Every US Open championship run is memorable. After all, the courts of the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center are professional tennis’ ultimate proving grounds. To win here, you need the whole package: intelligence, desire, stamina and courage. You need to own every shot in the book, and when that’s not enough, you need to be ready to write a new chapter or two.
But since the dawn of Open tennis in 1968, some of those championship runs have been particularly memorable and especially impressive. Some have been unexpected; some have included particularly large hurdles. Some have taken an extra degree of toughness and a double shot of tenacity.
Throughout the summer, as we make our way toward new memories at the 2021 US Open, tennis historian Steve Flink, himself enshrined in the International Tennis Hall of Fame, will be recounting some of the most notable, improbable, and particularly memorable championship runs in US Open history. In this installment, he looks at Martina Navratilova’s dominant march to the 1984 women’s title.
Martina Navratilova’s 1984 campaign had been an exploration in almost total perfection. She had lost in the final of the Oakland indoor tournament at the start of the season to a top-of-the-line Hana Mandlikova. That was understandable because an in-form Mandlikova was always hard to beat. Mandlikova’s game was so explosive, and her shot-making so spectacular, that even her foremost rivals could find it exceedingly difficult to find the right answers for the questions they were constantly being asked.
After that, Navratilova streamlined her game completely. On her long and unblemished road to the US Open, the enormously athletic left-hander had not lost again. Week after week, match after match, opponent after opponent, and situation after situation, Navratilova had methodically and professionally been ready to meet the moment. She simply found her groove, served-and-volleyed prodigiously, raised her confidence level to soaring heights, and demonstrated that she was at the height of her powers and in the heart of her prime.
Not shaken in the least by her meeting with Mandlikova, Navratilova found near invincibility in the months ahead. Martina took the U.S. Indoor title, was the victor at the Virginia Slims Championships in the fabled Madison Square Garden, moved on to Amelia Island in Florida where she was the champion on the clay, and came through in Orlando. Now flowing freely and feeling as if she was the architect of her own destiny almost every time she stepped on a court, Navratilova claimed the French Open crown for the second time.
Shifting to the lawns of Eastbourne, Navratilova stamped her authority there on her best surface, and then won Wimbledon for the third year in a row and the fifth time overall. Triumphant again in Newport, Rhode Island on the grass, Navratilova then moved on to Mahwah, New Jersey, toppling her doubles partner Pam Shriver on the hard courts there in a hard-fought skirmish, wining that encounter 6-4, 4-6, 7-5.
And so she came into the US Open as the prohibitive favorite, unbeaten in 48 consecutive matches since the winter, playing perhaps the finest tennis of her career, leaving all of her chief rivals wondering what they could possibly do to prevent Martina from defending her title in New York. She had beaten her greatest rival Chris Evert in no fewer than five finals across the season, including at the French Open and Wimbledon. In fact, heading into New York, Navratilova had stopped Evert in their last twelve head-to-head contests. Evert had last overcome Navratilova way back at the end of 1982 in the Australian Open final.
Unsurprisingly, Navratilova and Evert more than lived up to their billing as the top two seeds, reaffirming that they were far and away the two best players in the world of women’s tennis. Navratilova conceded only 31 games in six matches on her way to the 1984 Open final while Evert was every bit or even more impenetrable, dropping only 19 games in her six contests. Neither woman came close to losing a set.
Thus, the two pace-setters of the sport stormed into the title round, knowing they were performing remarkably well, hoping they could peak for the final as they were accustomed to doing.
Navratilova, of course, had the benefit of dominating the game all year long and demoralizing her adversaries with her all-out aggression, power and control from the backcourt, a magnificent serve that was so often unanswerable, and a skill on the volley that set her far apart from everyone else.
So how could she lose? Wasn’t this US Open bound to belong to her? Why would anyone doubt her chances of defeating Evert once more on one of the premier stages in the sport?
The answers to these questions were forthcoming. No one could have accurately anticipated what would transpire, however, on this historic Saturday September 8, 1984.
Play commenced in the late morning with Stan Smith rallying to defeat John Newcombe in the senior men’s final. Ivan Lendl then played the first men’s semifinal and rescued himself from match point down in the fifth set against Pat Cash with an astonishing topspin lob off the forehand. Lendl prevailed in a fifth set tie-break. That incomparable day—believed by many in the know to be the greatest in the history of the game—concluded after 11PM with John McEnroe eclipsing Jimmy Connors in five riveting sets under the lights.
That was surely an all-star cast performing in a series of showdowns that kept the fans spellbound from beginning to end. It was big-time tennis at its very best.
But the highlight was arguably the Navratilova-Evert final which reached dizzying heights and thoroughly enthralled the fans. It seemed entirely possible for quite a while that Evert was on her way to a stunning upset over her stylistic opposite. The magnificent backcourt practitioner from Florida—striving for a seventh singles crown at the championships of her country— was competing with steely resolve and her customary unrelenting consistency off the ground.
Having switched from her old and trusted wood racquet to a graphite frame earlier that season, Evert was generating more pace off the ground and serving with greater velocity. Despite her long string of losses to Navratilova, Evert was the game’s toughest player mentally. Perhaps others had given up on her chances to topple Navratilova, but she had clearly not given up on herself. Her determination knew no bounds.
Navratilova dominated the game all year long, demoralizing her adversaries with her all-out aggression and a skill on the volley that set her far apart from everyone else.
The crowd in the old Louis Armstrong Stadium was overwhelmingly behind Evert, cheering her on unabashedly, yearning to see her pull off an improbable victory. They sensed that Navratilova might be vulnerable while Evert was immensely inspired and quietly confident. This was her house. She had made her debut at the majors as a 16-year-old at the 1971 US Open, reaching the semifinals, connecting with the audience enduringly.
The heavy favorite Navratilova was serving at 4-3 in the first set, conducting business as usual on another big occasion. But Evert went on a golden spree over the next three games, breaking twice in the process, going for her shots with certitude, returning serve superbly, making every point count in this stirring stretch. Evert took that fascinating first set 6-4 with purpose and persuasion. The audience erupted, showering the six-time champion with a standing ovation. As Evert said later, “The applause was so loud I could feel it ringing in my ears.”
Navratilova was surely dismayed and unmistakably shocked by the dramatic turnabout in the score line, but she resumed her winning ways swiftly, moving forward meticulously, punching her volleys with more finality, moving her serve around the deuce and ad courts precisely and deceptively. She seemed set to bring the match back to one set all.
But Evert sent the audience into a delirious state when she advanced to 15-40 in that critical tenth game of the second set. She had reached double break point in a bid to lock the score at 5-5 and perhaps move inexorably toward a straight set victory. Martina missed the first serve and elected to stay back on her second delivery. This had the look and feel of an Evert point, until she steered a forehand down the line with too much caution, losing control of that shot. The ball landed long.
Navratilova realized that she had been fortunate. Evert rarely missed a shot like the forehand that got away from her. It was now 30-40 and Navratilova stifled Evert with a kicking serve that was unmanageable. Soon the top seed held on to seal the set 6-4. She had escaped from a dangerous corner to take that second set. There would be no stopping her now.
Navratilova broke Evert for 2-1 in the third set, saved a break point on her way to 4-2 and moved on to a 4-6, 6-4, 6-4 victory. For the first time, she took the lead in her celebrated rivalry with Evert, which had started eleven years earlier. Martina went ahead 31-30 in the series. She also matched Evert’s modern women’s record of 55 consecutive match victories, eventually reaching 74 in a row by the end of the year before losing to Helena Sukova in the semifinals of the Australian Open, then held as the last major of the year in December.
By then, Navratilova had captured six majors in a row to tie a record shared by Margaret Court and Maureen Connolly. She was going for a Grand Slam, hoping to establish herself as the first woman since Court in 1970 to sweep all four majors in a calendar year. Sukova spoiled that dream. Yet Martina finished the 1984 season with an astounding 78-2 match record, winning 13 of her 15 tournaments. The previous year she had won 86 of 87 matches.
The fact remains that Navratilova from 1982-86 enjoyed the finest five- year stretch of any woman player in the Open Era, winning 70 of 84 tournaments, losing a total of only 14 matches. Those numbers may never be replicated.
Although Martina sustained unimaginably high standards all through that period, arguably the most commendable of her individual achievements was overcoming Evert in the 1984 US Open final. The crowds in those days frequently rooted against her because she seldom lost and rarely seemed likely to be beaten. Always a woman who wore her emotions on her sleeve, Navratilova could not hide her frustration with the unsympathetic audiences who attended her matches.
Thirty years after the memorable 1984 final, Navratilova told the New York Times, “I understood why people were pulling for Chris. I would be pulling for her, too. But I felt that day at the US Open they wanted me to lose more than for Chris to win. I was crying after the match because I was rejected by the crowd. It was disheartening. For me it was important to be accepted by the crowd. It’s probably the saddest I’ve ever been after winning a Grand Slam title.”
Be that as it may, hard as it must have been to feel so under appreciated, Navratilova still came through amidst almost unbearable circumstances. Navratilova had come into the tournament with everyone believing she was virtually unbeatable. But, in the end, her 1984 triumph on “Super Saturday” may have been singularly impressive when one considers that Evert pushed Navratilova to her limits and the crowd made her feel like an intruder rather than the great champion she was. Navratilova was never better at dealing with a very difficult hand.
