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When two of history’s greatest tennis players agreed to make a documentary about the intertwining of their careers and lives, they thought they knew the story they were about to tell.
Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, both icons at the heart of women’s sport’s first transcendent rivalry, were on hand to reveal how they became closer than ever after supporting each other through simultaneous cancer treatments.
This was in the summer of 2023. Evert was in remission from ovarian cancer, which was diagnosed in January 2022. Navratilova completed treatment for early stages of throat and breast cancer, diagnosed 11 months later. They were ready to use the clear air in front of them to talk about how each had shaped the other’s life, and perhaps theirs.
Then the story changed. That winter, Evert’s ovarian cancer returned. She had chemotherapy and then another scan. It spread – this time to the stomach. It might be something different, something Evert and Navratilova didn’t sign up for and might not want to do.
That’s not how they say it.
“It was more authentic,” Evert, 71, said in an interview last week ahead of the Friday release of “Chris and Martina: The Final Set” on Netflix. “Now they’re going to get the real deal.”
Just a few days after this interview, the story changed again. Evert was supposed to be in London for Wimbledon. The All England Club will screen the film on opening night; Evert was scheduled to commentate on the tournament for ESPN.
Instead, Evert underwent exploratory surgery on Tuesday afternoon in Florida.
“Unexpectedly, a recent routine CT scan showed abnormal findings, suggesting that the ovarian cancer may return. Surgery is recommended for further treatment,” she said Tuesday, shortly before leaving for the hospital.
It’s unclear what the next steps in her recovery and treatment will look like, she said. Then on Thursday, Evert released another statement on social media detailing the surgery and subsequent chemotherapy that the treatment will entail.
“Ovarian cancer is unforgiving, but I will remain optimistic and determined to continue fighting this fight. I am deeply grateful to my medical team, my family, friends and everyone who has reached out to me with a helping hand and kindness.
“I look forward to seeing everyone again soon.”
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Sports documentaries, especially those involving tennis players, have been more vanity than reality in the recent past. As athletes in sports have realized they can use film to show the world the version of themselves they want it to see, star names have flocked to the medium, presenting hazy versions of their lives and careers that may captivate fans but sometimes ring hollow. They show tears, pain and difficult conversations, but don’t always get to the root of them.
“This is not a formula for making a great movie,” John Skipper, a former ESPN executive who was an early backer of Evert and Navratilova’s documentary, said in a recent interview.
“It’s a formula for attracting an audience, but it was kind of a return to making documentaries about something outside of sports.”
Any chance that Chris & Martina, directed by Emmy Award winner Rebecca Gitlitz and based on renowned sportswriter Sally Jenkins’ Washington Post interview with the couple in the spring of 2023, before Evert’s cancer first returned, would be an exercise in self-referential hero worship is quickly evaporating.
Evert comes to the hospital examination room. It is now December 2023. She expects to be told she doesn’t have cancer. Instead, the doctor tells her, there are more tumors. Another course of chemotherapy. Her blonde hair has just returned to the length and style she likes, but it will fall out again along with nausea, fatigue, and all the other indignities that come with being sick.
“It could have been me, and it could have been her,” Navratilova, 69, said during a recent interview about the film. She was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2010; the diagnosis in 2023 turned out to be a relapse.
“It’s such bullshit. It’s kind of Russian roulette, because you can die through no fault of your own. You only get cured because of where it is, what it is, when they find it. And the cure is better the sooner you find it.”
Evert knows this better than anyone. She believes the only reason she is still alive is because her younger sister Jeanne was diagnosed with ovarian cancer before she was. Jeanne tests positive for the BRCA1 gene, which significantly increases a person’s chance of getting cancer. She died in 2020.
This prompted Evert to take the same test. Positive. Same gene. Same cancer.
Evert quickly went public with her diagnosis, as did Navratilova in 2010. Both felt that their status on the tennis court and in the culture gave them a unique opportunity, and perhaps an obligation, to raise awareness. During the documentary, Evert’s son shaves her head. Her ex-husband and father of her three children, Andy Mill, accompanies her to appointments, where Evert stops by as she slips into the X-ray tube to rip off the hat covering her head with a kind of disgust that any cancer survivor and caregiver would recognize.
During a recent interview, Ian Orefis, chief executive of production company Everwonder, recalled the phone call that again changed Evert’s life and her story with Navratilova.
“Our hearts sank and, as people who care deeply about any person, but especially Chris in this case, we were devastated for her,” he said.
They asked Evert if she wanted them to document the next stage of her treatment. She did it. She told him she wanted people to see what it was really like to have cancer.
“There’s no bullshit in this movie,” Evert said.
Orefice later asked Navratilova why she and Evert made the choice, why Navratilova agreed to do the film when she too slid into the scanning machine and found out if her cancer had returned. When she brought soup to her wife at Evert’s house while her great rival and friend was undergoing another round of chemotherapy.
“She said something to the effect that this film should be a reminder that we as people need to help other people,” Orefice said.
The sporting rivalry between Martina Navratilova (left) and Chris Evert developed in parallel with their friendship. (Robert Deere/Associated Press)
Evert and Navratilova have been doing this for each other for more than five decades, ever since Navratilova entered the sport that Evert took over.
At first they were friends, and then doubles partners, a great champion and also duels and duels, but almost always with the same, safe result.
In their first 20 meetings, Evert won 16 times. The distance kept their relationship close. Navratilova then moved closer to victory every time they took the court, leaving Evert to retreat further. She ended the couple’s partnership. She could not separate friendship and rivalry as easily as Navratilova, and Navratilova knew her game too well.
The doubles breakup caused the first rift in their relationship. Navratilova recently fled what was then Czechoslovakia. She felt lonely in America and felt pushed away by one of her few close friends, although Evert insisted she was simply ending a sporting partnership, not a friendship.
Then it was Navratilova’s turn. Her partner, Nancy Lieberman, the best basketball player of the time, told her that she would have to train harder and also hate Evert if she wanted to overtake her and become world number one. Navratilova obeyed and iced Evert. It worked.
The documentary explores all this, as the twists and turns of their tennis rivalry cut into their human lives. Navratilova caught up and surpassed Evert and everyone else, setting a new standard throughout the world of sports.
This forced Evert to work harder to try to catch Navratilova in the twilight of her career. During the documentary, Evert and Navratilova watch several of their matches together, including the 1978 Wimbledon final, when Navratilova won the first of her nine All England Club grass-court titles, and the 1985 French Open final, when Evert won her penultimate Grand Slam title. Prior to Evert’s victory at Roland Garros, Navratilova had won 15 of her previous 16 matches.
They played 80 times in total, with titles on the line 60 times. This is unlikely to happen again. Navratilova finished in the lead 43-37. They both won 18 Grand Slam singles titles.
The crux of the film depicts them long after all this, when life has become more than just backhands and right-handers, when the glitz and glamor is mostly reflected in the rearview mirrors, and they need people who care about being there for them.
“I think that’s why it will resonate,” Navratilova said. “It’s just raw.”
The way they wanted it to be.
When the cancer returned, they began treatment differently. Evert surrounded herself with close people – her son, sister, ex-husband. Navratilova sent away her wife Yulia Lemigova. She wanted to undergo radiation and chemotherapy alone.
But toward the end of the film, Navratilova enters another hospital examination room. She learns that she is cancer free again. She stops walking out of the hospital to lean against the wall. When Evert watches this footage, she sees a plump woman whom she has known for 50 years.
“It showed vulnerability,” Evert said. “She had been holding it in for so long and it came out.”
Now Evert herself again knows this vulnerability, when to contain it and when to let it out. Life doesn’t give anyone, not even the two greatest champions of any sport, much choice.