Carly Zucker
Martina revealed how Carly’s dark hair and eyes reminds her of her current ‘drop dead beautiful’ girlfriend.
The tennis legend also said she was still looking for that perfect mate and would see if her current partner was ‘the one’.
‘She’s sweet and drop dead beautiful, she looks like Carly a little bit, brown eyes, dark hair, similar features. I was looking at Carly wondering who she reminds me of and then I realized it was my girlfriend!’
Martina opened up to Nicola after the glamour model asked if she had ever been married before. ‘No, I did have a boyfriend; I lost my virginity with a guy when I was about 17. He was a nice guy but it wasn’t quite there. Then when I was with the first woman about a year later, it was like ‘oh, I’m gay’. It was like coming home, it was clear, and that was my coming out and I knew then that my life wasn’t going to be as easy, it was going to be much more complicated but that’s what it is and I’ve never looked back.
‘Physically I could be with a man but emotionally I just have never fallen in love with a guy. You know when you get those butterflies? I just never had them with a guy.’
Nicola pressed her on what her family said when they realized that she was gay.
‘They didn’t know or didn’t ask until I was about 24, I wasn’t going to tell them but if they asked I wasn’t going to lie. My dad went crazy, it wasn’t happy for a while but we didn’t stop talking and he read some books on the subject and he realized that it wasn’t anything that I did or he did or anything like that and he was cool with it.
‘Mum wasn’t happy with some of my choices of partners but I think she just wanted me to be happy.’
Asked if the press made a big deal of it, Martina said the thing that annoyed her was the media referring to the home she shared with her partner of seven years as a love nest. ‘I had a relationship with a woman, we were practically married and then hey did a story on the house we lived in as Martina and Judy’s love nest. It’s not a love nest, it was a home. It drove me nuts. Regarding the fact that I’m gay, I’ve been out a long time, it’s not a big deal, it was then 25 years ago but it’s a lot easier now. ‘