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When two of the greatest tennis players in history signed on to make a documentary about the intertwining of their careers and their lives, they thought they knew the story they were going to tell.
Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, icons both, the main characters of the first transcendent rivalry in women’s sports, were ready to share how they had become closer than ever after supporting each other through simultaneous cancer treatments.
It was the summer of 2023. Evert was in remission from ovarian cancer, which had been diagnosed in January 2022. Navratilova had completed treatment for early-stage throat and breast cancers, diagnosed 11 months afterward. 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 their self.
Then, the story changed. That winter, Evert’s ovarian cancer returned. She had a round of chemotherapy, and then another scan. It had spread — this time to her abdomen. Maybe this was going to be something else, something that Evert and Navratilova hadn’t signed up for, and might not want to pursue.
That’s not how they tell it.
“It was more authentic,” Evert, 71, said in an interview last week ahead of Friday’s release of “Chris & Martina: The Final Set,” on Netflix. “Now, they’re going to get the real deal.”
Just days after that interview, the story has changed again. Evert was supposed to be in London for Wimbledon. The All England Club is showing the film on release night; Evert was scheduled to commentate the tournament for ESPN.
Instead, on Tuesday afternoon in Florida, Evert underwent exploratory surgery.
“Unexpectedly, a recent, routine CT scan was abnormal, suggesting the ovarian cancer may be back. Surgery is recommended for further treatment,” she said Tuesday, just before leaving for the hospital.
It’s not clear what the next steps of her recovery and treatment will look like, she said.
Sports documentaries, especially those involving tennis players, have been more deal than real in the recent past. As athletes across sports have recognized that they can use film to show the world the version of themselves that they want it to see, star names have flocked to the medium, delivering gauzy versions of their lives and careers that can enthrall fans but also, sometimes, ring hollow. They show the tears and the pain and the hard conversations, but do not always dig all the way down to their roots.
“It’s not a formula to get great filmmaking,” John Skipper, the former chief executive of ESPN who became an early backer of Evert and Navratilova’s documentary, said during a recent interview.
“It’s a formula to draw an audience, but this was a bit of a return to making a documentaries that are about something that transcends sports.”
Any chance that “Chris & Martina” — which is directed by the Emmy-Award-winning Rebecca Gitlitz, and draws from acclaimed sportswriter Sally Jenkins’ “Washington Post” interview with the pair in spring 2023, before the first return of Evert’s cancer — would be an exercise in self-referential hero worship evaporates early.
Evert arrives in a hospital examination room. It’s December 2023. She expects to be told that she is cancer-free. Instead, the doctor tells her, there are more tumors. Another round of chemo. Her blonde hair has just returned to a length and a style she likes but it is going to fall out all over again along with the nausea and the fatigue and all the other indignities of the disease.
“It could have been me, and it was her,” Navratilova, 69, said during a recent interview about the film. She was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2010; the 2023 diagnosis was a recurrence.
“It’s such a crap shoot. Russian roulette in a way, because you can die and through no fault of your own. You get cured only because of where it is, what it is, when they find it. And the cure is much better the sooner you find it.”
Evert knows this better than anyone. She is certain that the only reason she is still alive is that her younger sister, Jeanne was diagnosed with ovarian cancer before she was. Jeanne tested positive for the BRCA1 gene, which significantly increases the likelihood that a person will get cancer. In 2020, she died.
That led Evert to take the same test. Positive. Same gene. Same cancer.
Evert quickly went public with her diagnosis, just as Navratilova had in 2010. Both believed that their status on the tennis court and in culture gave them a unique opportunity, and perhaps a duty, to raise awareness. During the documentary, Evert’s son shaves her head. Her ex-husband and the father of her three children, Andy Mill, accompanies her to appointments, where Evert stops as she slides into an imaging tube to rip off the hat covering her head with a kind of disgust that any cancer survivor, and caregiver, might recognize.
During a recent interview, Ian Orefice, the chief executive of production company Everwonder, recalled getting the phone call that changed Evert’s life, and her and Navratilova’s story, once again.
“Our hearts sank, and as people that care a lot about any human but specifically Chris in this case, we were devastated for her,” he said.
They asked Evert if she wanted them to capture the next phase of her care. She did. She told him she wanted people to see what it was really like to have cancer.
“There’s no B.S. in this film,” Evert said.
Later, Orefice asked Navratilova why she and Evert had made that choice, why Navratilova agreed to be on film when she too slid into a scanning machine and found out whether her cancer had come back. When she brought her wife’s soup to Evert’s home, when her great rival and friend was in the middle of another round of chemotherapy.
“She said something to the effect of, this film should be a reminder that we as people need to help other people,” Orefice said.
Evert and Navratilova have been doing that for each other for more than five decades, ever since Navratilova broke into the sport that Evert had taken over.
At first they were friends, and then doubles partners, a great champion and one still in her becoming dueling and dueling, but almost always with the same, safe result.
In their first 20 meetings, Evert won 16 times. The distance kept their relationship close. Then Navratilova got closer to winning every time they stepped on the court, and Evert had to move further away. She broke off the doubles partnership. She couldn’t separate friendship and competition as easily as Navratilova could, and Navratilova was getting to know her game a little too well.
The doubles breakup caused a first rift in their relationship. Navratilova had recently defected from what was then Czechoslovakia. She felt alone in America, and she felt that one of her few close friends was pushing her away, though Evert insisted she was merely ending the sports partnership, not the friendship.
Then Navratilova would take her turn. Her partner, Nancy Lieberman, the best female basketball player of the era, told her she was going to have to train harder and also hate Evert if she wanted to overtake her as the world No. 1. Navratilova listened, and went icy on Evert. It worked.
The documentary explores all this, how the twists and turns of their tennis rivalry stitched its way into their human lives. Navratilova caught up and pushed ahead of Evert and everyone else, setting a new standard across the world of sports.
That made Evert work harder to try to catch Navratilova in the twilight years 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 titles on the All England Club grass, and the 1985 French Open final, when Evert won her second-to-last Grand Slam title. Before Evert’s win at Roland Garros, Navratilova had won 15 of their previous 16 matches.
They played 80 times in all, 60 times with titles on the line. That isn’t likely to happen again. Navratilova finished on top, 43-37. They both won 18 Grand Slam singles titles.
The guts of the film portrays them long after all that, when life has become about a lot more than forehands and backhands, when the glitz and glamor is mostly in the rearview mirrors, and they need people who care to be close to them.
“I think that’s why this will resonate,” Navratilova said. “It’s just raw.”
Just as they wanted it to be.
They went about their treatments differently when their cancers came back. Evert surrounded herself with loved ones — her son, her sister, her ex-husband. Navratilova sent her wife, Julia Lemigova, away. She wanted to go through her rounds of radiation and chemotherapy alone.
But toward the end of the film, Navratilova enters another one of those hospital examination rooms. She learns that she, again, is cancer-free. She pauses her walk out of the hospital, to lean against a wall. When Evert watches that footage, she sees the full woman she has known for 50 years.
“That showed a vulnerability,” Evert said. “She had held it in for so long, and it had come out.”
Now, Evert knows that vulnerability again herself, when to hold it in and when to let it out. Life doesn’t leave anyone, even two of the greatest champions any sport has known, with much of a choice.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Sports Business, Culture, Tennis, Top Sports News, Women's Tennis
2026 The Athletic Media Company
Continue reading...
Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, icons both, the main characters of the first transcendent rivalry in women’s sports, were ready to share how they had become closer than ever after supporting each other through simultaneous cancer treatments.
It was the summer of 2023. Evert was in remission from ovarian cancer, which had been diagnosed in January 2022. Navratilova had completed treatment for early-stage throat and breast cancers, diagnosed 11 months afterward. 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 their self.
Then, the story changed. That winter, Evert’s ovarian cancer returned. She had a round of chemotherapy, and then another scan. It had spread — this time to her abdomen. Maybe this was going to be something else, something that Evert and Navratilova hadn’t signed up for, and might not want to pursue.
That’s not how they tell it.
“It was more authentic,” Evert, 71, said in an interview last week ahead of Friday’s release of “Chris & Martina: The Final Set,” on Netflix. “Now, they’re going to get the real deal.”
Just days after that interview, the story has changed again. Evert was supposed to be in London for Wimbledon. The All England Club is showing the film on release night; Evert was scheduled to commentate the tournament for ESPN.
Instead, on Tuesday afternoon in Florida, Evert underwent exploratory surgery.
“Unexpectedly, a recent, routine CT scan was abnormal, suggesting the ovarian cancer may be back. Surgery is recommended for further treatment,” she said Tuesday, just before leaving for the hospital.
It’s not clear what the next steps of her recovery and treatment will look like, she said.
Sports documentaries, especially those involving tennis players, have been more deal than real in the recent past. As athletes across sports have recognized that they can use film to show the world the version of themselves that they want it to see, star names have flocked to the medium, delivering gauzy versions of their lives and careers that can enthrall fans but also, sometimes, ring hollow. They show the tears and the pain and the hard conversations, but do not always dig all the way down to their roots.
“It’s not a formula to get great filmmaking,” John Skipper, the former chief executive of ESPN who became an early backer of Evert and Navratilova’s documentary, said during a recent interview.
“It’s a formula to draw an audience, but this was a bit of a return to making a documentaries that are about something that transcends sports.”
Any chance that “Chris & Martina” — which is directed by the Emmy-Award-winning Rebecca Gitlitz, and draws from acclaimed sportswriter Sally Jenkins’ “Washington Post” interview with the pair in spring 2023, before the first return of Evert’s cancer — would be an exercise in self-referential hero worship evaporates early.
Evert arrives in a hospital examination room. It’s December 2023. She expects to be told that she is cancer-free. Instead, the doctor tells her, there are more tumors. Another round of chemo. Her blonde hair has just returned to a length and a style she likes but it is going to fall out all over again along with the nausea and the fatigue and all the other indignities of the disease.
“It could have been me, and it was her,” Navratilova, 69, said during a recent interview about the film. She was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2010; the 2023 diagnosis was a recurrence.
“It’s such a crap shoot. Russian roulette in a way, because you can die and through no fault of your own. You get cured only because of where it is, what it is, when they find it. And the cure is much better the sooner you find it.”
Evert knows this better than anyone. She is certain that the only reason she is still alive is that her younger sister, Jeanne was diagnosed with ovarian cancer before she was. Jeanne tested positive for the BRCA1 gene, which significantly increases the likelihood that a person will get cancer. In 2020, she died.
That led Evert to take the same test. Positive. Same gene. Same cancer.
Evert quickly went public with her diagnosis, just as Navratilova had in 2010. Both believed that their status on the tennis court and in culture gave them a unique opportunity, and perhaps a duty, to raise awareness. During the documentary, Evert’s son shaves her head. Her ex-husband and the father of her three children, Andy Mill, accompanies her to appointments, where Evert stops as she slides into an imaging tube to rip off the hat covering her head with a kind of disgust that any cancer survivor, and caregiver, might recognize.
During a recent interview, Ian Orefice, the chief executive of production company Everwonder, recalled getting the phone call that changed Evert’s life, and her and Navratilova’s story, once again.
“Our hearts sank, and as people that care a lot about any human but specifically Chris in this case, we were devastated for her,” he said.
They asked Evert if she wanted them to capture the next phase of her care. She did. She told him she wanted people to see what it was really like to have cancer.
“There’s no B.S. in this film,” Evert said.
Later, Orefice asked Navratilova why she and Evert had made that choice, why Navratilova agreed to be on film when she too slid into a scanning machine and found out whether her cancer had come back. When she brought her wife’s soup to Evert’s home, when her great rival and friend was in the middle of another round of chemotherapy.
“She said something to the effect of, this film should be a reminder that we as people need to help other people,” Orefice said.
Evert and Navratilova have been doing that for each other for more than five decades, ever since Navratilova broke into the sport that Evert had taken over.
At first they were friends, and then doubles partners, a great champion and one still in her becoming dueling and dueling, but almost always with the same, safe result.
In their first 20 meetings, Evert won 16 times. The distance kept their relationship close. Then Navratilova got closer to winning every time they stepped on the court, and Evert had to move further away. She broke off the doubles partnership. She couldn’t separate friendship and competition as easily as Navratilova could, and Navratilova was getting to know her game a little too well.
The doubles breakup caused a first rift in their relationship. Navratilova had recently defected from what was then Czechoslovakia. She felt alone in America, and she felt that one of her few close friends was pushing her away, though Evert insisted she was merely ending the sports partnership, not the friendship.
Then Navratilova would take her turn. Her partner, Nancy Lieberman, the best female basketball player of the era, told her she was going to have to train harder and also hate Evert if she wanted to overtake her as the world No. 1. Navratilova listened, and went icy on Evert. It worked.
The documentary explores all this, how the twists and turns of their tennis rivalry stitched its way into their human lives. Navratilova caught up and pushed ahead of Evert and everyone else, setting a new standard across the world of sports.
That made Evert work harder to try to catch Navratilova in the twilight years 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 titles on the All England Club grass, and the 1985 French Open final, when Evert won her second-to-last Grand Slam title. Before Evert’s win at Roland Garros, Navratilova had won 15 of their previous 16 matches.
They played 80 times in all, 60 times with titles on the line. That isn’t likely to happen again. Navratilova finished on top, 43-37. They both won 18 Grand Slam singles titles.
The guts of the film portrays them long after all that, when life has become about a lot more than forehands and backhands, when the glitz and glamor is mostly in the rearview mirrors, and they need people who care to be close to them.
“I think that’s why this will resonate,” Navratilova said. “It’s just raw.”
Just as they wanted it to be.
They went about their treatments differently when their cancers came back. Evert surrounded herself with loved ones — her son, her sister, her ex-husband. Navratilova sent her wife, Julia Lemigova, away. She wanted to go through her rounds of radiation and chemotherapy alone.
But toward the end of the film, Navratilova enters another one of those hospital examination rooms. She learns that she, again, is cancer-free. She pauses her walk out of the hospital, to lean against a wall. When Evert watches that footage, she sees the full woman she has known for 50 years.
“That showed a vulnerability,” Evert said. “She had held it in for so long, and it had come out.”
Now, Evert knows that vulnerability again herself, when to hold it in and when to let it out. Life doesn’t leave anyone, even two of the greatest champions any sport has known, with much of a choice.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Sports Business, Culture, Tennis, Top Sports News, Women's Tennis
2026 The Athletic Media Company
Continue reading...
