Hana Mandlikova was an enthusiastic member of the Sparta tennis club in Prague at the age of 12. She was a dancer when women played league games and there was a young woman whose explosive playing style she admired more than anyone else. But Mandlikova was shy and could not speak to her.
Eleven years later Mandlikova defeated her hometown, Martina Navratilova, in the 1985 US Open final, when the latter was at the height of her powers. Their match-ups were too few to earn the kind of rivalry immortalized by history. Martina di Mandlikova’s moments were enclosed between Navratilova’s famous ten-year tug of war with Chris Evert and the old comrade’s smackdown with Steffi Graf. Yet for a couple of years in the mid-1980s, Mandlikova spurred her idol to extraordinary performances.
There was a spectacular semifinal in the 1985 Virginia Slims Championships – in which Mandlikova’s ability to resist the powerful service of her former peasant woman sparked fireworks – and a four-set showcase of Navratilova footage in the same tournament the following year . Three months later, they met in the 1986 Wimbledon final.
Navratilova practically held the lease on Center Court. He had won six single titles, the previous four in a row. The titles of the seven doubles were simple showcases. But Mandlikova broke her first service game, and was 5-2 at the ball change, Navratilova was biting her lip as she returned to her place. In the next game, when his opponent hit a backhand down the line, Navratilova kissed his fingers in appreciation. And then – as if that were enough – world no. 1 started raining it serves as Jove who throws lightning.
What followed was a performance of the pinnacle of Navratilova’s volleyball service. It covered the net with the apparent wingspan of a Boeing 737; jumped up like an exploding star. There were impossible pickups from his ankles, catapulting cross-court racing and devastating deep-court bursts. Mandlikova continued fighting but could not fight the hurricane.
The following year, Navratilova earned her eighth title in Wimbledon, against Graf, the eighteen-year-old wunderkind who had defeated her at Roland Garros and should have announced the end of her reign. Graf also continued to argue, but the 12-year-old woman her elder overwhelmed her. As they waited for the trophy presentation, Graf joked, “How many more Wimbledons do you want?”
“Nine is my lucky number,” said Navratilova. He got what he wanted.
You can’t fight the hurricane. And that’s what Navratilova was meant to be, from the time she brought Evert to three sets in the 1975 French Open, or perhaps later that year, when she left her family to become an immigrant teenager with an Eastern European accent in a country that didn’t care much about strangers. That’s what he promised when he served to love to win his first grand slam in 1978, beating Evert only for the fifth time in 25 attempts, and what he showed in 1984 with his 74 game winning streak, the longest of the history of tennis.
The importance of Navratilova has never been only on discs and titles, although the pure mathematics of his successes – 167 single titles, 177 double titles, 59 majors – has broken every pre-existing algorithm. The magnitude of his career cannot be simply expressed by his longevity, even if he beat the nineteen-year-old world No 1 Monica Seles at the Paris Open when he was almost double his age, or raised the trophy of the US Open mixed doubles when she was a year off from her half century and her partner, Bob Bryan, looked like a nephew who had come around to help her install her computer.
Navratilova possessed a power that overturned everything; he went through a world that was not ready and did not know how to call it. We now recognize it as an identity – an authenticity of self that our zeitgeist encourages and rewards. But for most of Navratilova’s 31-year career, her individuality – the one that inspired her to value physical strength and appear more muscular than a woman should have been, to live openly with a partner and speak for what he believed – it brought a personal cost.
It is easy to forget the support and sponsorship that she has lost, and the suspicion and defamation she has drawn, for being inapologically herself – especially now that she is an international treasure, a beloved expert, a recurring cameo as a lover of Gwyneth Paltrow on a comedy movie Netflix. When Navratilova came out in 1981, he was in a world that associated gay men with AIDS and was largely at ease in his endemic institutional homophobia. When he criticized the U.S. government, it was towards a sports fan base that called for all-American heroes and a media that labeled it unpatriotic.
Western culture took some time to catch up with Navratilova’s non-compliance. His endurance and his immortal passion for tennis enriched his legacy, because the longer he continued, the more people were able to appreciate and understand it: humor and warmth, the soft center of a personality that they once took out of seriousness.
However, its most inspiring attribute has long been evident. Mandlikova once spoke of his vivid memory of discovering that his hero was leaving Czechoslovakia, never to return. “That,” he said, “one he was brave. “It was the quality that made Navratilova a leader in its time and for ours.
Roll of honor
18 single Grand Slam titles
Australian Open: 1981, 1983, 1985
French Open: 1982, 1984
Wimbledon: 1978, 1979, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1990
US Open: 1983, 1984, 1986, 1987
167 single titles
332 weeks classified in the world n. 1
31 double titles of women in grand slam
Australian Open: 1980, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1988, 1989
French Open: 1975, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988
Wimbledon: 1976, 1979, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1986
US Open: 1977, 1978, 1980, 1983, 1984, 1986, 1987, 1989, 1990
10 mixed double slam titles
Australian Open: 2003
French Open: 1974, 1985
Wimbledon: 1985, 1993, 1995, 2003
US Open: 1985, 1987, 2006
From the archive
She may have been born in Prague, now she can live in Texas but, for Martina Navratilova, Wimbledon is her spiritual home and the Center Court crowds her family. “I love this place,” he said on Saturday. And so it should, after bringing the total of the finals to seven by beating Hana Mandlikova 7-6, 6-3 after perhaps his most tested first test exam … For months Navratilova struggled to find his rhythm of service. Even she had come to recognize that her lethal quality was gone. “And all that was wrong was the draw, nothing else,” he explained. ‘Once they got together I didn’t feel anything that could go wrong. When you feel so confident, the rest of your game falls into place. ‘
What gave her special pleasure, he stressed, was to get so convincingly into her first final against a serve-and-volleyball. The other six title fights had been with baseliners – five against Chris Lloyd [Evert]once against Andrea Jaeger – and he had also lived with the annoying memory that Mandlikova had removed her from the American title last September. On the grass, however, Navratilova has once again shown that he has no equal. There has never been a female champion like her. ‘
David Irvine, The Guardian, July 7, 1986
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