Martina Navratilova

Martina Navratilova (Martina Navrátilová ; ; born October 18, 1956) is a Czech–American former professional tennis player.

Widely considered among the greatest tennis players of all time, Navratilova won 18 major singles titles, 31 major women's doubles titles, and 10 major mixed doubles titles, for a combined total of 59 major titles, the most in the Open Era.

In 1962, her mother Jana married Miroslav Navrátil, who became her first tennis coach.

Martina then took the name of her stepfather (adding the feminine suffix -ová), thus becoming Martina Navrátilová.

Her father, Mirek (officially Miroslav Šubert), was a ski instructor.

Navratilova has a younger sister, Jana, and an older paternal half-brother.

Her grandmother, Agnes Semanska, was a tennis player for the Czechoslovak Federation before the Second World War and had a ranking as high as No. 2 among Czech women during her amateur career.

When Navratilova was four, she was hitting a tennis ball off a concrete wall and started to play tennis regularly at age seven.

Alongside Chris Evert, her greatest rival, Navratilova dominated women's tennis for much of the 1970s and 1980s.

Navratilova was ranked as the world No. 1 in singles for a total of 332 weeks (second only to Steffi Graf), and for a record 237 weeks in doubles, making her the only player in history to have held the top spot in both disciplines for over 200 weeks.

She won 167 top-level singles titles and 177 doubles titles, both the Open Era records.

In 1972, at the age of 15, she won the Czechoslovakia national tennis championship.

In 1973, aged 16, she made her debut on the United States Lawn Tennis Association professional tour but did not turn professional until 1975.

Although perhaps most renowned for her mastery of fast low-bouncing grass, her best early showing at majors was on the red clay at the French Open, where she would go on to reach the final six times.

In 1973, she made the quarterfinals, where she lost 6–7, 4–6 to Evonne Goolagong.

She made the quarterfinals the next year and lost to Helga Masthoff (née Niessen).

Navratilova won her first professional singles title in Orlando, Florida in 1974 at the age of 17.

Upon arriving in the United States, she lived with former actress Frances Dewey Wormser and her husband Morton Wormser, a tennis enthusiast.

Originally from Czechoslovakia, Navratilova was stripped of her citizenship when, in 1975 at age 18, she asked the United States for political asylum and was granted temporary residence.

Navratilova was the runner-up at two major singles tournaments in 1975; the Australian Open (won by Goolagong) and the French Open (won by Chris Evert in three sets).

After losing to Evert in the semifinals of the US Open in September, the 18-year-old Navratilova went to the offices of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in New York City and informed them that she wished to defect from communist Czechoslovakia.

Also, in 1975, Navratilova teamed with world number one Evert to win the French Open women's doubles title, Navratilova's first major title outside of mixed doubles.

They teamed again in 1976 to win the Wimbledon women's doubles title over Billie Jean King and Bette Stove.

Navratilova won her first major singles title at Wimbledon in 1978, where she defeated Evert in three sets in the final and captured the world No. 1 ranking for the first time on the WTA computer, a position she held until Evert took it back in January 1979.

She successfully defended her Wimbledon title in 1979, again beating Evert in the final, this time in straight sets, and earned the World No. 1 ranking at the end of the year for the first time.

Just before Wimbledon in 1979, Navratilova and Evert played possibly the highest scoring women's professional match ever in the Eastbourne final, in which Evert edged Navratilova 7–5, 5–7, 13–11 after facing match points.

In 1980, Navratilova defeated previous six-time Wimbledon champion Billie Jean King in a two-day epic in the quarterfinals of Wimbledon, with a scoreline of.

She became a US citizen in 1981.

Navratilova has been openly gay since 1981, and has been an activist on gay rights.

Navratilova was born Martina Šubertová in Prague, Czechoslovakia.

Her parents divorced when she was three, and her mother, an accomplished gymnast, tennis player, and ski instructor, moved the family to Řevnice.

Within a month, she received a green card and in 1981 became a US citizen.

In April 1981, Evert defeated Navratilova in the finals of the Women's Tennis Association championships, held on clay at Amelia Island, 6–0, 6–0.

She reached the Wimbledon singles final 12 times, including for nine consecutive years from 1982 through 1990, and won the title a record nine times.

Navratilova is one of the three tennis players, along with Margaret Court and Doris Hart, to have accomplished a career Grand Slam in singles, doubles, and mixed doubles, called the career "Boxed Set".

She won a record six consecutive singles majors across 1983 and 1984 while simultaneously winning the Grand Slam in doubles.

Navratilova claims the best professional season winning percentage, 98.8% in 1983 (going 86–1 for the season), and the longest all-surface winning streak of 74 straight match wins.

She won her last major title, the mixed doubles crown at the 2006 US Open, shortly before her 50th birthday, and 32 years after her first major title in 1974.

On January 9, 2008, Navratilova reacquired Czech citizenship, thus becoming a dual citizen.

She stated she has not renounced her U.S. citizenship nor does she plan to do so, and that reclaiming Czech nationality was not politically motivated.