The Best of All Time?

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

At Wimbledon, Martina Navratilova proves she has no equal

There are two Wimbledons now. There is the tennis tournament, of course. And then there is the media event surrounding it and, in recent years, threatening to overwhelm it.

The former is played "upon the lawns of the All England Club" by "ladies and gentlemen," as the official program has it. Its proprietors still insist on white balls and white tennis togs. At the changeovers they provide barley water for the players, and at the refreshment stands they will go on selling strawberries and cream until TV's last colonial color commentator ceases to remark on the quaintness of it all. Sometimes tradition warms and touches, as the appearance of perky Kitty Godfree, 88, winner of the 1924 and '26 ladies' championships, did, in the centenary celebration of women's play at Wimbledon. Sometimes, though, it seems a weak defense against the rude noises arising from the other Wimbledon.

That event is a free-form hubbub conducted largely in the sleazier reaches of journalism, for the benefit of an audience that does not know the difference be tween a lob and a drop shot and believes that when the great scorer comes to mark against your name, it matters not whether you won or lost but how you conducted yourself in press conference and bedroom. It may be that 1984 will enter tennis history as the year in which this vulgarly imagined (and reported) tournament, supplanted, in almost everyone's mind, the lovely reality of a game that remains one of sports' subtlest tests of skill and will. If so, it will mostly be because a pleasant and extraordinarily gifted young woman, by dint of disciplined effort, achieved dominance on the grass courts and, by reason of a certain careless openness about her private life, achieved unwanted dominance in the court of public opinion. Standing bleached-blond head and broad shoulders above the women's field, Martina Navratilova was, as she has been all this grand-slam year of hers, simply stunning; it was a moral victory when one opponent took up more than an hour of her valuable time before yielding in straight sets. But greatness can be boring, especially to the ignorant, and Navratilova left Wimbledon watchers with only two less-than-entertaining subjects on which to speculate.

The first was how one might possibly beat her. The only realistic suggestion came from Don Candy, Pam Shriver's coach, who proposed, "Drive over her foot in the car park." But the consensus among the experts was "Play her like a guy," as Peanut Louie, her first-round victim, put it. In other words, serve and volley and try to beat her at her own power game. This led to much crocodile sympathy for her only real rival, Chris Evert Lloyd, the baseliner's baseliner, the deposed queen of the game and a woman widely held to be too old, too distracted by marital problems, too disheartened by eleven straight losses to Navratilova to give her a game. What everyone forgot is that good tennis strokes are good tennis strokes and that the reliable production of same, whether from backcourt or fore, is the essence of the contest. They also forgot that beneath her perfect manners, Evert Lloyd possesses a steely determination that is every bit the equal of her great rival's. They also failed to notice that Evert Lloyd's game steadily tightened as the tournament proceeded. It was not until she cleaned the loudly ticking clock of unpopular Hana Mandlikova in the semis (Mandlikova had implied both that she would brush past Evert Lloyd to reach the finals and that Navratilova must have a chromosomic screw loose somewhere) that it occurred to people that Chris might just give Martina a match.

And indeed she did. Up two breaks in the first set, drilling glorious passing shots down the lines and coming bravely, effectively to net, she lost in a 7-6 tiebreaker, then proved to be a tougher out than the concluding score of 6-2 indicates. With a new willingness to venture netward (where Navratilova says her opponent is better than she thinks she is) balancing her textbook ground strokes, Evert Lloyd has hope in future confrontations. But not a lot. Time and again, Martina reached back to deliver an unconquerable serve when she needed it, and her McEnroe-like athleticism at the net robbed Evert Lloyd of what would have been sure winners against anyone else.

Still, the fact that one had to wait this long to see a first-rate match, points up the age-old weakness of women's tennis: its failure to develop more than two genuinely talented players at any given moment. It is at least in part because of this that the attention of even its most devoted followers begins to wander. And that is where the likes of Judy Nelson come in.

The thirty-eightish wife of a Fort Worth physician and the mother of two, she was first noticed in Navratilova's extensive entourage at the French championships in May. She was all the tabloids could think about when Martina & Co. arrived to prepare for Wimbledon. They laid siege to the house the champion had rented for herself and friends, made ugly inquiries about the relationship at postmatch press conferences. Soon Navratilova was calling some reporters "scum," forcing Wimbledon officials to warn that if personal questions were asked the player had the right to terminate the conference.

Still, the damage was done, not least to the perceptions of tennis followers. Because she long ago admitted her bisexuality, and because she is not, in Billie Jean King's phrase, "a cutie pie," Navratilova, even without controversy breaking around her, sometimes appears to be playing in a segregated tournament all her own. Wimbledon seems to give her less Centre Court time than a player of her stature deserves. And U.S. television did not cover one of her matches complete until there were virtually no other women's matches it could show. As a result, many people are unaware of the good humor with which she conducts her business. Her ferocious style makes it seem like she is "beating up all those innocent young girls," as she wryly puts it. Not so, says Peanut Louie: "It looks like she's having fun playing tennis. Even if you get murdered you don't feel so bad." In short, Navratilova is anything but a diesel truck steaming heedlessly toward immortality.

Around the lawns and locker rooms of Wimbledon last week connoisseurs were comparing her to the all-timers -- Suzanne Lenglen, Helen Wills Moody, Mo Connolly, King -- and speculating, as tennis people do, about how she would fare in dream matches against them. It is part of the respect anyone on the verge of winning this tournament five times gets. But even those who appreciate her no-weakness game tend to overlook the fact that she has come further emotionally than anyone else who has ever played this game.

Indeed, it is hard to reconcile this lean heavy hitter with memories of the chubby adolescent who came out of Eastern Europe more than a decade ago with an unreliable backhand, a gentle disposition that led her to give away games, and a sweet tooth for capitalism's material delights. Hard to reconcile this figure too with the bewildered defector of 1975, or the girl who cried in 1981 over her inability to win the U.S. Open. With astonishing grit she has overcome all that, while retaining, with people she trusts, the rather innocent and witty honesty that is among the sources of her troubles. "Professionally speaking," she says, "I'd like to be the greatest tennis player of all time.

And, at 27, I still have a few years left for that." Reminded that last year at Wimbledon she was saying such a dominance was impossible, what with all the good young players coming up, Martina gave a 300-watt grin and admitted, "I lied." Last week, with her mid-size Yonex racquet doing the talking, she told some tennis truths that no one now playing can possibly deny. And perhaps set a standard of all-around play that will endure for the rest of this century.

With reporting by Arthur White/London