth back in the bag. Judy Nelson came next; that partnership ended in a public suit. The file is not a romance novel. It is a champion who came out when coming out still cost money, and who kept winning after the money left.
Whoever said, 'It's not whether you win or lose that counts,' probably lost.Martina Navratilova
She has also said that the difference between involvement and commitment is ham and eggs: the chicken is involved; the pig is committed. The line is a joke until you watch her at net. That is the turn, and it is easy to file as a coming-out story with trophies attached. The turn is the 1975 walk into an immigration office and then the 1981 decision to live in public. A lot of champions become citizens of their own highlights. She became a woman who would not let a state, or a sponsor, own the calendar. The ninth Wimbledon singles title, in 1990, is the monument the grass keeps. The mixed-doubles majors she won in 2003, and the U.S. Open mixed in 2006 with Bob Bryan, a few weeks short of her fiftieth birthday, are the correction: the body was not a souvenir.
The grass is famous. The ledger is larger. She won Wimbledon singles in 1978 and 1979, then again in 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, and 1990 — nine times, a women’s record that still sits on Centre Court like a weather system. The U.S. Open singles came in 1983, 1984, 1986, and 1987. Paris, 1982 and 1984. Australia, 1981, 1983, and 1985. Eighteen Grand Slam singles titles. Thirty-one major women’s doubles. Ten major mixed. Fifty-nine majors in all, the usual and correct total. One hundred sixty-seven singles titles, a number that still looks like a typo. One hundred seventy-seven doubles titles. She spent 332 weeks at world No. 1 in singles. In 1983 she went 86–1. Across 1983 and 1984 she held all four major singles titles at once, a non-calendar sweep the press still reaches for. Nancy Lieberman, among others, helped rebuild the body in the early 1980s: weights, endurance, a professional’s fitness in a tour that had not yet agreed that women should look like that.
Chris Evert is the other half of the civic object. They played eighty times. The record is 43–37, Navratilova, close enough to be a marriage of a kind. Evert took the early years and the clay. Navratilova took the middle years and the grass. They have both said the other made them. A fan who keeps only one of them has cleaned the room. The room is the two of them. She also played Fed Cup for the United States after the citizenship, and she won doubles majors with a list of partners — Pam Shriver above all, a pairing that treated the alley as a private country. The serve-and-volley was not a style note. It was a decision to end points at the net while a generation of baseliners was still constructing rallies.
On July 20, 1981, she became a United States citizen in Los Angeles. In the same season she told the truth about her life with the writer Rita Mae Brown. The papers used the word bisexual; the tour and the endorsement men used the word problem. Contracts receded. She did not put the truth back in the bag. Judy Nelson came next; that partnership ended in a public suit in the early 1990s. The file is not a romance novel. It is a champion who came out when coming out still cost money, and who kept winning after the money left. She left full-time singles in 1994, after a last serious run at the majors, and did not vanish. She kept doubles. She kept mixed. In 2003 she won mixed majors at the Australian Open and at Wimbledon with Leander Paes. In 2006, a few weeks short of fifty, she won the U.S. Open mixed with Bob Bryan. The Hall of Fame had already taken her, in 2000. She was not finished.
She married Julia Lemigova, a former Miss USSR, in 2014, at the New York Public Library. The household is a public partnership and a private one, which is a hard double after decades in which the papers treated her kitchen as a beat. She regained Czech citizenship in 2008 and has held both passports as a fact, not a slogan. Colleagues from the tour describe a woman who could be blunt in a press tent and generous in a locker room after the match was dead. The children of the sport have had to share a champion who is also an opinion. Both the generosity and the bluntness are the life. She has written books, including a memoir that does not sand the defection or the outing. She has taken the booth as a second workplace: the BBC at Wimbledon, Tennis Channel, a voice that still treats a short ball as a moral event.
Six things most people never knew
- Šubertová is the certificate. Prague, October 18, 1956. A stepfather, Miroslav Navrátil, added the name the world learned to spell.
- The defection is a Manhattan office after a loss. 1975 U.S. Open. Eighteen. Czechoslovakia took the passport. She asked for asylum and stayed.
- Fifty-nine majors is the full count. Eighteen singles, thirty-one doubles, ten mixed. Nine Wimbledon singles. The grass is famous. The doubles pile is the other kingdom.
- 1983 was 86–1. A season that still looks like a typo. The non-calendar sweep of the four singles majors sat on either side of that year.
- She came out in 1981, the year of the citizenship. Rita Mae Brown. Endorsements left. She did not.
- A mixed-doubles major at forty-nine is in the file. 2006, Flushing Meadows, with Bob Bryan. The Hall of Fame had already taken her, in 2000. She was not finished.
She married Julia Lemigova in 2014. The household is a public partnership and a private one, which is a hard double after decades in which the papers treated her kitchen as a beat. She regained Czech citizenship in 2008 and has held both passports as a fact, not a slogan. Colleagues from the tour describe a woman who could be blunt in a press tent and generous in a locker room after the match was dead. The children of the sport have had to share a champion who is also an opinion. Both the generosity and the bluntness are the life.
The later years
She is living. The years after the last full-time singles season are still a public life, which is the point of writing them while she is alive. Home, with Julia Lemigova, has been Miami and the road the booth requires: a marriage that began at the New York Public Library in 2014, a household the papers can no longer treat as a rumor. She regained Czech citizenship in 2008 and carries both passports. Prague still claims the girl. The All England Club claims the nine. The immigration office in Manhattan in 1975 is the door the still cannot show. She has not asked any of those rooms to let go.
The booth took her and did not let go. The BBC at Wimbledon, Tennis Channel, a voice that still treats a short ball as a moral event. She has been honest, in that seat, about players she thinks are not working and about politics other retired athletes hire someone to sand. In 2010 she named a noninvasive breast cancer and had it treated. In January 2023 she named two more — stage 1 throat cancer, tied to HPV, and an early breast cancer found in the same workup. She was public. The prognosis she was given was good. She went back to the microphone. She did not make the illness a farewell tour. She made it information. By the summer of 2023 she was in the Wimbledon booth again. She has said the cancers were caught early. She has not asked to be pitied. She has asked to keep talking.
She is in her late sixties. The body that Lieberman helped rebuild in the 1980s is now a commentator’s body, and still a player’s memory. She has appeared at exhibitions. She has raised money for LGBT sport and for cancer research without turning either into a logo that replaces the work. She will still say the political sentence — about refugees, about women in sport, about a country that took her in at eighteen — when a quieter champion would have hired a statement. Some of those sentences have cost her. She has not put the truth back in the bag. The Evert matches are still taught as the last time women’s tennis had a plot that did not need a subplot. New players who never saw her live still come in behind a first serve because she proved the net was not a man’s furniture. She has not issued a farewell. She has only, repeatedly, stayed in the room.
After the spotlight moved
It moved to the booth, which is still a spotlight, just a seated one. New players who never saw her live still come in behind a first serve because she proved the net was not a man’s furniture. The Evert matches are taught as the last time women’s tennis had a plot that did not need a subplot. Prague still claims the girl. The All England Club claims the nine. The immigration office in 1975 is the door the still cannot show.
She came out of Prague, took a stepfather’s name, walked into a New York office at eighteen, made Wimbledon a habit, played Evert eighty times, told the truth when it cost endorsements, won on grass until the record looked like a fable, and is still, after two public wars with cancer, talking into a microphone. If you only remember the serve, you have the still. If you remember Šubertová, the eighty matches, and the 1981 season, you have her.
Portrait: Andrew Campbell · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons