On its face, it was a benign American summer. Big budget movies filled the theaters. Sugary pop songs wafted from the radio. An elderly woman asking “Where’s the Beef?” was a national laugh line. Ronald Reagan Era was in full free-market, take-cutting bloom, a few months before his resounding re-election.
But in retrospect, the June-July-August of 1984 marked a pivotal season, 90 days that would change the country. Americans fell in love with the personal computer; and realized a universe of television channels beyond the three major networks. Bruce Springsteen and Prince would release the albums – Born in the USA and Purple Rain – that would vault them to a new plane of celebrity. This transformation was especially pronounced in sports.
Compressed in the summer of 1984: Michael Jordan was drafted by the Chicago Bulls, won an Olympic gold medal and lent his name to a signature shoe. Magic Johnson and Larry Bird faced off in the NBA finals for the first time, cementing their rivalry – to the delight of the league’s new visionary commissioner, David Stern. Donald Trump would – as owner of the USFL’s New Jersey Generals – use sports to become a national figure, while Vince McMahon would consolidate pro wrestling, bringing it into the mainstream.
In the following extract from Glory Days: The Summer of 1984 and the 90 Days That Changed Sports and Culture Forever, the author Jon Wertheim writes about Wimbledon that year, John McEnroe at the peak of his powers and Martina Navratilova, breaking ground on grass.
In the summer of 1984, John McEnroe conjured a level of tennis – equally athletic and aesthetic – so sublime that it overshadowed his antics. Or at least cause authorities to look away. At the time, McEnroe had effectively chased off one rival, Bjorn Borg. Another, Jimmy Connors, was in his mid-30s, then the athletic equivalent of dotage. A third rival, Ivan Lendl, had just achieved his awaited breakthrough at the French Open – coming back from the brink of defeat to beat McEnroe in the final, a loss that haunts McEnroe to this day. But that was on clay; on the barbered lawns of Wimbledon, Lendl professed an allergy to grass.
With so few challengers, McEnroe treated the All England Club as his personal performance space, the guys on the other side of the net not so much opponents as accompanists. McEnroe’s lyrical flourishes were in full effect. He unspooled his sidewinding lefty serve to great effect. He attacked the net, executing angles no other players would even conceive of, much less conjure. He deployed pointillist volleys.
How well did he play?
So well that his extravagant tennis stifled his volcanic temper. Facing little resistance, McEnroe won Wimbledon and, in turn, won over the British crowds that, before, had been so ambivalent – attracted as they were by his tennis and repulsed by his outbursts. This two-week cadenza on the grass would mark the highlight of his gilded 1984, a year in which McEnroe would go 82–3 and win 13 titles.
At the time, McEnroe was only the second most dominant force in the sport.
As the tennis circuit left Paris and wended its way to Wimbledon in the summer of 1984, Martina Navratilova had won 31 straight matches and, almost comically, 85 of her last 86. She had won the two previous Wimbledon titles and four overall.
While Chris Evert was Navratilova’s greatest challenger at the time, their rivalry approximated the rivalry between a lawn mower and a swath of grass, a hammer and a nail, Mozart and Salieri. Navratilova had won each of their previous 10 matches. Almost as an afterthought, Navratilova paired with Pam Shriver to hold the doubles title at all four Majors in 1984 as well, an achievement that no other player in tennis had ever pulled off.
At the time, the annual event in Eastbourne, a Wimbledon tune-up tournament, played in England and on grass, doubled as the site of the WTA’s player revue, something akin to a summer camp talent show. At one point in the evening, a group of players performed a spoof song of Michael Jackson’s hit from the previous year, Beat It.
Martina you’re too good / Just give us a break
You’re beating us too bad/It’s getting hard to take
Quit eating that food / And lift no more weights
Stop It! / Stop It!
Have some more sex / Have some more booze
It doesn’t matter if you win or lose
Reporters asked Don Candy, Shriver’s coach, how the great Martina Navratilova could possibly be beaten. Candy paused, contemplated and finally responded, “Drive over her foot in the car park.”
No one did.
While McEnroe dropped only one set in winning the 1984 Wimbledon singles title, Martina Navratilova dropped none. While McEnroe left the All England Club with a match record of 47-1 on the year, Navratilova left having won 92 of her last 93 matches. While McEnroe would win two Majors that year, Navratilova would take three. She would win $2,173,556 in prize money in 1984, the most of any player – male or female – in a single year.
Wimbledon 1984 marked Peak Navratilova. In every sense. She came to Wimbledon, her personal grass playground, as the top seed. She also came with a new entourage. Renee Richards had returned to her Park Avenue eye surgery practice, so Navratilova turned to a new coach, Mike Estep, a former player on the men’s circuit. Navratilova had split with her partner, Nancy Lieberman, and had a new love interest – Judy Nelson, a Dallas society housewife and mother of two who had never been with a woman but had met Navratilova and “instantly felt a bond.”
The day before Wimbledon, Nelson filed for divorce from her husband, a Dallas physician. The media, especially London’s Fleet Street tabloids, dined out on Navratilova’s personnel and romantic roster moves. There were the usual mocking references to her entourage, which included a dog-walker and a dumpling maker. (“Never mind that it was the same person,” says Navratilova. “A friend who happened to be a good cook.”)
For the tournament, Navratilova had rented a Georgian house in Wimbledon Village, a few minutes’ walk from the All England Club. Tabloid paparazzi camped out on the lawns, hoping to capture the scandalous image of a champion and her blond girlfriend. Reporters rang her doorbell early in the morning and late at night.
Navratilova being Navratilova, she did not exactly retreat. From her townhouse, she would taunt the paparazzi, calling them “scum.” After Navratilova won an early round match, Nelson blew her kisses from the stands. The click of shutters from the courtside photographers’ pit was louder and more sustained than the applause of the crowd. Navratilova smiled at the men in the pit, shook her head and muttered, “You guys are pathetic.”
She began her post-match press conference by declaring that she would be taking all British events other than Wimbledon off her touring schedule. “I love the people here and I love playing here,” she said. “But I have decided that the harassment I have been getting here is not worth it, and I should not subject myself to it.”
It all made for a dissonant tableau. Here was Wimbledon, the emblem of elegance, this decorous affair for the landed gentry, with its whites-only dress code and white tennis balls and breaks for tea and strawberries. And it was being confronted by the outspoken, muscular, lesbian star, her flamboyant lover in the stands and paparazzi attempting to capture it all. This was a skunk at what was, quite literally, a garden party. The conventional wisdom: loathsome as the tabloids might be, Navratilova bore some responsibility as well. Even sober Time magazine scoldingly noted that Navratilova possessed “a certain careless openness about her private life.”
During the tournament, London’s Daily Express ran a masthead editorial headlined, “Don’t Turn Martina into an Oscar Wilde.” What was, notionally, a defense, contained lines like this: “She’s every man’s anti-heroine. Her muscles are too big. She doesn’t bounce around like two cute little tennis balls, making pretty pictures for the newspaper…. Navratilova’s almost pathetic attempts to disguise her discontent with her own looks (“the best you can say is that I have a strong face”) haven’t helped her.”
The editorial then urged sympathy. “I object to the Oscar Wildean witch-hunt of this unusual and lonely figure, who doesn’t please men. If male reporters want to be nasty, let them lob their insults at the silly celebrity-smitten Texan blonde housewife who has filed for divorce and at least temporarily left two very young children to follow Navratilova.”
In response to the titillation over Navratilova, the Women’s Tennis Association called an emergency mid-tournament meeting at the All England Club, condemning the press’s treatment of Navratilova as “horrendous.” Wimbledon officials issued a statement permitting players to walk out of press conferences when the questions departed from tennis and became “provocative.”
Other forms of rejection came with more subtlety. Navratilova was not assigned to play on the showcase, cathedral-like Centre Court as often as a player of her stature normally would be. NBC, the network holding American television rights, went to strenuous lengths to avoid covering Navratilova until the latter rounds when it was absolutely necessary. (The network defended this by noting that Chris Evert’s matches drew higher ratings.) Behind the scenes, officials wrung hands, concerned that Navratilova-as-figurehead would foreclose sponsorship revenue.
Navratilova was as blazingly far ahead of her time as she was ahead of the field. Following her lead, other gay athletes would come out during their careers. When, in 2013, NBA player Jason Collins told the world that he was gay – the first active American athlete from a major team sport to do so – he cited Navratilova as his guide star.
In time, athletes would realize that the powerful megaphone they own as cultural forces makes them effective voices for political and social causes. The veins and muscles that earned Navratilova sideways glances and snark? They became de rigeur for athletic girls, who now proudly post #myfirstvein photos. Navratilova’s “entourage” and “royal cortege,” so roundly mocked, became commonplace in tennis and all individual sports, rebranded as a “team.” The “computer data” Navratilova conferred to devise strategy grew into the cottage industry of sports analytics.
But at the time? At Wimbledon 1984? A new love with a new woman? A romance being picked apart by the tabloids? The public scorn over her muscles, her entourage, the boldness to believe she was entitled to give voice to opinions on matters that went beyond sports? The pressure of playing Wimbledon, the crown jewel of the tennis season? The added pressure of knowing that she was expected to win, to hold court as it were, that any result short of taking the trophy would constitute a considerable upset? Disgust inside and outside the locker room with her rippled “unladylike” body? Any one of those factors could crush a player.
Yet Navratilova brushed it all off as if it were lint on her tennis whites. At her Martina-est, she won with power and guile and athleticism. She won from the backcourt and from the net. She served better than the other 127 players in the field; she returned better as well. Her matches bore little tension; the drama instead resided in how Navratilova’s talent and shot-making manifested itself.
And, at odds with the mechanical intensity with which she was too often portrayed, Navratilova went about her business wearing a carefree smile. “It looks like she’s having fun playing tennis,” said the American player Peanut Louie, “[so] even if you get murdered, you don’t feel so bad.”
She won her first matches without so much as dropping a set. In the final, Navratilova won the title – her third straight at Wimbledon – by beating Evert for the 11thstraight time, 7–6, 6–2. That Evert had played well, and taken a full eight games, made for a moral victory.
The great Frank Deford took the measure of Navratilova and put it this way: To have achieved so much, triumphed so magnificently, yet always to have been the other, the odd one, alone; left-hander in a right-handed universe, gay in a straight world; defector, immigrant; the (last?) gallant volleyer among all those duplicate baseline bytes … Can’t she ever get it right?
Success emboldened her to speak up and use her platform for causes and concerns having little to do with tennis. It was somehow fitting that less than a week after Navratilova won Wimbledon, Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale chose as his running mate Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman on a major party ticket.
Basking in her 1984 Wimbledon title, Navratilova was reminded that, just a year earlier, she had stated that in sports – with its constant competition, its steady flow of motivated newcomers, its small margins of defeat and victory – total domination was an impossibility. What did Navratilova now make of this assertion?
“Well,” she said. “I lied.”
