Martina Navratilova rewrote the rules. In the early 80s, when she was in her pomp, normal standards of evaluation became redundant. To enquire about the outcome of Navratilova’s latest match was to invite ridicule. How did Martina get on today? She won, of course. Almost without fail, she won.
In 1983, her annus mirabilis, the Czech was beaten just once in 87 matches. That solitary setback, a fourth-round defeat to Kathy Horvath at the French Open, cost Navratilova the grand slam – and her coach, Renee Richards, her job. It came midway through a three-year period in which Navratilova won eight majors and suffered just six defeats. It was dominance on a scale unprecedented in the open era.
As the victories mounted, the focus shifted from the outcome of Navratilova’s matches to their length. Keeping the world No 1 on court for more than an hour became a badge of honour, tantamount to victory. By that standard of evaluation, the Wimbledon runner-up in 1983 was not Andrea Jaeger, whose 6-3, 6-0 mauling in the final lasted a mercifully swift 54 minutes, but rather Sherry Acker, the American who pushed Navratilova to a second-set tiebreak – and, crucially, beyond the magic 60-minute mark – in round two.
As her unexpectedly early departure from the sport suggests, wholesale pre-eminence was never the goal of Ashleigh Barty. You could no more envisage Barty preparing to celebrate her 50th birthday by winning the US Open mixed doubles, as Navratilova did in 2006, than you could have imagined the teenage Martina trading her racket for a cricket bat, as Barty did when she took a sabbatical from the game at the age of 17.
Yet that is not to say that the Queenslander, who held the No 1 ranking for a total of 120 weeks, never approached Navratilovian levels of dominance. The aura of invincibility that enveloped Barty two months ago at Melbourne Park, where she shrugged off 44 years of national mortification to bring home the Australian Open title for the first time since Chris O’Neil in 1978, was a throwback to the days when Navratilova’s pre-eminence was measured by the stopwatch rather than the scoreline.
In the opening round, the Ukrainian qualifier Lesia Tsurenko was dispatched in just 54 minutes. That was two more than Italy’s Lucia Bronzetti, another qualifier, managed in round two. By the time Barty reached the final, she had spent an average of 61 minutes on court across six matches. A typically spirited performance from Danielle Collins, who kept alive her dream of lifting the Daphne Akhurst Memorial Cup for almost an hour and a half, added almost four minutes to that time. Yet it is a measure of Barty’s breakneck progress through the tournament that Collins’ second-set resistance felt positively Acker-like in scale.
Barty won at Melbourne Park without dropping a set, losing a mere 30 games. Beyond mere numbers, however, she had the ineffable air of serenity and assurance that only the greatest champions possess. The kind of presence that sees mental battles won in the locker room, opponents beaten before they set foot on court. The Australian is a humble soul, but even she was not oblivious to the effect.
“Sometimes it’s really nice to be able to focus internally and just focus on what you need to do,” Barty reflected after her quarter-final victory over Madison Keys. “Other times, it’s nice to look up the other end of the court and see how your opponent is reacting.”
Few reacted well. With each successive victory, Barty acquired greater stature. By the end of it all, she looked poised to assert era-defining dominance over the women’s game. At 25, and with three major titles on three different surfaces under her belt, the question was not whether she could add to her grand slam tally, but how many more she would win.
When Chris Evert tipped Barty to complete a career grand slam at Flushing Meadows, that felt like the least of it. Having won at Roland Garros three years ago, why not again? Having spoken warmly of Wimbledon as a birthplace of “hopes and dreams”, surely she would relish returning to Centre Court as the defending champion?
Barty, as we now know, had other ideas. She read the script set down for her and didn’t much care for it. Craig Tyzzer, her long-standing coach, first sensed the direction of travel after Wimbledon, where Barty’s victory represented the realisation of a lifelong ambition. When his charge was subsequently upset by Sara Sorribes Tormo in the opening round of the Tokyo Olympics, the writing was on the wall.
“Once we got to the Olympics, it sort of hit home to me that there wasn’t much left in her. The motivation wasn’t there,” said Tyzzer at a news conference following Barty’s bombshell announcement. “I sort of felt she’d climbed where she needed to get to, and it was going to be a hard slog to keep her involved. I felt it was coming.”
For some, the fulfilment of a dream is an end in itself. Others seem to view it as the departure point for a new journey, one with no defined end point. Navratilova was in the latter camp. In 1994, when her last singles appearance at the All England Club ended with defeat to Conchita Martínez in the final, she wept because the adventure that had begun 16 years earlier “was all over”. Navratilova left SW19 with nine singles titles and no regrets but, she admitted, without “the ending I was hoping for”. Somewhere within, the fire still raged.
For Barty, whose Wimbledon campaign last summer was an extended homage to her friend and mentor Evonne Goolagong Cawley, one moment of perfection was enough. Having donned an outfit echoing the one worn by her compatriot half a century earlier, she marked the golden jubilee of Goolagong’s maiden Wimbledon victory by becoming the first Australian since to claim the title. In the joyful tears that followed, there was a lachrymose acknowledgement that things would never get any better.
“It was never about the successes,” said Tyyzer. “It was about fulfilling Ash’s dreams, and she basically did that.”
The Australian Open title that followed, he added, was motivated more by love of country than any pursuit of a fairytale ending. “It was really difficult to do the pre-season, for the lead-up to the Aussie summer circuit. She just put her head down and went super hard. I feel the hardest thing was trying to motivate her, to get a spark to go, ‘Hey, you need to be out there’, because her tennis and her mindset were so relaxed, and so easygoing with it all, it was almost like she didn’t care whether she won or lost. She obviously did. But I think the Australian summer was for everyone else and not for her.”
There has been much speculation that Barty might eventually return to the sport, with precedents cited from Bjorn Borg to Justine Henin and Kim Clijsters. She has not ruled it out – “never say never,” Barty teased when asked – but if her decision to retire has shown anything, it is that she follows her own muse. “Ash does her own thing,” said Tyyzer. “[She] is a tennis player, but it’s not who she is”.
Barty’s decision to call time on her career is a reminder that tennis is not merely about the relentless accumulation of titles and accolades. It is an individual sport – and Barty, not for the first time, has asserted her individuality. Navratilova, who has always done things her own way, would approve.