Vintage 1979 Martina Navratilova Embossed Stamped Envelope ✉️ Tennis Legend!

Remember Martina Navratilova at Madison Square Garden? 🎾 Martina Navratilova, 1979 Avon Women's Tennis Championship Cover, Madison Square Garden

Size: 6 1/2" x 3 3/4" ~ Unaddressed.

A tennis legend on her way to the top! This is a vintage 1979 commemorative cover for the Avon Women's Tennis Championship at Madison Square Garden, with a silk cachet picture of a player inside a gold embossed border, an orange "A" eagle stamp cancelled NEW YORK, N.Y., MAR 21, 1979, and a printed caption telling how Martina Navratilova beat Tracy Austin in the final. It's a Smith Sports Cachet cover, never addressed. This stunning, commemorative envelope recalls Martina Navratilova's (the previous year's Wimbledon Women's Singles Champ) triumph over the prodigy from California, Tracy Austin, on Sunday, March 25, in the tournament's finale.

🔍 What's on it

At the left, a color picture printed on silk, set in a gold embossed checkerboard frame. Look close and you can see the fine weave of the cloth. It has with Smith Sports Cachet in tiny type up the side and an embossed shield with a Z below. That Z shield is the mark of Historic Limited Editions, John Zaso's company, the silk-cachet makers. Zaso's covers had their picture reproduced on a silk-like cloth and fixed to envelopes that were already stamped and postmarked, and you can see it here. The postmark is opening day, March 21, but the caption reports the final, played March 25. Across the cover, AVON WOMEN'S TENNIS CHAMPIONSHIP, MARCH 21-25, 1979, and the caption: BEFORE A RECORD WOMEN'S CIRCUIT CROWD OF 13,752, MARTINA NAVRATILOVA BEAT TRACY AUSTIN, 6-3, 3-6, 6-2 FOR THE $100,000 TOP PRIZE AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN. In the corner, the orange eagle stamp marked A and US Postage, tied by a round NEW YORK, N.Y. MAR 21 1979 10001 postmark on the opening day of the tournament.

🏆 The 1979 Avon Championships

The Avon Championships were the big season-ending championship of women's tennis, and the 1979 edition, the eighth, was played March 21 to 25 at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Navratilova beat a 16-year-old Tracy Austin in three sets in the final, her fifth singles title of the year and the 29th of her career, for $100,000. She came into it as the reigning Wimbledon champion, having beaten Chris Evert in the 1978 final for her first major singles title, and Austin, from the Palos Verdes Peninsula in California, was one of the great teenage prodigies the game has ever seen. That summer she went on to win Wimbledon again, and she would become one of the greatest players the game has ever seen.

The final was a rematch. Back in January, at the 1979 Avon Championships of Washington, Austin had beaten Navratilova 6-3, 6-2. At the Garden, Martina turned it around. Sports Illustrated called the 13,752 people who came to watch the largest tennis crowd in the history of the women's game, the same number printed in the caption. Austin wasn't done, either. Six months later she won the 1979 U.S. Open at 16 years and 9 months, the youngest champion it has ever had.

Avon's name was only on the championships for four years, 1979 through 1982, and Navratilova won the trophy twice in that run, in 1979 and 1981. The trophy itself was much older than the sponsorship. The International Tennis Hall of Fame says it was made and hand-etched in England in 1879.

📮 The "A" stamp

That orange eagle stamp with no price on it is a neat piece of postal history. When the Postal Service knew a rate increase was coming but not what the new rate would be, it printed stamps with a letter instead of a number. The "A" stamp was the very first of them, issued May 22, 1978, when first-class postage went from 13 to 15 cents, and later came B, C, D, E and on down the alphabet.

🏡 Display

It's a perfect gift for a tennis fan, a Navratilova fan, a stamp collector, or anybody who remembers the Garden in the '70s, and it looks great framed in a den or a tennis club. Nobody is printing these covers again. Once these last ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.