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‘I wasn’t an icon. I was a pervert’
Martina Navratilova changed the way tennis is played but was vilified for her sexuality. Now, on the eve of Wimbledon, she tells Rosie Kinchen how gay marriage protects her from prejudice
Rosie Kinchen
June 26 2016, 12:01am, The Sunday Times
Martina Navratilova: ’I wasn’t an icon, I was a pervert, I was an outlier. I was the person you didn’t even speak to your children about in fear of them being like me’
I had expected turbo-powered togetherness from Martina Navratilova, I was prepared for the poker face and the severe expression that could mean boredom, or perhaps dismay, but I hadn’t expected tears. Yet here we are in a west London hotel, and the unbeatable, impenetrable tennis champion is fighting to hold them back.
After a succession of turbulent relationships (two former partners sued her for millions of dollars and one nearly shot her), 18 months ago the former world No 1 married Julia Lemigova, a Russian beauty queen, in New York.
It was a ceremony as extravagant as you could wish for, for the LGBT icon and original power lesbian, including Brooke Shields and Chris Evert as maids of honour, and it clearly meant a great deal to Navratilova.
“I didn’t realise how different it would feel, but it definitely does. It was huge,” she says, her ice-blue eyes filling with tears. “Growing up, we didn’t even think about getting married. It wasn’t even a possibility, so to have that legal protection and the freedom that comes with that cannot be underestimated.”
She and her family are based in Miami, Florida, and the gunman who killed 49 people in a gay club in Orlando has brought home to her the importance of this new legitimacy. “For me, now, I don’t have to look over my shoulder any more, nobody can attack us, they have nothing on us. We are just as important or legally protected as the straight couple next door, and it really made a huge difference.”
She certainly looks a lot happier, faux-fretting that one of Lemigova’s two daughters, who are over here for Wimbledon, has hijacked her Uber account.
Over four decades in the public eye, Navratilova has gone from communist defector to fearsome champion and symbol of gay rights, although she didn’t often look as if she was having much fun. Now, as she approaches her 60th birthday, she is jovial and, at times, almost frothy.
She is the focus of a BBC documentary to air next month and has recently been awarded an honorary fellowship by Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. But what she’s really after, she says, whooping with laughter, “is an MBE”.
This week she will be back in the Wimbledon commentary box analysing the day’s play with characteristic bluntness. She believes we have reached a dramatic turning point in the women’s game, as a new generation threatens the dominance of Serena Williams. “They’re coming through now, they’re nipping at her heels, that’s for sure,” she says.
The power shifted last year when Williams lost to Roberta Vinci in the US Open semi-final. “Everybody realised, ‘Oh, she’s beatable at the Grand Slams,’” Navratilova says. The others “play better because they actually think they can win, and it pisses you off, frankly”, she laughs. “The privilege of being a champion is that everybody plays harder against you.”
She points to the 22-year-old Spanish player Garbiñe Muguruza, who has just beaten Serena in the French Open final, as her “most likely heir”.
Navratilova is one of the few players who knows exactly how it feels to dominate the game for a decade; she played in the Wimbledon final every year from 1982 to 1990 and held the world No 1 spot for 332 weeks.
She also knows what it is like to feel that crown slipping. “As you age, it’s harder to find the best as often as you did when you were younger, and the off days are worst. That’s what I noticed the most when I was getting old,” she says.
Navratilova’s shadow still looms over modern tennis, not just because of her achievements, but because she changed the way the game is played. At a time when most women played from the baseline, she moved forward to the net.
She was also the first to build her physical strength. “I started overall fitness,” she agrees, “not just playing tennis but doing other things so that you become a better tennis player.” Her aim was to be “able to hit as hard at the end of the match as at the beginning of the match”.
Power is now the central feature, she thinks. “I would be considered small now in the woman’s top 10.”
I raise the dramatic three-stone weight loss of the French player Marion Bartoli since her retirement, which has prompted worries about her health in the press. At her muscular peak, the BBC commentator John Inverdale said Bartoli was “never going to be a looker”.
Navratilova sighs, “I’m not sure what Marion is trying to do, but she doesn’t look healthy to me.” She believes there is still a huge discrepancy between the way we talk about the bodies of male and female athletes. “I think if a man put on weight, no one would say, ‘Oh look at him, he has put on so much weight,’ but they would with women.”
It is, she thinks, a symptom of a more widespread sexism in society: “We pay much more attention to what women look like than men. Look at some of the commentators on TV — if a woman looked that way, she would never have had the job.”
Sponsors are often the worst culprits: “I mean David Beckham’s a great guy. He wasn’t that great a footballer, but he’s the biggest star because of how he looks.”
We don’t have one gay male player — really? What are the odds?
Equality in tennis has been one of Navratilova’s greatest battles. The fight for equal prize money at the Grand Slams was only won long after she retired — Wimbledon was the last to agree in 2007 — and she’s fiercely proud of the achievement. “Women’s tennis is much more equal than any other sport and more equal than most professions.”
She brushes off the recent comments by Raymond Moore, the chief executive of the Indian Wells tournament, that women “ride on the coat-tails” of the men’s game (he later resigned) . “I don’t really care, I don’t care what view they hold. The fact is that we deserve equal money at the Grand Slams because the only reason the Grand Slams are this big is because we all built them together.”
Screen time, however, is another issue. The BBC has admitted that in the first week of Wimbledon last year, 76% of the coverage focused on men’s matches — rising to 93% by the middle Saturday. She nods wearily: “[The tournament organisers] have got into the habit of putting two men’s matches and only one women’s on the show courts. That’s not right,” she says. In addition, “TV is still run by men, and they are more likely to give more time to men athletes”.
One of Navratilova’s defining traits is that she tells the truth at any cost, perhaps a response to her childhood under communism. She was living in Revnice, Czechoslovakia, in 1968 with her mother and stepfather (later her first coach) when Russian tanks entered the country. “My parents gave me the talk of not saying what I wanted to say because you could get in trouble with the school. So I did learn to censor my language or who I told political jokes to when I was 10 years old,” she says. “It makes you tougher, you have to pay attention, and the lack of opportunity makes you more focused.”
The decision to leave her family behind in 1975 and defect to the US is still an emotional one. “I didn’t have a choice,” she says — and she didn’t see her mother again for four years.
It was her refusal to lie that prompted her, at the age of 24, to come out as gay in a newspaper interview in 1981 . However well she played, however many titles she won, audiences remained frosty towards her.
She recalls “people booing and whistling and not clapping when I came on the court”. At the time she did “not realise” how much of this was down to prejudice.
“I wasn’t an icon, I was a pervert, I was an outlier. I was the person you didn’t even speak to your children about in fear of them being like me,” she says. “I’m not putting myself on the same level as Muhammad Ali, but he was excoriated and shunned and vilified for standing up and not going to war.
“And for that same reason, 20 or 30 years later, he is celebrated as an icon. That kind of happened to me on a smaller level,” she says.
Does she think there are still players who aren’t out? “Of course. We don’t have one gay male player — really? What are the odds?” she asks, chuckling to herself. “There is still a stigma, no doubt. I know there are players that are not out, but to each his own.”
Sponsorship is no longer the reason to stay in the closet, she says. “If anything, now you would make more money because of it.” Nowadays, it is more likely to be a reluctance to be “defined by it”.
The other big change to the women’s game is the absence of Maria Sharapova, following her two-year suspension for taking a banned substance.
Navratilova had talent-spotted the star when she was six years old — and has defended her fiercely until now. “The bottom line is that she took a drug that is against the rules and the rules are very strict, so she could have been given four years,” she says.
She is astonished that Sharapova didn’t admit to taking meldonium earlier. “Every player I know is extremely careful about what they take and you write it down on the piece of paper when you take the drug test. Every vitamin I took I would write down,” she says. “It might seem harsh but, Jesus, you cannot be taking this stuff and not check. Maria took responsibility for it, but even so you still have to pay the price.”
She is looking forward to commentating — “Because if you can’t do it, the next best thing is to talk about it.”
The only regret I can whittle out of her is not having tried her hand at Formula One racing. “I would have made a heck of a race-car driver, I know that.” Instead she made do with driving at 200mph on the autobahn in a Porsche 959. “It was legal,” she adds quickly. After a cancer scare in 2010, she is now in good health, has taken up yoga and is “more flexible” than when she was playing professionally: “I can do a headstand, which is cool.” She plans to take up kite surfing later this year.
She has just returned from a school reunion in Revnice where she was “bragging” to the rest of her class that she is still only 59.
Can she believe she’s nearly 60? “No,” she looks astonished. “I’ve been defying age for quite a few decades now, and I intend to keep on doing so.”
Just Call Me Martina will be shown on BBC1 on Monday, July 4, at 10.45pm.
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