Navratilova Elated at Czech Reforms

Martina Navratilova has returned home to find out if everything being reported about her native country was true and if her people were free again.

“I still can’t believe all the things I heard about the revolution are true,” she said. “I just had to come here and see it for myself.”

Navratilova, ranked No. 2 in the world, defected from Czechoslovakia in 1975 and went to live in the United States.

Last year, Czechoslovakia joined other former East Bloc countries in their drive toward freedom, renouncing communism in the 10 dramatic days of the country’s peaceful revolution.

“I followed the events mostly on television, but with enormous interest,” Navratilova said during an interview in Revnice, her native town, 20 miles west of Prague.

“When I saw (Alexander) Dubcek speaking to that wonderful crowd on Wenceslas Square, I started crying like a little girl,” she added, referring to when Dubcek, the symbol of Czechoslovakia’s reform crushed by Soviet tanks, returned to political life.

Despite her emotional homecoming, Navratilova, 34, has said frequently that she had no plans of returning to Czechoslovakia to stay.

It was her second visit home. Her first was in 1986, when the U.S. team defeated Czechoslovakia in the Federation Cup.

“When I was leaving Prague then, I felt sorry for everyone who had to stay, because they simply did not have the right to travel,” she said. “I was depressed.

“Now it’s another story. Everybody has the same rights and I don’t have to be depressed.”