Back in the day, Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert didn’t just play tennis. They staged a decade-long bloodsport that made the Cold War look like two guys arguing over the last beer. Every major final was national television.
Baselines vs. serve-and-volley. Ice queen vs. Czech powerhouse who defected and then proceeded to hit winners like she was personally offended by the existence of the net. They played each other 80 times. Eighty. That’s not a rivalry. That’s a hostage situation with better outfits and worse hair.
Total Matches: 80 meetings.
Overall Record: Navratilova led 43–37.
Navratilova won 167 titles, and Evert won 157 titles
They battled each other the way only two people who keep stealing each other’s lunch money for fifteen years can. And now, in the year of our lord 2026, these two absolute legends of “I will bury you in clay and then smile for the cameras” have discovered the one thing more powerful than mutual loathing.
Common sense.
Specifically, the common sense that says biological males do not belong in women’s tennis. Not with hormone levels. Not with a cheek swab that comes back positive for the SRY gene. Not because someone “identifies” as a woman harder than Serena identified as a threat in the 2000s. Just… no.
Martina has been saying this out loud for years like a woman who once had to defect from communism and is therefore allergic to BS. Chris has backed her up with the quiet, devastating clarity of someone who once struggled to beat a 43-year-old post-transition Renée Richards while ranked No. 1 in the world and still remembers how the wingspan and the heart size and the lung capacity felt. Science doesn’t lie, she said. Which is the polite way of saying “I have eyes and a memory and I am not interested in pretending otherwise.”
This is the same pair who spent the better part of a generation turning the women’s tour into appointment viewing. They made it matter. They made it physical and psychological and occasionally borderline homicidal. And now they’re looking out at all the elite media and the powers that be and saying, “yeah, bring it.”
They are not intimidated.
When the WTA finally caught up and started doing actual sex testing again. Martina celebrated like someone who just watched the referee stop the fight before the heavyweight started punching the bantamweight for charity.
Their old rivalry was theater. This is just two women who spent their careers proving that elite female athleticism is real, rare, and worth protecting, refusing to let it get diluted by the latest linguistic magic trick. These two women used to try to destroy each other on every surface. Now they’re on the same side of a cultural argument over whether “woman” actually means anything.
August 20, 2026 at 1:21 pm
You know, Matthew, when there’s an organization for boys called the Boy Scouts of America again, I’ll worry about men in women’s sports.
You don’t get to jump off the cultural cliff, and three quarters of the way down indignantly complain that things have gone too far. Women who reject the unreality of men pretending to be women should engage in a little introspection. Did they also reject the unreality of believing that a clump of cells in the womb isn’t a human being? Did they reject the unreality of two people of the same sex being in something called a marriage? If not, enjoy the results of the dysfunctional world you helped to create ladies.
Conservatives should allow the consequences of those choices to become a learning opportunity. We shouldn’t be expending energy on supporting those whose decades of bad decisions have finally come around to undermining their own ideology like they have undermined the rest of society.