We are taught from a young age that to live well is to win. In sports, in corporate boardrooms, in creative fields, and across almost every human occupation, the world operates on a simple, ruthless binary that there is the person at the top, and there is everyone else. Society feeds on the narrative of the rivalry. We love the clash of titans, the stark contrast of opposites, the drama of two forces colliding for a singular crown. Rivalry is praised as the ultimate moving force which acts as the fuel that forces us to wake up early, push past exhaustion, and outwork the world.
For nearly two decades, the world of tennis was defined by one such clash: Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova. It was a rivalry so pure it felt scripted. Chris was the poised, baseline queen from America and Martina was the fierce, net-rushing force who had risked everything to defect from communist Czechoslovakia. Eighty times they stood on opposite sides of a net. Sixty times they fought each other exclusively for a championship trophy. For an entire generation of youngsters, they were the definition of success. They possessed the "fire." They held the world captive.
But time is an undefeated opponent, and it teaches a vastly different lesson than the ones we learn in our youth.
When you watch the latest documentary detailing their lives, “Chris & Martina : The Final Set” you are not just watching a sports retrospective. You are witnessing a profound philosophical unraveling of human ambition. As you see these two icons who are now stripped of their youth, their rackets, and the roaring crowds, they are sitting together to watch old tapes of their fiercest battles, a striking realization sets in. The summit they spent their lives bleeding to conquer looks incredibly ordinary when viewed from the evening of life.
The tragic reality of striving to be "Number One" is the profound isolation it demands. It is a lonely, fragile pedestal. The world is filled with spectators, critics, and advisors who will eagerly tell you how to maintain your grip on the top, yet almost none of them have ever breathed the thin air of that altitude. They do not know the pressure of having a target on your back, nor the quiet dread of knowing that your entire worth has been tied to a scoreboard.
We encourage youngsters to run blindly toward this version of success. We tell them to burn the midnight oil, to view their peers as competitors, and to treat life as a ladder where others must lose for them to win. We celebrate the fire. But we rarely teach them what happens when the fire burns out, or worse, when life throws a shadow so large that the fire cannot light the way.
That shadow, for both Evert and Navratilova, came in the form of a dreadful, equalizer: CANCER.
There is a terrifying democracy in disease. It does not care about Grand Slam titles, historic statistics, or who held the number one ranking for more weeks. In the sterile, quiet rooms of oncology wards, the applause of millions fades into absolute silence. It is here that the grand illusion of societal success crumbles. When you are combatting ovarian cancer, or fighting breast and throat cancer, the trophy room offers no comfort. The titles cannot cure you. The accolades cannot hold your hand.
It is in this exact space that the documentary pivots from a story about tennis into a masterclass on human existence.
The two women who spent twenty years trying to break each other's spirit became the very people who saved each other's souls. The rivalry did not just soften but it vanished entirely, exposed as a superficial game played in their youth. In the darkest chapters of their lives, they did not look for advisors or fans but they looked for each other. They shared doctors' updates, stepped inside each other's treatment rooms, and brought each other soup. The hands that once fiercely struck yellow felt balls across a net were now extended in quiet, desperate solidarity.
This transformation is the lesson that must be shouted to every youngster sprinting through life today.
Having the fire to do well is important. Ambition is a beautiful, necessary trait that stretches the boundaries of what humans can achieve. But ambition must never be mistaken for an end in itself. If you sacrifice your humanity, your capacity for empathy, and your relationships on the altar of success, you will eventually find yourself at the top of a very cold, very empty mountain.
What Chris and Martina have shown us is that relationship is the only true phenomenon that yields lasting happiness. When the evening of life arrives—and it arrives for us all—the metrics of the world lose their value. The honors we chased look small. The bank accounts look trivial. The only currency that retains its value when we face our vulnerabilities is the love we gave and the friendships we nurtured.
To surpass the trials of aging, disease, and mortality, we do not need rivals to beat but we need companions to walk with.
Let the youth run. Let them strive, create, build, and play with everything they have. But let them also understand the reality of time. Time strips away our strength, our status, and our titles. But it can never strip away the profound bond of two souls who looked past a fierce rivalry and chose, instead, to love one another. The true victory of Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova was never won on the lawns of Wimbledon or the hard courts of New York. It was won in the quiet realization that the person across the net was not the enemy, but the only other person in the world who truly understood their journey.
In a world obsessed with winning, maybe it's time we remind ourselves of what is actually worth keeping.
Author is a Judge at High Court Madras. Views are personal.