Lookout

Ed Sadlowski is the hottest thing to hit the steel industry since the Bessemer converter. Running against a handpicked protégé of United Steel-workers chieftain I.W. Abel, Sadlowski recently swept to the $35,000 directorship of the largest USW district in the country (Chicago and Gary are within its province) by a two-to-one margin. He seems a likely candidate to succeed Abel himself when the aging laborite retires in 1977. The 36-year-old Sadlowski puts down Abel as representative of what he calls “tuxedo leadership.”

Born in the gritty shadow of Gary’s steel mills, Sadlowski worked his way through the rank and file after starting as a machine oiler with U.S. Steel 18 years ago. “Steelworkers make only $4.70 an hour,” he growls. “There’s no way I’m worth $35,000 a year or Abel $75,000.” The father of four, Sadlowski has an interim therapy to see him through the remainder of Abel’s presidency. “I like to cook. That’s where I work out all my frustrations.”

Martina Navratilova, only 18 and Czechoslovakia’s national women’s tennis champion for the last three years, is now burning up U.S. courts. Martina, who started playing back home in Revnice under the watchful eye of her father when she was 5, is devoted to tennis. “I would never want to have any other business but tennis,” says Martina, though she dislikes the traveling. She won her first tournament at 8 and became the national champion at 15. Last year, her first on the international circuit, she made the finals at the Italian Open (to be beaten by Chris Evert), won the Virginia Slims Orlando Tournament and ranked ninth in earnings on the U.S. women’s tour. A powerful left-hander (the overhead smash is her best stroke), Martina plays the kind of fast, aggressive game that made Billie Jean King a crowd pleaser. “Martina is the rising young superstar,” says Chris Evert, 20. “She is where I was two years ago.”