Heads Martina wins
The 1978 women’s final at Wimbledon between Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert was finely balanced at set-all, going on serve with Evert 2-3 in the decider, when both players came to the net at 15-30.
Evert hit a backhand volley that struck her 21-year-old opponent in the head, and Navratilova collapsed to the Centre Court turf more from embarrassment than pain. When she got up, grinning, Evert was waiting at the net to give her head a friendly rub as the crowd applauded.
Evert won that game, but Navratilova came back at her to seal the Championship shoot-out 2-6, 6-4, 7-5. Although this was already the 27th match she and her great friend had contested, it was the exiled Czech’s first time in the Wimbledon final… and she had won, her serve-and-volley ultimately outwitting Evert’s anticipation and passing shots. Navratilova did not know it then, but her mastery of low-bouncing grass would eventually earn her a record nine title victories in SW19.
Yet the left-hander had never even seen a grass court until a week before her first match on it, in 1973. Watching Wimbledon on television as a child, she imagined the grass to be a couple of inches long, much like a football pitch. And here she was standing on the most famous tennis lawn of all, waiting to receive the Venus Rosewater Dish.
I can’t believe it. I hit you in the head with the ball, and you started playing better
"How come you’re not crying?” queried Evert, as they stood courtside before the presentation.
“I don’t know,” replied Martina, adding: “I don’t want to, not in front of all these people.” Evert looked at her indulgently.
“I did, the first time,” she said, remembering 1974. Then she smiled: “I can’t believe it. I hit you in the head with the ball, and you started playing better.”
Forty years on, Navratilova’s first Wimbledon title still lights up the history books. Playing better, being better, was Martina’s quest, fuelled by her defection from her homeland of Czechoslovakia in 1975 at the age of 18.
Having been stripped of her citizenship, she considered that first Wimbledon title in 1978 a triumph for the Czech people. But it was a victory she celebrated without her family.
Her parents, sister and half-brother were not permitted by the Czech government to travel to London. The pain of their absence was so heartfelt that in an interview conducted in 2012, 34 years after the event, the memory moved her to tears.
"I didn't even know if my parents were able to see it on TV,” recalled Navratilova. “Czech television wouldn’t show it because I was persona non grata. So they drove near to the German border and saw it on German TV; and then I spoke to them on the phone maybe a couple of hours later. They were thrilled.”
The German broadcast was her family’s first glimpse of her in two years. Her parents’ absence touched HRH the Duchess of Kent, who at that time presented the trophy to the winner of the women’s title. In 1978 she promised Navratilova she would do what she could to help; and one year later, when Navratilova successfully defended her Wimbledon title, she did so with her mother Jana among the Centre Court crowd.
Meanwhile, that 1978 Wimbledon win was pivotal in other ways. Before the final that year she had won 56 of 59 matches, including a 37-match, seven-tournament winning streak – but Evert was absent from all those tournaments on an extended break, and Navratilova was still No.2 behind her. The week before Wimbledon they met on the Eastbourne grass, where Martina came back from match point down to win. But Wimbledon was her goal.
I didn't even know if my parents were able to see it on TV. Czech television wouldn’t show it because I was persona non grata. So they drove near to the German border and saw it on German TV
Two months after her SW19 victory, she spent one Saturday evening at the New York home of the Czech film director Milos Forman, by then already a winner of an Oscar for One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (and later to win another for Amadeus), in the company of other American-resident Czechs.
"We had some wine, and they were all playing Czech songs,” Navratilova told The Washington Post in September 1978. “Then Milos dragged all eight of us in front of the television, and we watched the last set on video.
When I was up two-zip in the first set, I just fast-forwarded to skip the four games I lost. I didn't want to watch those. We watched the last four, when I came back to win. I remember every point from that final.”
Especially, maybe, that backhand volley to her head – falling down, getting back up, and staying up. Always winning, especially at Wimbledon.