© Sue Macy
Oxygen Sports (WeSweat.com), 2000

When I was in my 20s, I spent every Rosh Hashanah thinking about Martina Navratilova. More often than not, the holiday fell during the U.S. Open tennis tournament, and I would find myself in synagogue with my family, zoning out as the rabbi droned on. I’d imagine myself in the stands at Flushing Meadows, cheering for Martina as if my life depended on it, amazed at her raw emotion, her power, her grace.

Tennis was my spectator sport of choice in the late 1970s and early 1980s because it was the only sport, other than golf, where women played regularly and got some form of TV coverage. Less than a decade before, Billie Jean King and a handful of other pioneers had declared their independence and formed a women’s tennis tour separate from the men’s circuit. My friends and I did our best to support the tour, driving from New York to Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington to while away our weekends watching their matches.

Memories of those days came flooding back to me last month, when I learned that Martina had become the 47th woman (and the 175th person overall) to be voted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island. She’ll be enshrined on July 15 along with Robert Kelleher, a former president of the United States Lawn Tennis Association, and Malcolm Anderson, an Australian singles and doubles champion of the 1950s.

Excellent company, to be sure, but I can’t help thinking that Martina deserves to be in a class by herself. After all, she was, quite simply, one of the most, if not the most important female athlete of her generation. She didn’t fight the sports establishment in the same way as Billie Jean, but she raised the level of play in women’s tennis dramatically, as well as the level of conditioning for all women athletes. Martina was the first highly visible female athlete to sing the praises of weight training and a scientific diet, to focus not only on the skills necessary to play her sport, but also on her overall strength and endurance. With veins popping out of her sinewy arms and legs, she led the second stage of the women’s sports revolution—the personal stage, where women everywhere were finally free to embrace a self-image that included muscles instead of curves.

Along the way, Martina won 167 singles titles and 165 doubles titles (most of them with Pam Shriver), and spent 331 weeks as the world’s top-ranked singles player. She won 18 Grand Slam singles events, including an amazing nine at Wimbledon, and still owns the longest winning streak in tennis history, coming out on top in 74 consecutive matches in 1984. She won at least one event on the women’s tennis tour 21 years in a row and finished her career with 1,438 singles wins.

Martina was also one half of the classiest women’s sports rivalry ever, with her adversary and good friend, Chris Evert. They slugged it out match after match, Chris on the baseline and Martina rushing the net. Ice princess versus brat, All-American girls versus political refugee, the rivalry put fans in the stands and made us feel that somehow, much more than a tennis match was on the line. We were rooting for their playing styles, even their lifestyles—defensive versus aggressive, straight versus gay—reading our own agendas into every serve and smash. But those of us who were able to step back realized that this battle of opposites was grounded in respect. Ultimately, we admired both women for playing with incredible skill, pride, and heart.

Those were the days just before the women’s sports explosion, before girls began to consider it a right, rather than a privilege, to compete in tennis and soccer and basketball and track. It was, in fact, a different century, even though Martina retired a mere five years ago. But it’s fitting that her achievements are among the first to be honored at the dawn of the new millennium. After all, they are the foundation on which the future will be built.

For reprint permission contact the author at mail@suemacy.com.

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