Chris and Martina: The Final Set review – tennis titans discuss their deep bond and intense rivalry

Now supporting each other through cancer treatment, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova trace the ups and downs of their decades-long relationship at the summit of sporting achievement

Here is a Netflix documentary with a real story to tell: the giant friendship and frenmity (or frivalry) between Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, the two titans who throughout the late 70s and 80s dominated international women’s tennis and did so much to boost the sport whose existence, incidentally, helped to silence certain sexist reactionaries who doubted the feasibility of women’s football. The film shows us their intense relationship now, supporting each other as they both go through the challenge of cancer.

It’s a highly watchable film, which makes the strong and valid point that even in the cutthroat world of professional sport there is, in fact, room for real friendship and “sportsmanship”. But it leaves open the suspicion that the friendship between Evert and Navratilova, though perfectly genuine, may be a little more complicated than it looks here. And the dual storyline tilts the balance, just a little, away from the side of the story which for me is more compelling: the extraordinary drama of Navratilova’s courageous defection in 1975, when she was just 18, from communist Czechoslovakia to the US. She knew that she might never see her mother or sister again, and for a while faced the real threat of abduction by Soviet or Czech security forces. (Nureyev was 23 when he defected, chess star Victor Korchnoi 45.)

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