Navratilova emigrated, but her Czechoslovak Fed Cup partner paid

Martina Navratilova turns 70 today. But in 1975, her emigration to the US came at a heavy cost to her team partner Miroslava Bendlova-Kozeluhova: the Czechoslovak regime expelled her from the team and took away her job. Now she has told for herself how it happened.

A letter instead of a phone call

Bendlova-Kozeluhova still keeps the yellowed notice. Nobody called her; they sent a curt letter saying that for political reasons she had failed vetting and could not remain on the national team. “My father nearly had a stroke, because he knew I was not guilty of anything. Then I was fired from my job,” she recalls of September 1975.

Her only offence: that year, together with Navratilova, she had won Czechoslovakia's first-ever Fed Cup. In Aix-en-Provence the team had unexpectedly crushed its opponents. Bendlova-Kozeluhova played in a doubles match against the Netherlands that was never finished because of the weather, but she was on the team and counts as a winner. The witness at her wedding the same year was the team captain Sukova, mother of the future legend Helena Sukova.

Soon after the victory, Navratilova flew to the US Open and stayed there. It was a blow to the regime, and somebody had to answer for it. Bendlova-Kozeluhova had her passport taken away and lost her job at the construction company Stavik. Western tournaments were closed to her for two and a half years.

Why she had to answer for it

Bendlova-Kozeluhova was born in Prague in 1951 into the famous Kozeluh family, at the roots of Czechoslovak sport. Her great-uncle Karel Kozeluh is in the International Tennis Hall of Fame, and the family was friends with the Masaryks. The family motto: “Be hardworking, honest, truthful.”

After 1948, such qualities counted for little. At Sparta Prague she was promised a lot but given nothing. A stroke of luck helped: in Zurich she told her story to the chairman of Slavia and moved there. She was given a flat and a job, and played tennis in the evenings. “At Slavia we were the elite. Until 1975,” she says.

Officially she was accused of “association” with the defector; unofficially, she says, the motive was different: room had to be made for girls whose fathers were prominent communists. “They needed someone to point a finger at, and as a Kozeluh I always had it worst,” she believes. Captain Vera Sukova, Bendlova-Kozeluhova adds, was not to blame either: “What was she supposed to do, tie Martina to the bed?”

Then came a ban on playing in the league, help from a club in Prerov, the birth of her first daughter and evening studies. In 1978 she qualified and reached the quarter-finals of Roland Garros, winning eight matches. She was allowed out again, she is convinced, because a child was waiting at home: “They knew I would not run away.”

A hug at Stvanice and coffee in Paris

In 1986 Navratilova came to Prague to play for the US in a Fed Cup tie. Bendlova-Kozeluhova was working as an umpire at Stvanice. “I shouted: Marti, hi! She ran over and hugged me, we both had tears in our eyes.” They were not allowed to have coffee together, but at midnight state security officers turned up at her home and turned the flat upside down. According to her, it was the first time this happened in front of her children.

They managed to talk seriously only in 2016 in Paris at Roland Garros, 41 years after the defection. Navratilova at first even avoided the meeting, tormented by guilt. “I told her: Marti, I know. If you had not run away, they would never have let you out again,” says Bendlova-Kozeluhova. She could have emigrated herself but did not dare because of her parents and sister: “I did not have the courage that you had. I cannot reproach you.”

This autumn they again talked for a long time in Prague. According to Bendlova-Kozeluhova, Navratilova looks calm and content with life, although she has beaten cancer twice, so the main birthday wish was good health.

After her career, Bendlova-Kozeluhova herself became a successful coach; her pupils included the future superstar Martina Hingis. After November 1989 she founded one of the first private tennis schools in Nedvezi, where children followed the regular curriculum. Today she still coaches children in Neratovice, and among those she influenced is Wimbledon champion Linda Noskova. On Tuesdays at Stvanice she meets her old friend Jan Kodes, who in 1978 paid for her hotel in Rome when it turned out that the communists had not entered her in the tournament.

Around Prague, based on reporting by seznamzpravy.cz