You can look at house prices and hemlines, or prime ministers and presidents, but for my money, the quickest shortcut to evoking an era is its tennis players. I grew up in the age of Graf v Seles and Agassi v Sampras, but my earliest memories – those that yank me back to a primordial time – come from the period immediately before that. I haven’t even reached the end of the trailer for Chris & Martina: The Final Set, the new Netflix documentary following the lifelong rivalry and friendship of Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, and I am already an absolute wreck.

Wimbledon starts next week and, in The Final Set, we are taken back to that pivotal moment in the late 1970s when Evert and Navratilova – “the most cold-hearted pursuers of greatness that you’ve ever met in your entire life”, as the documentary puts it – changed the women’s game. It was Rocky v Apollo Creed; Maverick v Iceman. There was Evert, blond, tiny, from Florida, versus Navratilova, who, in 1975, when she defected from what was then communist Czechoslovakia, was out of shape and unsure of herself. Over the next decade she transformed herself into a winning machine and while Evert, my first love, gave way to Monica Seles, my second love, and Steffi Graf, the tennis love of my life, it was Navratilova who would break all our hearts.

For context: to grow up in the UK’s tennis-club belt of the home counties in the late 1980s was a very particular thing. It meant swerving louchely around and knocking imaginary clay out of your big Fila trainers because that’s what Andre Agassi did at Roland-Garros. It was murmuring brand names – Yonex, Ellesse, Diadora – with the fervour of the rosary. For a solid 10 years, I couldn’t imagine aspiring to anything higher in life than getting another white shell suit by Sergio Tacchini and a massive Tag Heuer watch (sponsors of Seles in the late 1990s). It meant despising Anna Kournikova, who never won a singles title. And yet there she was, hoovering up multimillion-dollar sponsorship deals while Amélie Mauresmo, the actual world No 1, went begging.

Of course, we all know what that was. Tennis had long had a homophobia problem. A generation earlier, Evert was sponsored by Rolex while Navratilova struggled to get any sponsorship at all. Evert was her only friend and that friendship cost her dearly on court. It wasn’t until Navratilova’s girlfriend at the time, a pro basketball player from Brooklyn, said, “You need to kick her ass,” that she turned into a killer and came after her friend. (A line from Navratilova to make lesbians everywhere laugh bitterly: “I think I was influenced too much by my girlfriends.” No kidding.)

And so the women entered a period of trying to destroy each other, a dynamic amplified by what, in the first half of their careers, was a stark preference by crowds for Evert. At the finals of the US Open in 1984, the entire stadium was behind Evert and Navratilova was booed. “I don’t know if it’s because I’m gay or from a communist country,” says Navratilova, looking back, “but I’m American. And I’m a good person. And you guys are hating on me.” She won the tournament, but 40 years later you can still hear the hurt in her voice.

Let’s not kid ourselves; the dislike for Navratilova wasn’t about where she came from. The real reason was there when sports journalists asked her if she thought she was “bad for women’s tennis”. It was there at my grandparents’ house during a Wimbledon final when my grandfather made a snide remark about Navratilova’s awesome physique and suggested she might be better suited to the men’s game. I was not yet 10 at the time but, in the way children know things long before they know them, I remember thinking, with a sinking heart, oh, so there’s that.

The other part of the documentary is a cancer story; the two old champions receive simultaneous diagnoses, Evert with ovarian cancer, Navratilova with throat and breast cancers. Incredibly, the cameras get access to them in hospital and when, in a facility in Florida, a nurse comes into the waiting room and says blandly, “Christine Evert?”, you want to shout at the screen: do you know who she is?

They retired. A new order came in. I fell in love with Graf and then the Williams sisters. But I never got over that era. In 1990, Navratilova made her final winning singles appearance at Wimbledon where she won her ninth title, and that is how I think of her, now: big glasses, hair peroxided and only just growing out of the mullet look.

By 1994, the crowds loved her, and as she bowed out of Wimbledon for the last time they gave her a one-minute-40-second standing ovation. She cried, we cried, and watching these legends at 69 and 71, bald from chemo, fighting, still – “If I didn’t have a bum shoulder, I’d kick your ass,” says Evert to her old friend as the pair leave the cancer ward – I defy you not to cry, too.

• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist