Two women sit in front of a screen and watch themselves try to destroy each other. The footage is decades old; the wince when a passing shot lands clean is brand new. That is the room Rebecca Gitlitz builds her documentary inside — Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, the two players who spent sixteen years as the largest obstacle in each other’s path, watching the obstruction play back.

Chris & Martina: The Final Set is the rare sports film that treats a rivalry as one shared life rather than two careers laid side by side. They met across the net eighty times. Navratilova finished ahead, 43 to 37. Sixty of those meetings were finals; fourteen were Grand Slam finals. Strip the trophies out and a stranger fact survives: no other person on earth stood across the net for that many of the most important afternoons of either woman’s life.

The contrast was almost too clean for a screenwriter. Evert was the baseliner from Fort Lauderdale, the metronome who turned patience into a weapon and got handed the role of America’s sweetheart while she did it — seven French Open titles, a winning streak on clay that ran past a hundred matches, a two-handed backhand that never seemed to miss twice. Navratilova defected from communist Czechoslovakia as an eighteen-year-old, rebuilt her body into something the women’s game had not seen before, and won nine Wimbledon singles titles serving and volleying at an angle the rest of the tour could not answer. One was what the sport already knew how to sell. The other was what the sport did not yet know how to hold.

That second half mattered, and the documentary does not tiptoe past it. Navratilova was openly gay in an era that charged interest on it, and the endorsements that flowed to Evert did not flow to her. The same athleticism that made her unbeatable was described, at the time, as if it were a problem to be solved. Evert was marketable; Navratilova was inconvenient. The film lets that imbalance sit in the frame rather than narrating it away, because the imbalance is part of why the rivalry carried a charge that went well past the baseline.

What Gitlitz understands is that the rivalry was an engine, not a feud. Navratilova has said for years that chasing Evert dragged her toward fitness and discipline she would not have found alone. Evert has said Navratilova forced her to keep adding to a game she could otherwise have coasted on. Each one became great by refusing, specifically, to lose to the other. The losing is the part most rivalry films flinch from. This one does not. It lets Evert sit inside the stretch when Navratilova simply took the rivalry away from her, winning thirteen in a row at the peak of the 1980s, and it lets Navratilova name what it cost to be cast as the villain in someone else’s American fairy tale.

The matches themselves still hold up as evidence. The 1985 French Open final — Evert winning 6-3, 6-7, 7-5 to end Navratilova’s grip on the rivalry — is the kind of three-set argument that needs no commentary, and the film mostly lets it run. What it adds is the second screen: the two of them now, watching a younger Chris chase down a ball she has no business reaching, both of them knowing how the point ends and flinching anyway. Old footage plays differently when the people in it are sitting next to you.

There is also the detail every rivalry myth tends to bury — that the two of them were friends almost from the start. Early on the tour they shared rides and hotel rooms; in 1976 they won the Wimbledon women’s doubles title as a team, partners on Saturday and opponents in every final that mattered. Gitlitz uses that to complicate the binary the public was sold. The opposites were never as opposed as the marketing needed them to be.

Then the film does the thing that lifts it out of the archive. In the present tense, both women are in cancer treatment. Evert has spoken openly about the BRCA1 ovarian cancer that has returned more than once; Navratilova has faced throat and breast cancer. Gitlitz puts the camera in the rooms where that is discussed without softening — appointments, prognoses, the flat administrative language of treatment. The competitive reflex does not switch off. There is a moment about there being no contest over whose cancer was worse, and it lands as a joke and a truth at once. But the instinct has nowhere left to aim except at the disease. The two people who once needed each other to lose now need each other to keep going.

The supporting voices are the ones who watched it from close range: John McEnroe, the former world No. 3 Pam Shriver, the broadcaster Mary Carillo, Evert’s brother John, the writer Sally Jenkins. They fill in the era around the two principals — the locker-room politics, the press framing, the weight of being a woman carrying a sport that did not always carry her back. But the film belongs to Evert and Navratilova and to the footage, much of it never released, of points they are now seeing again at sixty-nine and seventy-one.

It sits in the small, good tradition of tennis films that are really character studies, closer to the interior portrait of McEnroe than to a highlight reel. Gitlitz, a two-time Emmy winner, resists the coronation that a story like this invites. There is no voice arriving to tell you these are legends; the word would only get in the way of two specific people doing something harder than winning, which is staying.

And it leaves one question open on purpose. A rivalry is built to produce a winner. This one produced a friendship neither woman could have predicted at twenty, and the film never quite decides whether that friendship is the rivalry’s resolution or its quiet refutation — whether sixteen years of trying to beat each other built the bond, or simply had to be survived to reach it. The final set, the title promises, is still being played, and not for a trophy.

Chris & Martina: The Final Set had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival and arrives on Netflix on June 26. It runs ninety-six minutes, directed by Rebecca Gitlitz. For a sport that loves to crown a single greatest, it is a film about the two players who spent their whole careers proving the question was wrong.

Tags: Netflix, documentary, tennis, Chris & Martina: The Final Set, Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova

Chris & Martina: The Final Set — Netflix reopens an 80-match rivalry that outlasted the tennis

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