Although the two teenagers hit it off brilliantly, with Evert surprising her new best buddy by telling a variety of dirty jokes, the first problem developed when Navratilova improved enough to create a genuine rivalry. In 1976, after Evert had won a tight Wimbledon semi-final, she told her former pal that they could no longer play doubles together.
“You give up things if you want to be great at something,” Evert tells director Rebecca Gitlitz, during one of the film’s most absorbing sequences. “Growing up was all about tennis. Friendship was never encouraged. It worked for me. But it was just very lonely.”
Caricatured as “The Ice Maiden” in the newspapers, Evert was miserable for much of this period, she now admits. But she was also hugely successful. By the time the pendulum began to swing against her – a moment we might identify as the Australian Open final at the end of the 1981 season – Evert had accumulated 12 major titles to Navratilova’s two.
The spur for the shift came from one of Navratilova’s many girlfriends. Having defected from Czechoslovakia in 1975, she had no family to share her life with, and so became something of a serial monogamist. “I was single for a couple of years here or there, but overall I was with somebody,” she tells Gitlitz. “I did not like to be alone.”
The key partner was basketball legend Nancy Lieberman, a streetwise New Yorker who insisted that Navratilova was not training hard enough. Within a few months, their work together had resulted in Navratilova’s body fat dropping to just eight per cent.
But Lieberman’s most influential message was psychological: the idea that Evert was the enemy. “She was the one I had to beat to get to No 1,” Navratilova recalls in the film. “But I think I was influenced too much. I knew that I needed to [have] a little more of a killer instinct. Maybe I just took it too far.”
Trailing 30-18 in the head-to-head at the end of 1982, Navratilova then went on a run of 13 straight wins that gave her the overall lead – just. Every single match was a final, so they were always the last pair in the locker room, studiously ignoring each other. “They were doing some damage to each other emotionally,” says Jenkins.
From the perspective of Billie Jean King, the great instigator who had founded the Women’s Tennis Association in 1973, this was a fantastic plot line. Talk about a contrast of styles. Miss America versus communist defector. Metronomic baseline ball–basher against leaping, acrobatic volleyer. Barbie-esque princess against muscular lesbian. Not that Navratilova would come out officially until the early 1990s, when former lover Judy Nelson forced her hand with a messy palimony lawsuit.
