'She has that rare, exceedingly admirable quality of seeming incapable of pretending to be anything she's not'
As a tennis fan, I was a helpless autodidact. I started watching it as a very young child in America, much to the incredulous boredom of my family, who were baseball fans if they were anything. With no one to explain it to me, I had to figure it out by watching, and though I'm still a little iffy on the difference between ad and deuce courts, I remember being precociously ? probably obnoxiously ? proud of being able, at 10 years old, to explain the doubles alley.
Back then, Martina Navratilova was a goddess. Not your boring, movie-friendly kind of goddess ? all flowing locks and silky fabrics ? but what a real goddess might be like should she actually come to earth: overwhelming and terrifying, casting off power like a heatwave, leaving scorch marks where'er she walked.
But I admire her for more than her extraordinary tennis. She has that rare, exceedingly admirable quality of seeming incapable of pretending to be anything she's not, even when doing so might be to her advantage. She came out as gay, for example, decades before it was remotely safe to do so, and has remained outspoken since. She's been equally frank about being diagnosed with breast cancer last year. And on the court, there was never a moment when she seemed able to hide how she felt: weeping with joy when she beat Zina Garrison for her ninth Wimbledon singles crown, bitter-sweetly plucking a few blades of grass when she lost her last Wimbledon singles match to Conchita Mart�nez. Or the sheer glee when she won her final Wimbledon title, aged 46, in mixed doubles with Leander Paes.
I have a number of literary heroes ? Peter Carey, Nicola Barker, Don DeLillo ? but Navratilova has remained for years (and years) the person I'd most like to meet. Scarily competitive, humanly complicated, yet in interviews witty, warm and surprisingly shy, I'm sure she'd play tennis with no one watching, just for the sheer, blistering joy of it. And isn't that what any artist does?
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/01/martina-navratilova-hero-patrick-ness
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