In 1983 Martina Navratilova lost exactly one singles match all season
Martina Navratilova's 1983 record reads 86 wins and one loss, the best winning percentage of any professional since 1968. Her only defeat came in the fourth round of the French Open. Two years earlier she had been thrashed without winning a game, and her response was to rebuild her fitness from the ground up.
Born in Prague in 1956, she took her surname from her stepfather, who became her first coach, and began hitting balls against a concrete wall at age four. At 15 she was Czechoslovakia's national champion. In 1975, aged 18 and just beaten at the US Open, she walked into an immigration office in New York and asked to defect from communist Czechoslovakia. Her home country stripped her of citizenship; she received a green card within a month and became an American citizen in 1981, the same year she came out publicly as gay.
Her first major singles title came at Wimbledon in 1978, beating Chris Evert, the rival with whom she would dominate the decade. The turning point arrived after Evert beat her 6–0, 6–0 in 1981. Navratilova began training with the basketball player Nancy Lieberman to toughen her body and mind, and switched to a new graphite racquet. From 1982 to 1984 she lost only six singles matches in total, including a streak of 74 straight wins that Helena Suková finally ended. In 1984 she held all four major singles titles at once.
Her rivalry with Evert is widely considered the greatest in women's tennis, and it ended with Navratilova ahead 43–37 overall and 14–8 at the majors. The pair's contrast of surfaces was striking: Evert ruled on clay, Navratilova on grass and indoors. With Pam Shriver she also won a calendar doubles Grand Slam and 109 consecutive doubles matches. Steffi Graf eventually overtook her weeks at world number one, but not her titles.
The totals remain extraordinary: 18 major singles titles, 31 in women's doubles and 10 in mixed, including a record nine Wimbledon singles crowns, and 167 singles titles overall. She reached the Wimbledon final nine years in a row. Her last major came in mixed doubles at the 2006 US Open, shortly before she turned 50, some 32 years after her first.
Source: Martina Navratilova
