Tennis rivals Chris Evert & Martina Navratilova team up against cancer
6/29/202646 min
Once the most successful women’s tennis champions of their generation, Evert and Navratilova open up about friendship, cancer and retirement in the Netflix documentary ‘Chris & Martina: The Final Set.’ They spoke with Terry Gross.
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Terry Gross· Host0:12
This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. My guests, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, were the greatest female tennis players of their generation. They were friends, and they were each other's greatest rivals in the '70s and '80s. When Evert retired in 1989, they'd each won 18 Grand Slam victories, and they'd each been the top-ranked female player in the world seven times. Navratilova retired in 2006. Now they're the subject of a new Netflix documentary called Chris and Martina: The Final Set. It tells the story of how they interacted as friends and as opponents, and how their friendship went cold for an extended period when their rivalry became more fierce. When they were each retired, their friendship deepened as they both faced cancer and were able to support each other. Evert was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2021. Navratilova was diagnosed with throat and breast cancer in 2022, the same year that Evert had a recurrence. When I spoke with them a couple of weeks ago, they were both in remission. But late last week, Evert disclosed she'd just been diagnosed with a recurrence of ovarian cancer. Here's how the interview went a couple of weeks