{"id":165050,"date":"2020-07-20T12:00:10","date_gmt":"2020-07-20T11:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=165050"},"modified":"2020-07-20T12:49:53","modified_gmt":"2020-07-20T11:49:53","slug":"how-cancel-culture-repeatedly-emerged-in-my-attempt-to-make-a-film-about-tennis-legend-martina-navratilova","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/07\/how-cancel-culture-repeatedly-emerged-in-my-attempt-to-make-a-film-about-tennis-legend-martina-navratilova\/","title":{"rendered":"How \u201cCancel Culture\u201d Repeatedly Emerged in My Attempt to Make a Film About Tennis Legend Martina Navratilova"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Martina Navratilova – wn.com<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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14 Jul 2020 – <\/em>Growing up as a gay\u00a0child\u00a0in South Florida in the late 1970s and into the\u00a0dark\u00a01980s era of Reagan and AIDS, my childhood hero was the tennis star Martina Navratilova. In 1975, at the age of 18, Navratilova fled\u00a0Communist\u00a0Czechoslovakia, leaving her entire family behind in a daring escape, to emigrate to the U.S. In the 1980s, she became one of the\u00a0only openly gay celebrities in the world, an LGBT and feminist pioneer, and an outspoken political dissident.I had other childhood heroes: the Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg; the Jewish ACLU lawyers<\/a> who endured endless attacks\u00a0to defend the\u00a0First Amendment free speech rights of neo-Nazis to march through Skokie, Illinois, a town with numerous Holocaust survivors; and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whose iconography was seared into my brain by my fixation with \u201cAll the President\u2019s Men,\u201d the book and subsequent film that chronicled their journalistic investigation of Watergate.<\/p>\n

But Navratilova occupied a singular pedestal for me. She became one of the world\u2019s most extraordinary and famous sports stars: Sports Illustrated ranked her as 19 on its list of the 20th Century\u2019s Greatest Athletes<\/a>, the second-highest woman behind Babe Zaharias, one spot behind Bill Russell, and one ahead of Ty Cobb. She won the Wimbledon singles crown nine times (Serena Williams has won seven), with her last Grand Slam title earned one month shy of her 50th birthday<\/em>, when she became\u00a0the 2006 U.S. Open Mixed Doubles champion. That was her 59th Grand Slam title, the most ever in tennis history by any player.<\/p>\n

Her rivalry with U.S. tennis star Chris Evert in the late 1970s and throughout the \u201980s was one of the greatest sports rivalries of the last century<\/a>, if not the single greatest<\/a>. They played 80 times (with Navratilova winning 43), including 14 times in Grand Slam finals (where Navratilova won 10). Their matches \u2014 a dramatic clash in personalities, cultures, branding, and playing styles \u2014 were watched by millions of people around the world on NBC, CBS, the BBC, and other global corporate networks.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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