Consistency Is Best Part of Her Game

Who would you say is the athlete who most thoroughly dominated a sport?

Well, a case could be made for Babe Ruth. All those home runs, pennants, World Series. He could even pitch. Even his strikeouts were epic.

What about Wilt Chamberlain? Well, he certainly dominated. All those 70-point nights, that 100-point night, 55 rebounds in a game, 23,924 in a career.

Joe Louis? Sure. All those one-minute knockouts, champion for 13 years. Surely, a champion among champions. The competition was reduced humiliatingly to “bum of the month.”

Jack Nicklaus won 70 pro golf tour tournaments and was runner-up in 56 others. He won 19 major tournaments and was runner-up in 19 others. If he didn’t win, you had him to beat.

But all these guys were 6 or 7 feet tall, 200 or more pounds.

A figure who may yet become as dominant as any of them is one who is considerably under 6 feet, weighs well under 150 and looks good in high heels.

Like them, Martina Navratilova may very well be the most dominating there ever was in her sport. If she were a team, there’d be cries to break her up. There may be parity in golf or pro football today but there’s none in women’s tennis. Nobody ever threw a blanket over her sport the way she does, not Helen Wills Moody, Billie Jean King, Margaret Court Smith--nobody.

She runs off victories in strings of 50 in a row. She has won Wimbledon, singles and doubles, twice in a row, she has won the U.S. Open, singles and doubles, twice in a row, she has won the Australian Open, singles and doubles, and the French Open, singles and doubles.

She so towers over her sport that when her principal rival, Chris Evert Lloyd, beat her in a so-what competition down in Florida, for the first time in 26 months, it was worldwide Page 1, Finland-Beats-Russia type of headlines.

She wins so often, she is such a superpower in tennis, you wonder that she doesn’t get bored. You would think, as she runs off matches and tournaments in chunks of 50, that her attention would begin to wander, that she would divert her thoughts to what to wear to the victory party or where to put the mirrors in her new flat. There isn’t anything on the tennis horizon that even figures to keep her awake.

When you beat Chrissie Evert 13 straight times and have won every title in sight, you would think it was like starring in 1,008 straight performances of “The Count of Monte Cristo,” or having the same thing for breakfast every day. Even Muhammad Ali, after one of his particularly one-sided victories, leaned over the ropes one night and shouted in some exasperation to the audience: “Bring me a contender!”

Navratilova’s tennis tournaments are not so much contests as concerts. If there is a tennis player in the world today who can seriously threaten her, it is not someone wearing skirts.

Consistency, Shakespeare said, is a jewel. Emerson sneered that it was “the hobgoblin of little minds.” Whoever is right, it is the hallmark of champions. There’s never been a great performer who wasn’t consistent. The man who writes one good book, the singer who has one hit record, the artist who paints one good picture does not leave his mark on the world. The pitcher who has one no-hitter and little else is a curiosity, not a celebrity.

Being a champion, like being a genius, is being able to do the same thing over and over again. The player who does that is a Hall of Famer. The player who doesn’t is an asterisk.

Navratilova does it better than any tennis player who ever lived. Whether it’s Centre Court at Wimbledon or a first-round match in the West Hempstead Open, you get vintage Navratilova. Martina has no alter-ego, no B game.

I asked her how she keeps her enthusiasm level that high. Is she so good she can win at a yawn? How does she resist getting bored?

“Well, in the first place, I would find losing a whole lot more boring than winning,” she said. “It would be really boring to lose 50 matches in a row.

“I think, in general, that you give it your best because you are pleasing you, not the world. You are the one you have to satisfy.

“When I started to play tennis in Czechoslovakia as a little girl, I did not just want to be the best player in Prague. You know what my ambition was? I wanted to be the youngest player ever to win Wimbledon! I found out later that May Sutton, the California girl, had won it at the age of 16 when she won in 1904, so I couldn’t have. But that was the kind of baggage I loaded on myself right at the start.

“I always want the public to feel that I will be something worth seeing at all times. I see nothing remarkable in always doing your best. What else are you to do?

“It’s not the money. How many Mercedeses can you drive? How many swimming pools can you swim in?”

Martina will appear in the novel-format $500,000 Chrysler Women’s Team Championships at La Costa Mar. 1-3, and finds herself intrigued by this event in which the top eight singles players in the world will select a partner by draw.

“I think it’s an exciting test of tennis and a really neat idea,” she said. “Pam Shriver and I have won Wimbledon four years in a row but now we will all have to break in new partners and try new combinations.”

The tennis tour has finally figured the right approach to Navratilova. You can’t beat her, join her.