Martina Navratilova Defects to the U.S.

| J. Robert Parks |

Fifty years ago this week, on September 6, 1975, one of the greatest tennis players of all time defected from Czechoslovakia to the United States. In 1975, Martina Navratilova was only 18 years old, and she had begun to make her mark in women’s tennis, although she wasn’t yet a household name. When she and Chris Evert won the French Open women’s doubles title earlier in 1975, many observers credited Evert rather than Navratilova for the victory. Over the next fifteen years, however, Navratilova went on to win 18 Grand Slam singles titles, including nine Wimbledon titles, and a remarkable 31 Grand Slam women’s doubles titles. Teachers and librarians who want to highlight one of the greatest female athletes of the twentieth century as well as one of the first athletes to come out as a lesbian will find a wealth of resources in Gale In Context: World History.

Historians debate when and where tennis originated, but many believe it dates to medieval France. The first rules were standardized at the turn of the seventeenth century, but the game didn’t become widely played until the late nineteenth century. Even though it doesn’t require much equipment (unlike golf, for example), tennis has often been perceived as a game of the leisure class, and until the 1960s, major tournaments were held at and organized by private clubs.

It’s somewhat surprising then that one of the best women’s tennis players grew up in the communist nation of Czechoslovakia. Sports were popular in the country, though, and Navratilova excelled in skiing and hockey, often playing with and competing against boys. Her stepfather was her first tennis coach, and her success in tennis enabled her to travel overseas as a teenager. Like most people in her country, she resented the oppressive influence of the Soviet Union, especially after it invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 to put down the Prague Spring when Navratilova was 11 years old.

As Navratilova excelled on the world stage, authorities in Czechoslovakia started to worry that she was becoming too Westernized, and they threatened to withhold her visa. The Cold War was at its fiercest in the mid-1970s, and publicized defections of athletes and artists were embarrassing to communist leaders. Fearing what might happen if her visa were taken away, she decided to defect during the U.S. Open tennis tournament, on September 6, 1975. Her family back in Czechoslovakia heard about it from listening to the Voice of America radio broadcast.

One of the defining aspects of Navratilova’s tennis career was her rivalry with Chris Evert. Evert was two years older and was already the No. 1 women’s tennis player in 1975, but Navratilova’s growing skill and power enabled her to win her first Wimbledon singles title in 1978, and she would go on to win that title seven more times in the next nine years. In 1983 and 1984, Navratilova won six of the eight Grand Slam singles titles.

As for her sexuality, Navratilova kept that a secret in the 1970s. Homosexuality was widely condemned during those years, and she didn’t know how she would be received if people knew she was gay. In 1981, however, Navratilova told a newspaper interviewer that she was bisexual but asked the paper to hold that information until she was ready to come out publicly. The newspaper ignored her request and published that she was homosexual. Later, she would identify as a lesbian, and in 1998, one newspaper article called her “probably the most famous lesbian alive.” She married her longtime partner Julia Lemigova in 2014.

For all the ways Navratilova was a trailblazer, her tennis dominance over decades will probably be what people remember. In a career that spanned more than 30 years, Navratilova won 167 singles tournaments and 177 doubles tournaments, both Open-era records. She won the French Open mixed doubles title when she was 17 years old, and she won the U.S. Open mixed doubles title a month before she turned 50 years old, an incredible span of achievements that has cemented her legend.

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