You can look at house prices and hemlines, or prime ministers and presidents, but for my money, the quickest shortcut to evoking an era is its tennis players. I grew up in the age of Graf v Seles and Agassi v Sampras, but my earliest memories – those that yank me back to a primordial time – come from the period immediately before that. I haven’t even reached the end of the trailer for Chris & Martina: The Final Set, the new Netflix documentary following the lifelong rivalry and friendship of Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, and I am already an absolute wreck.
Wimbledon starts next week and, in The Final Set, we are taken back to that pivotal moment in the late 1970s when Evert and Navratilova – “the most cold-hearted pursuers of greatness that you’ve ever met in your entire life”, as the documentary puts it – changed the women’s game. It was Rocky v Apollo Creed; Maverick v Iceman. There was Evert, blond, tiny, from Florida, versus Navratilova, who, in 1975, when she defected from what was then communist Czechoslovakia, was out of shape and unsure of herself. Over the next decade she transformed herself into a winning machine and while Evert, my first love, gave way to Monica Seles, my second love, and Steffi Graf, the tennis love of my life, it was Navratilova who would break all our hearts.
