Tennis Talk

Martina Navratilova was born and raised in Czechoslovakia in 1956. She was known as a tom boy and started playing tennis at a young age of 4. Her parents were both tennis administrators and was coached by her step dad.

When she was nine, she began to take lessons from a tennis champion in Czech, George Parma. He improved her skills and by the age of 15, she wont the Czech national championship. By the next year, she turned pro and started to compete in the United States. She competed in the U.S because she went on a world tour in 1972. When the tour brought her to the United States, she liked the offerings it had. Martina struggled with her weight for a while because she wasn’t getting the proper training needed for her.

By 1979, she won her first Grand Slam tournament at Wimbledon against Chris Evert who has been one of her main competitors for years. The next year she beat Everts once again in the finals and won her third Grand Slam title at the Australian open in 1981. In the early years of 1980, she was officially the most dominant player in women’s tennis. In 1982, Martina won the Wimbledon and French Open tournaments.

Overall, Martina won 18 Grand Slam singles titles, 31 Grand Slam doubles titles and 10 mixed double Grand Slam titles. She stopped playing singles in 1994 but continued with doubles. In 2003 and 2006, she won the mixed doubles championship at Wimbledon and the U.S Open.

Martina finally retired in 2006 and was a big influence of the gay rights movement and even wrote a series of fiction books.