Kralík and the 12-time Grand Slam tournament champion invited a phalanx of Prague's media to their exhibition's unveiling at the adjacent Congress Center. Crammed into the hotel's glass-enclosed solarium among a veritable who's who of Golden City journalism, I jostled between the TV cameras and craned my neck for an unobstructed view of the Sarasota, Florida, resident.

Navrátilová didn't disappoint, responding to questions with aplomb. She called her 50s "the busiest time of my entire life," and insisted that "despite reports in the media, I'm not a painter." She was also quick to point out that the exhibit is a joint effort, and blanched when one of the local press hounds kept phrasing his remarks as "your exhibit, Miss Navrátilová." She cut the guy short and corrected him that the exhibit was Kralík's bold idea, not hers.

The exhibit consists of a series of wall-mounted canvases, some up to 10 meters (33 feet) high, featuring, among other things, impressions of colored balls. Over the course of six years, Kralík worked together with the Řevnice native to find brief gaps in her busy playing schedule to "paint" a variety of innovative artworks. Whenever Navrátilová was free, Kralík would quickly convene his crew and hustle to lay down a series of canvas sheets atop the vacant courts of the French Open, Wimbledon, and the U.S. and Australian Opens. Then Navrátilová would forehand and backhand a series of painted tennis balls onto the blank canvases at high speed, producing some very rare designs.

A 50 Kč ($2.25) admission fee gets you a chance to see it until Nov. 22, after which the exhibit moves on to Paris.

Did Kralík have any inhibitions in approaching Navrátilová?

"No, but I was actually pleasantly surprised when she got back to me so soon — a total of two weeks between the time I presented the idea in New York and [when] she e-mailed me back," he said in an interview after the press conference. "That's how much she wanted to do this."

Kralík's interest in Navrátilová stems from a trip his father made to the States in the '70s, when he returned with some Pink Floyd albums and a U.S. newspaper telling about a then-obscure 18-year-old Czechoslovak female tennis player. On display at the exhibit is an eerie communist-era write-up from that time in English, Czech and German that rails against "a young tennis player who is more interested in playing tennis and competing in tournaments than in learning a real profession for the benefit of our socialist Czechoslovak motherland."

Kralík said Navrátilová told him that she would only be a part of an artistic endeavor if it "had never been done before." That immediately ruled out sculpture or the nifty series of hand and body molds that Kralík had conceived for her, which she said had "been done millions of times already."

Navrátilová said that she hopes "to sell every single canvas," because she's promised "100 percent of the proceeds to charity."

One reporter asked Navrátilová whether she'd ever consider becoming a full-time painter. Her response was quick: "I don't know any other life than this one. But I just hope I'm going to live long enough to do good things and leave this world in better shape than I found it in."