[Red Moon]

Jungle jaunt's a game to love

'FADED stars and celeb has-beens off to the jungle." Whichever tabloid headline writer penned those words last week to greet the new series of I'm A Celebrity: Get Me Out Of Here should look out for a mouthful of tennis racquet and a ferocious punch volley of abuse.

It is only two years since Martina Navratilova, just weeks shy of her 50th birthday, was still strutting the courts at the upper levels of the professional game that made her fortune and turned her into a global sporting icon.

Age may have caught up with her ability to slug it out with a new generation of pumped-up teenagers, but faded she ain't. Off court, she's been no slouch either. Since retiring, she has written a best-selling diet and fitness book, polished off a tennis-and-murder novel and launched her own art collection of works that involve hitting paint-covered tennis balls against a canvas. Laugh not – they sell for in excess of £100,000.

Navratilova has also spent time visiting Africa to highlight the plight of Kenyan slum children and spent parts of her considerable career earnings – $21m from the game itself and more from her many endorsements – on causes close to her heart, such as animal rescue and gay rights.

She appears to be fulfilled in her career and certainly in no need of reputation rehabilitation – unlike the real faded stars, celebrity has-beens and celebrity wannabes she will surround herself with over the next three weeks in the Australian jungle.

So why is this sporting legend risking ridicule and humiliation by entering the volatile arena of reality TV on a show with notoriously unpredictable consequences? Those who have watched her career closely can only conclude that Navratilova is unable to resist yet another attempt to lay to rest the media-created caricature of her as a forbidding, stern, muscular lesbian ogre.

One aspect of her life that has always rankled with the former tennis golden girl is that while the public may have respected her, she feels they never really loved her, never really understood that beneath the austere eastern European veneer of an apparently cold-hearted tennis assassin was a warm, funny, intelligent and passionate individual.

She tells a story of once asking Chris Evert, her great American rival and male pin-up girl of her generation: "'How come your image is so good and mine is so bad, so hard? How come the fans love you so much? What do you do with your fan mail?' She just giggled and told me that she chucked her mail in the bin. And there I am, paying a guy a lot of money to answer my fan mail. I am like: 'What am I doing wrong here? Why don't they love me the way they love her?'"

There is, however, an alternative explanation for her foray into reality television. Maybe Navratilova, born fighter and ultra competitor, simply misses the limelight and is tempted by the opportunity to appear before millions of viewers once again. She's single following the end of a seven-year relationship, has just lost her mother, and perhaps welcomes the chance to get out of her normal environment and back into a competitive arena.

It's in her make-up not to turn her back on fresh challenges or experiences. At the age of 18, her tennis career blossoming, she took the momentous decision to abandon her native country to defect to the United States, paying the price of leaving her family behind in a hostile communist regime.

Tennis-wise, it was the right decision as she became arguably the greatest player, male or female, to lift a racquet. She holds the record for winning the most singles titles (167) and the most doubles titles (77). The longest winning streak in tennis history of 74 consecutive victories is hers, and she contested 12 Wimbledon singles finals, including nine years in a row between 1982 and 1990, winning nine.

Her regal progress continued into her 30s, when most players would have quit the punishing global tennis circuit. Instead, she merely insisted she was stronger and fitter than ever. Even during her last season, at the age of 49, she made it through to the quarter-finals of the women's doubles at Wimbledon before drawing the curtain on her illustrious 31-year career.

Her love life threw up its challenges too. At the age of 24, she was shot at by a furious female lover she had just dumped, the bullet hitting the headrest of the passenger seat of the BMW she was driving at the time. It led to the tennis player being "outed" by the New York Daily News and ructions on the female tour when sponsors threatened to pull out. Navratilova refused to compromise her sexuality, saying: "I am not going to deny myself my true nature."

Sexuality aside, her true nature was to compete. With two Grand Slam titles behind her, she decided she was not fit enough to go on winning. She enlisted the help of her lover at the time, basketball star Nancy Lieberman, to develop the fitness regime that allowed her to stay at the top for three decades.

Mental toughness has been a hallmark of her life. At the end of a nine-year relationship with Judy Nelson, a former Texan beauty queen who was married with two children when they met, Navratilova fought a $15m palimony claim. The fact that Navratilova contested the claim angered the gay rights campaigners whose cause she had championed for many years. They believed homosexual relationships conferred the same obligations as straight ones when couples split up.

Navratilova disagreed, saying: "It had nothing to do with being gay or straight and everything to do with the feeling that half of what I made should not be going to a person who had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I was the No.1 player in the world. I was the top player before I met her and continued to be after we split up."

Of her reincarnation as a reality show contestant, she cheerfully admits she has never seen the programme and has no idea what to expect, but will trust her instincts. "I'm sort of going in trusting in my ability to adjust," she says, an ability that no one could possibly deny.

Broadcaster and journalist Janet Street-Porter, a previous contestant, has Navratilova installed as favourite against the medley of assorted Wags, soap actors and former singers, who include Carly Zucker, whose main claim to fame is being engaged to Chelsea footballer Joe Cole, former lads mag favourite Dani Behr, EastEnders actor Joe Swash and boy band vocalist Simon Webbe.

Street-Porter believes she will also give short shrift to the "oldies": veteran TV host Robert Kilroy-Silk, That's Life presenter Esther Rantzen and 'Cannabis Cop' Brian Paddick, a former senior officer with the Metropolitan Police. All will experience Navratilova's in-built and overwhelming desire to win. Quiet please. First service.

Source: The Scotsman