-So everybody knows all your stats.
80 matches, 18 Grand Slams.
I'm going to read you different statistics,
seven surgeries, nine chemo cycles
between the two of you, 50 radiation treatments.
Who did it better? -[bleep]
[laughter]
-Oh, she did. For sure. She did for sure.
-I think mine was harder in some ways,
but Chris was longer time wise and it just beats you up.
So this was definitely not a competition.
And I can just say that we both came out on the other side
holding up really well.
-Tennis icons Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova
met as teenagers and forged one of the greatest
rivalries in sports.
-♪ You've come a long way, baby ♪
-They spoke with The Post's Sally Jenkins about
their decades-long friendship and fights against cancer.
-It was so striking how a grand Slam tournament
dwindles, right?
Like 16 people. Eight people. Four people and then two.
Can you describe for people what that was like,
especially in Grand Slam?
-You know, we were always well,
80 times, we were the last two standing in the locker room.
And one of us would be happy at the end of the match
and one of us would be, you know,
sad or and one of us would be comforting the other.
And that's when I saw her at her highest and her at her lowest.
And I think because we saw each other that way,
the vulnerable part, I think that was, like,
you know, that's another level of friendship.
[crowd cheering]
-Until it was over, I didn't really think
that it was over because, you know, a couple of weeks ago
I beat Chris, but I was down at match point,
so she was the one that should have won the match.
And even when I was down
and when I was up three match points today,
I didn't think it was all over.
-I wanted to talk to you about your sense of responsibility
about cancer because it feels so similar to the way
you guys went about your careers in terms of, you know,
you were chasing number one, you were chasing trophies,
and, yet, you always were political minded about the tour,
about doing something for other people.
I mean, these are intimate conversations about cancer,
ovarian cancer, breast cancer.
So what makes you want to do this interview?
Come forward and talk publicly about cancer?
-Cancer is a nasty opponent.
It was, you know, and I have a double reason.
The fact that my sister Jeannie, who's younger than I am,
she died from ovarian cancer two years after she died.
I get a phone call from the geneticist
saying that one of the variants that was in Jeannie's blood
has turned to cancer.
And we'd like you to go right away
and have the BRCA gene test. And I got it.
Like, the next day I had a blood work
and I was BRCA positive, you know,
and I was feeling fine.
And I was stage 1 ovarian cancer.
And that's a deadly ovarian cancer you don't want to get.
So I was kind of like pissed off,
you know, I was like, I wanted to get the word out.
I want to get the word out. It's nothing to be --
I mean, cancer is nothing to be ashamed of or self-conscious
about because half the world,
if not more people are going to get it in their lifetime.
So any time that you can,
you feel like you can save lives or make a difference
or just get the word out about about early detection
and know your family history and all those messages.
You know, this is something you can't control.
We talked about this.
This is -- We controlled our career.
You can control certain things in your life,
but this is something you can't control.
-Thousands and thousands of people have cancer.
I'm just like everybody else.
I didn't want women to go through the same thing
that I went through, which is for me,
once I found out, it was 4 years between my mammograms,
I realized, holy [bleep]
I could have really been in trouble.
My timing was lucky because clearly the disease
had happened the last year of the 4 years.
But if it happened the first part of the 4 years,
it could have been much, much worse situation.
So I wanted to preempt other women
from making the same mistake because we're much better
taking care of others than we are of ourselves.
-Let's talk about that lack of control,
because, I mean, you guys were masters of your destinies,
right until now.
How hard was it to adjust to that mentally?
-Well, let's let's put it this way.
It's a life lesson.
It's like, okay, you're not special.
You know, just because you're a champion at something,
doesn't mean you're not going to, you know, get cancer.
At the same time, I think the other characteristics
of being an athlete come into play,
like the focus and like the determination
and like the discipline.
And you just you got to go through it.
You have no choice.
You just got to go through it to get to the other side.
-You're 68 and 66. You met at 18 and 16.
-Yeah -Yeah.
And we went through pretty much the same things in life.
-The trajectory, it's amazing, really.
-And we're going through this together, which is like,
I love the phrase that,
you know, we're in the trenches together.
Like, we've been in the trenches together our whole life.