Inside a former carpet warehouse in Perth’s northern suburbs, Margaret Court has created her temple. This building, the Victory Life Centre, brings together the two distinct halves of her story: one as a Pentecostal pastor fiercely wedded to the word of the Bible, the other as the most decorated tennis player who ever lived. Beneath the five-storey prayer tower lies the opulent “heritage room”, with her monogrammed Ted Tingling dresses in each corner and a 1962 oil portrait of the young champion, still then Margaret Smith, looking enigmatically at the artist with a couple of wooden rackets across her lap.

At 83, she has lost none of this forceful presence. Still physically robust and with an arduous schedule of church services to maintain, she ascribes her stamina to the self-discipline she brought to her sport. “I’ve been a pioneer,” she smiles. “I was the first woman in tennis doing weights in a men’s gym. People had said, ‘She’s too scrawny, she’ll never make it.’ But it maintained my fitness – to this day, I’ve never needed an operation on any of my joints.”

And yet there is a paradox here. For all that Court’s statistical records brook no argument, with her 64 grand slam titles in singles and doubles unlikely to be eclipsed in anyone’s lifetime, her trenchant rhetoric on gay marriage and transgender ideology – based, as she has long argued, on steadfast religious conviction – has rendered her a pariah in her own country. “You’re the first press person to interview me like this in years,” she says. “The Australians don’t come near me. They would rather my name just go away.”

This impression is hardly without foundation. Campaigns to rename Margaret Court Arena at Melbourne Park have smouldered for more than 20 years. In 2021, Daniel Andrews, then-premier of Victoria, opposed her award as Companion of the Order of Australia on the grounds of her “disgraceful and hurtful” views. Even when the Australian Open deigned to host her in 2020, on the 50th anniversary of her calendar grand slam, organisers added a hand-wringing caveat that Court’s beliefs did “not align with our values of equality, diversity and inclusion”.

We meet at her church office, where she is greeted without fail as “Pastor Margaret”. Court is not a Perth native, only moving here in 1966 out of a desire to “hide” from the scrutiny that her all-conquering tennis career had produced. Having grown up in Albury, on the Victoria-New South Wales border, she explains: “In Perth I could go out, run along the beach. In Melbourne, everybody knew me. Even if I went to dinner with someone, people would marry me off.” Her commitment to her adopted community is profound. One unexpected consequence of England’s two-day defeat in the first Ashes Test is that she has spent the past week helping to redistribute Perth Stadium’s unused food to the homeless and those in need.

Court continues, inconveniently for her tennis critics, to be a yardstick for the greatest names in the game. Serena Williams fell one short of emulating her 24 major singles titles, while Novak Djokovic, for whom the clock ticks ever more loudly aged 38, has tried and failed eight times to claim the outright record of 25. “The 24, I won’t be surprised if it’s beaten,” she says. “But the 64, I don’t think it ever will be.” As if to affirm the point, a speech in 2022 by Australian MP Peter Collier, acclaiming Court as “without a shadow of a doubt the greatest tennis player of all time” has been turned into a hardback book, displayed prominently in the church shop. “Whatever tennis does,” she insists, “it can never take away what I’ve done.”

She reveals she has not been invited to either the French or US Opens, both of which she won five times, for 15 years. To any other champion of similar pedigree, such disdainful treatment would be unthinkable. It illustrates the strange position that Court occupies, as a woman who dominates every honours board but whose inflammatory statements have led to a form of erasure. “Day to day, I’m not really thinking about her,” Williams wrote, in a 2022 retirement article for Vogue, adding that the idea of saying “see ya!” to Court was a “good fantasy”.

There are two ways of viewing Court’s body of work. Patrick Mouratoglou, Williams’ coach, once dismissed her 24 major triumphs as belonging to a “different era” to his own protégée’s 23, with tennis still an amateur sport until 1968 and fewer international players travelling to the Australian Open during her heyday. But Court also enjoyed far less privilege than today’s crop. Never mind an entourage of masseurs and psychologists, she would schlep across Europe in the early Sixties in a series of grimy one-star hovels. When she won the first of her 11 Australian Opens in 1960, she received an umbrella. The following year? A leather cosmetics case. “Except there were no cosmetics in it,” she laughs.

I notice, on the lapel of her navy jacket, a pin of the Australian and Israeli flags crossed. It is a subject on which she has spoken passionately of late, releasing a video to declare that the Australian government “should be ashamed of itself for the way it has treated Israel” over the war in Gaza. Penny Wong, the country’s foreign minister, indicated last year that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be arrested if he set foot on Australian soil, before recently refusing to identify Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

“This being a Judeo-Christian nation, I thought they did the wrong thing,” Court says. “They’ve wobbled their way back into line with the Americans, playing it like a chess board. But it’s very sad. We need to stand with the Jews, and this tiny little nation. I think there’s a price to pay if you don’t.” Such is her alarm about the lack of Holocaust education, her church has just co-hosted a talk by Kai Höss, grandson of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and a pastor who has spent decades talking about the shame of that association. “It concerns me that children are not learning about it in school,” she says.

‘Some children don’t even know whether they’re boys or girls’

It turns out to be far from her only concern about today’s youth. “Christian values have been taken out of our schools. Some children don’t even know whether they’re boys or girls any longer. This is where I get upset, because I look back at my life and I was such a tomboy when I was young. I played football and cricket, and I beat all the boys doing it. But I still knew I had two brothers who were different from me. Now you have children saying: ‘I feel like being a boy.’ Giving them hormone replacement before puberty? They end up trapped in their bodies and they can’t turn back. We don’t even allow them to drive until they’re 17. So why would you do that to another human being? What are we doing to our young people? I cry about that.”

A caricature has developed of Court as a ferocious fire-and-brimstone preacher. But the logic she spells out here has, in the past five years, gained widespread acceptance. An indefinite ban on puberty-blockers is now official government policy in the UK, if not Australia. So why has Court provoked such a howling backlash, to the point where, in 2017, even 11-year-olds at her hometown academy were targeted with abuse? The hostility erupted after her appearance on a Christian radio station, where she described Australia’s Safe Schools programme – promoting “gender diversity” and condemned by former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott as “social engineering dressed up as anti-bullying” – as “the devil”.

This quickly morphed into such lurid headlines as “Court calls trans kids the work of the devil”. “I didn’t say that,” she sighs. “I was answering about something else. I was a bit hurt, because then people formed opinions on the back of that.” One was Billie Jean King, her long-time rival, who reflected that her comment – misrepresented though it was – “put me over the edge”. In this febrile environment, it became fashionable to give Court a kicking, with Martina Navratilova and John McEnroe parading a banner in 2020 to urge her airbrushing from her own Melbourne stadium. “Evonne Goolagong Arena,” they demanded, in reference to Indigenous Australian Evonne Goolagong Cawley, the winner of seven majors and, in their eyes, a superior role model.

It took an open letter from Court’s four children, Daniel, Marika, Teresa and Lisa, to call off the mob. “Mum heads a church of thousands and helps many with food handouts daily,” they wrote. “She has always been very Bible-based in her Christian beliefs, and that is the reason we have such a strong loving family.”

Court has faced excoriating reaction, too, for her opposition to gay marriage. In 2013, she said of Australian player Casey Dellacqua’s son with her partner, Amanda Judd: “It is with sadness that I see this baby has seemingly been deprived of his father.” Four years later, ahead of a plebiscite allowing same-sex couples to marry in Australia, she announced she would boycott Qantas, the national airline, over its support of the cause. “Margaret, enough is enough,” Dellacqua warned.

Even today, she seems nonplussed by the hostility, refusing to bend because she believes implicitly what the Bible tells her. “As a minister, I simply stood up for some values. I have nothing against gay people. I just say what the Bible says: “A man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” Jesus said that in the gospels. I was brought up with this, and I haven’t changed.

“It can turn people against you. But you know what? When you know the peace of God, when you help people and see their lives change, that’s all that matters.”For almost 50 years, her perspective has remained the same. In the late Seventies, soon after retiring from tennis, Court suffered a paralysing period of depression – reducing her, she said in her memoir, to a “shipwrecked shell floating on a sea of bewilderment”.

“That was when somebody said: ‘Well, why don’t you go to Bible school?’ At first I thought my life would be a bigger mess by becoming a Christian. But somehow I decided: ‘There is a way out of this.’ At Bible school, I was totally healed.” For her husband, Barry, a leading yachtsman in his day, the transformation was extraordinary, to the point where he supported her choice to become a pastor with the words: “If God’s calling you to do it, you had better do it.” She says, tenderly: “I remember asking 200 men at a breakfast function, ‘How many of you would like your wife to do what I do? Not one put his hand up. So I knew I had a special person.”

It is instructive to study Court’s cult of personality in the flesh. To watch her orchestrate a Sunday morning service at Victory Life Centre is to see the spell she casts over her congregation, with a style that owes less to the Billy Graham style of tub-thumping evangelism than to the rhythms of an intense meditation session. For the best part of an hour, she alternates between ululating on her knees and praying for “mercy on our land”, her eyes closed and her hands clasped.

‘There is a very military side to Islam’

There is, true to form, the odd incendiary digression, not least when she pronounces: “There are mosques everywhere in England. We think we have nothing to be concerned about? We need to get in early.” I ask her afterwards about what message she is trying to send here to Australia. “There is a very military side to Islam,” she says. “It’s dangerous for your nation and it’s dangerous for our nation. Christians can be asleep to this, and we need to get behind our values and our morals.”

It is unlikely that Court will win over any liberal constituencies with these remarks. But she approaches the blizzard of public opprobrium with the same resilience she perfected as a player. So monastic was her regime, she could often be regarded as austere. Take the manner in which she was portrayed in the 2017 film Battle of the Sexes, as the aloof counterpoint to the effervescent King. She has still not seen the film, such is the trauma of the memory of losing 6-2, 6-1 to Bobby Riggs – the same man famously vanquished by Billie Jean – in a 1973 exhibition known as the “Mother’s Day Massacre”. The experiment is due for a 21st-century upgrade next month, with Nick Kyrgios’ match in Dubai against Aryna Sabalenka.

“I got such a shock,” she says. “I wasn’t ready for it. It’s one of those things where I think: ‘What did I ever do that for?’ I knew, because of my insecurities, that I didn’t like the limelight too much. I didn’t like the cocktail parties, I just loved the game.”

She will be back at the Australian Open in the new year, where her timeless records will again flash up on the giant screens. A visit to her home tournament, the stage she dominated for more than a decade, has long been fraught. In 2012, she was warned to expect a salvo from gay rights activists, even if the most militant gesture was a 17-year-old Laura Robson wearing a rainbow ribbon in her hair. In 2020, she was deeply wounded by the spectacle of McEnroe and Navratilova’s appeal for her to be disavowed, saying she would never call for somebody’s name to be stripped from an arena because of a personal disagreement.

As 2026 approaches, the temperature appears finally to have cooled, now that Tennis Australia sees fit to welcome Court without public rebuke. Where society leads, perhaps, sport follows. “I sense that they think: ‘She has paid the price.’” Ultimately, she feels sufficiently buttressed by her faith that she claims no longer to care. “You and I will pass away,” she assures. “But His word won’t.” And as she takes her leave, in this church she has made her own, she writes a note to me to express this state of serenity. “The best,” it says simply, “is yet to come.”