[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 148 (Wednesday, November 30, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: November 30, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                       TRIBUTE TO AN AMERICAN HERO

                                 ______


                        HON. MICHAEL J. KOPETSKI

                                of oregon

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, November 29, 1994

  Mr. KOPETSKI. Mr. Speaker, rarely does a sports figure become known 
throughout the United States and the world both for his or her 
accomplishments on or off the field of competition. That's what makes 
Ms. Martina Navratilova unique.
  Recently, Ms. Navratilova retired from professional tennis 
competition. Her record on the court is legion.
  Martina is an American. She came by it her way--the hard way--by 
escaping the scourge of communism in her home country. She chose 
America. And as an American so many of us cheered her on to victory, 
were depressed when she lost. But our respect for her only continued to 
rise as she lived a life of example and courage. She changed life on 
the court for many aspiring women tennis players. She had the courage 
to speak out with pride and credibility on the rights of gays and 
lesbians. In her unique way, one of America's most famous and 
accomplished immigrants, showed us that her sexual orientation should 
be accepted as that: an orientation of herself, not some trait that was 
odd or a malady. She wears her orientation as comfortably as she holds 
a tennis racket. She taught us, moved us forward as a society, in her 
own way. We respect her for this and appreciate her contributions.
  Recently, the Washington Post wrote of Ms. Navratilova's life to date 
and her retirement from professional tennis. I ask unanimous consent 
that the Post article be made a part of the Record. Her life to date is 
one of which all Americans can point to with pride and state: 
``Martina, you're a great American.''

                  [The Washington Post, Nov. 15, 1994]

               For Navratilova, It's Time to ``Just Be''

                          (By Johnette Howard)

       New York.--Sometime this week at Madison Square Garden it 
     will finally end. A ball will bound forever out of reach, the 
     match will have hit its unavoidable conclusion and Martina 
     Navratilova will make her last long walk to the net as 
     cheers--a tumult of cheers--thunder down. The ovation is 
     guaranteed to be long and loud and heartfelt. Much like her 
     career. In sports you never say never. But you wonder. Who 
     might approximate her at here zenith? Her uniqueness? Her 
     gallant, unyielding, uncompromising example?
       It doesn't matter much if you approve of Navratilova's 
     sexuality, the opinions she voices, the choices she's made. 
     This is undeniable: more than just an athlete, she has been a 
     serious figure in public life. When the United Nation's 50th 
     anniversary board recently selected its U.S. national 
     committee to help spread U.N. principles of peace, human 
     rights and social justice, it tabbed names such as Henry 
     Kissinger and Coretta Scott King and Navratilova, the lone 
     athlete chosen. Because of the heights she hit. And the 
     breadth of her reach.
       When she felt here spirit shackled by her Communist 
     Czechoslovakia homeland, she chose freedom. A lesbian, she 
     became a beacon for gays--forthright, unapologetic, unbowed. 
     In the years since, she has never stopped saying what she 
     believes, even after she went on to dominate women's tennis 
     and endorsements never came; even after bigots made 
     wisecracks about the physicality she brought to women's 
     sports, failing to acknowledge that the sort of training 
     regimen she embraced is now standard for women athletes.
       Navratilova remade women's athletics in the process of 
     inventing herself. She is an original. She came along at a 
     time when women's tennis was moving from backwater to big 
     time. She won a record $20 million in prize money. Along the 
     way, she has carefully paid homage to the game's 
     groundbreakers before her, especially Billie Jean King, and 
     to places such as Wimbledon, tennis's enduring shrine, and to 
     America, her beloved adopted home.
       Tuesday night a tribute will be held for Navratilova at 
     Madison Square Garden after her opening match at the Virginia 
     Slims Championships, a season-ending tournament Navratilova 
     has won six times. The tournament will mark the end of her 
     21-year, 1,650-match odyssey on the tour. She says the 
     yawning distance between where she started and where she's 
     come in life has seized her only occasionally this year. But 
     always, it moves her to say, ``Who'd have thought this? I 
     mean, who'd have thunk all this could happen. To me. Just 
     because I can hit a tennis ball?''
       Navratilova was only 12 when Soviet tanks rolled into 
     Prague in '68. She was only 18 and alone when she defected in 
     Manhattan in 1975, spitting out the bit the Czech tennis 
     federation tried to shove in her mouth to rein her in. She 
     was already marked for tennis greatness. The price for her 
     freedom was steep. She left parents, a sister, a dear 
     grandmother. She was declared a ``nonperson'' back home. But 
     Czech newspaper editors would slyly keep her countrymen 
     abreast of her career with carefully worded stories such as, 
     ``The four semifinalists of Wimbledon are already known. They 
     are Chris Evert, Andrea Jaeger and Evonne Goolagong.''
       Any Czech who could count to four would know the last 
     semifinalist's name.
       To Czechs and Slovaks alike she was--and remains--a heroic 
     figure, a clenched fist of defiance back when dissident 
     victories were rare. In 1986 when Navratilova returned to 
     Czechoslovakia for the first time with the U.S. Federation 
     Cup team, she'd been an American citizen five years, a Czech 
     expatriate for 11. The Iron Curtain was still drawn, but fans 
     in Prague chanted her name--Nav-ROT-e-lo-va! Hundreds more 
     lined up four-deep at her old club, Sparta, to watch her 
     practice.
       Now, in the gloaming of her career, fellow players revere 
     her with the same intensity. When Navratilova lost the 1993 
     Wimbledon semifinals, Sports Illustrated reported that top-
     ranked Steffi Graf was so disappointed about the lost chance 
     to meet Navratilova in one last final, she sent word to 
     Navratilova through an intermediary: How about the two of 
     them get together, alone, on the hallowed old grass courts, 
     and play one more championship with no linesmen, no crowds, 
     no coaches--just the two of them?
       Last week at the Bank of the West Classic Czech-born 
     Marketa Kochta spoke of traveling to Oakland and entering the 
     tournament's qualifier round expressly because she'd never 
     played the great Navratilova in five years on the tour. This 
     represented her last chance.
       Kochta's family had defected from Czechoslovakia when she 
     was 7. Navratilova's career had been her faraway inspiration. 
     When her three-set, first-round loss to Navratilova in 
     Oakland was through, Kochta shook her hand at the net and 
     bashfully said, ``You are my hero.'' Then, once off the 
     court, she fell into a friend's embrace and sobbed.
       ``I could never tell her my feelings,'' Kochta said, 
     ``until today.''
       Asked what the 38-year-old Navratilova has meant to tennis, 
     Kochta stared and her eyes opened wide and she said: ``She 
     made it. She is history. She made things possible, you see?''


                           an american voice

       A trace of Czech may remain in Navratilova's voice, her 
     syncopated cadence, but she has always believed she was meant 
     to land in America. ``I felt it in my blood,'' she says. 
     ``Even before I had a reason to. I don't know why.''
       For so long she was marginalized as the Communist defector, 
     the Iron Curtain amazon, the lesbian with the outrageous 
     entourage in tow. For eight years her lover was a divorced 
     Texas beauty queen and mother of two. Her first pro coach was 
     a transsexual opthalmologist. So much of what she 
     accomplished was as the villian.
       But regard for her has changed. Of her adversaries, 
     Navratilova now jokes: ``I've outlasted them. Definitely.
       And America has definitely changed,'' she says. ``It's more 
     acceptable for women to be assertive, for them to be 
     athletes, to speak their minds, to be politicians or heads of 
     the household. Gays are treated differently. And people 
     realized I was not as threatening as they thought I was, 
     especially when I was beating Chris [Evert]. She's the 
     perfect image of a lady who also happens to be a great tennis 
     player. Whereas I was an athlete who happens to be a woman. 
     The contrast was pretty great.''
       In time, though, it was as if the flip side of their 
     rivalry--Evert and Navratilova's genuine affection and 
     respect for each other--helped humanize Navratilova to the 
     public in ways she, by herself, could not. By 1989, the first 
     year of Evert's retirement, regard for Navratilova had begun 
     to shift. She lost a three-set final at the U.S. Open to 
     Graf, just as she had lost to Graf at Wimbledon months 
     earlier. And the Open crowd gave Navratilova a rousing 
     standing ovation that brought tears to her eyes.
       ``One of the best things about lasting this long is it's 
     been so nice to feel the appreciation,'' Navratilova says.
       She encounters it everywhere. When she returned to Prague 
     in 1990 for the six-month anniversary of the end of Communist 
     rule, Vaclav Havel, the dissident poet and eventual Czech 
     president, asked her to speak from the balcony of his 
     liberation party's headquarters to the tens of thousands who 
     had gathered below in Wenceslas Square.
       After years of walking into tennis stadiums or banquet 
     halls unsure of what the reaction to her would be, after 
     going through the irony of fighting a couple of palimony 
     suits in courts that won't even recognize gays as legally 
     married, Navratilova took the rostrum at the 1993 gay rights 
     march on Washington and the crowd--a half million gays and 
     their supporters--cut loose a sustained full-throated roar.
       Among the things she said:
       ``If we want others to give us respect, we must first be 
     willing to give ourselves respect. We must be proud of who we 
     are. And we cannot do that if we hide. We have to make 
     ourselves palpable. Touchable. Real. And then we have the 
     opportunity to show the world what we are all about: happy, 
     intelligent, giving people. We can show our whole strength, 
     our dignity and character. We can show our joy and sorrow, 
     our heartaches and our pain.''
       An then?
       ``Then'' she said, ``We can just be.''


                             To Be the Best

       In that same speech Navratilova said: ``My sexuality is an 
     important part of my life. But it's not all that I am.'' When 
     asked in Oakland if she ever identified with something Arthur 
     Ashe once said--that bigotry or racism requires so much 
     wasted energy--Navratilova nodded and said: ``It has been so 
     much wasted energy. So much. It's so negative and 
     counterproductive and useless, all this hate talk.''
       For all the turns her life has taken, she has steadfastly 
     tried to just be.
       At the start of her tennis career she set out to be the 
     best ever. But as the years went on she discovered ``the 
     closer I got, the less it mattered to me.'' She points out 
     her career didn't take off until she was 25. But her 
     statistics are nonetheless amazing: She was ranked No. 1 a 
     record 332 weeks. She won 167 singles titles. She won a 
     record 74 straight singles matches, and 109 consecutive 
     doubles matches with partner Pam Shriver. Her 18 Grand Slam 
     singles wins break down to nine Wimbledons, four U.S. Open 
     crowns, three Australian Opens and two French Opens.
       She knows she had some well-chronicled bouts of excess--too 
     much junk food, too much shopping, some overboard largesse. 
     But when she remade her body and finally hunkered down to see 
     how good she could be, the results were astonishing: From 
     1981 through 1984, she hung up annual records of 89-14, 90-3, 
     86-1 and 78-2. But she doesn't look back fondly on those 
     invincible years. ``I'm a much better person now,'' she says, 
     ``and a much better human being.
       ``By 1986 I had been going for five years, nonstop, full 
     speed, and I was getting really tired of it, and I was making 
     out my schedule for '87 and I was saying, `Okay, how few 
     tournaments can I play and get away with it?''' Navratilova 
     says. ``There were years when I only took off two days from 
     practice the whole year. Until Billie [Jean King] pointed out 
     to me what I was feeling was burnout, I had no idea.''
       With the help of King and fulltime coach Craig Kardon, 
     Navratilova won her record ninth Wimbledon singles title in 
     1990. By the midpoint of this year she was playing lousy and 
     losing early, and it was King and Kardon who assured 
     Navratilova once she got back to the the All-England Club, 
     the magic of Wimbledon would takeover. And it did. As 
     Navratilova said then, ``I feel this place in my bones.''
       She rolled to a finals berth no one predicted for her. Once 
     there, her three-set conqueror was Conchita Martinez, a young 
     Spaniard who grew up practicing against a wall she'd 
     nicknamed ``Martina.''
       When the match was lost, Navratilova blinked. She sighed. 
     Then, looking around, she smiled. She and Martinez hugged at 
     the net, their heads tilted against each other's in fatigue. 
     When the awards ceremony was through, Navratilova took one 
     fond last lap around Centre Court. Then she plucked a couple 
     of blades of grass before saying goodbye with a turn and a 
     wave.
       Whenever she's gotten down in the four months since, she 
     says she's often reminded herself if she hadn't played one 
     more year, ``I wouldn't have had Wimbledon.''


                              Moving Along

       Looking ahead to Tuesday's ceremony at the Garden and this 
     final week of her career, Navratilova has insisted she's not 
     yet been struck by the finality of the occasion. And friends, 
     with a laugh, say she's either engaged in the greatest 
     focusing act of her career or her most colossal bout of 
     denial.
       Either way, the 21 years and 1,650 matches are funneling 
     down to this. Navratilova's friends and family are flying in. 
     Her friend, pop star Melissa Etheridge, will sing. Garden 
     management will raise a retirement banner to the rafters for 
     her, commemorating the 18 titles she's won there.
       Navratilova has been telling friends she expects this to be 
     ``the best week of my life.''
       And beyond this week? Navratilova has purposely resisted 
     having too much planned for next year. A 1995 legends tour 
     with Evert could be forthcoming. But Navratilova has said no 
     to myriad other things because she simply wants to put her 
     feet up, visit with friends, try wind-surfing and 
     snowboarding and helicopter skiing, ride her Harley, visit 
     Big Sur and the Napa Valley and ``just see this country I've 
     been living, in.
       ``For so many years tennis was first. Now my life will come 
     first--what a change, what a concept!'' She says with a 
     laugh.
       She has been asked to predict her legacy. But she knows 
     it's likely to be different things to different people. She 
     has joked, ``Before me, everybody played baseline like Chris. 
     Then I came along playing serve-and-volley tennis. And 
     everybody still played baseline like Chris.'' But that image 
     of Navratilova--rushing forward, always bravely--is the one 
     most likely to last. In a more serious moment she says, ``I 
     guess I'd tell people I played the game with a passion. Not 
     just tennis, but life.''
       But she has been more revolutionary than just that. 
     Navratilova is proof that all serious daring starts from 
     within.
       Poet William Dean Howells once wrote it is always the small 
     still voice the soul listens to. In some ways, Navratilova's 
     life has been a parable about that--a reason to believe 
     conviction counts. And that by telling the truth you carve 
     out room for more truth around you. And that if you indeed 
     last long enough and live honestly enough, time can leaven 
     the valleys and the spires, the tumult and the shouting. Even 
     the hate talk can die out, diminish. And decency will 
     prevail.
       And then? Then you really can just be. Difference will not 
     be seen as a bad thing but, rather, as something glorious and 
     precious. Something proud. And you will be someone worth 
     celebrating, not just worth remembering, long after your last 
     tennis ball bounds out of reach.

                          ____________________