Richard Jago tennis
For a third and final time Bjorn Borg feels ready to risk the abyss of Life After Tennis. When the born-again Borg began his last tournament in Britain this week, the over-35s Honda Challenge at the Albert Hall, many felt nostalgia while the Swede was eager to demonstrate that he is no longer haunted by the past.
The dramatic fall of the first tennis pop star after his first retirement in the Eighties destroyed almost everything he had: his flowing locks and the ground-breaking image, his business and a fortune, two marriages and his happiness, and very nearly his life too. A comeback to the main tour in 1991 ended in tears embarrassingly, he used a wooden racket but a return on the seniors tour in 1993 allowed scope for the emergence of a mature talent.
So nostalgia will at best be ambivalent for the media megastar who was broken and the tennis legend who endures. The only man of the Open era to win Wimbledon five times in a row, the only player to win the French Open and Wimbledon back to back three times, Borg is slipping into his last retirement.
The inevitable question is, will he be sliding to disaster again?
Borg can claim he has changed. He has cropped hair and more limited goals, a stable relationship (with an American restaurateur, Keri Bernhardt) and a profitable brand of underwear to which he lends his name. Borg will not make the mistake of severing his involvement with the tour this time and at the age of 44 he reckons he has a better sense of what he can and cannot do.
A matter-of-fact air of tennis elder-statesmanship has replaced the aura of distant mystery which once sent teenaged girls hormonal at Wimbledon. In fact Mr Cool was never so cool as he looked. Borg does lose his temper and, as he acknowledged last week, he always did.
“When I got back to the hotel after matches I had to react with my feelings and emotions. My coach Lennart Bergelin had to take a lot of bad things from me,” Borg said. “Sometimes I needed to let my feelings loose. He got the whole thing but he understood.”
Borg has said similar things about his first wife, Mariana Simionescu. “She got most of my anger. It was shouting and bad moods. She put up with all the crap. I had to let it all out,” he once admitted.
Therein lies the source of some of his problems. This was also a hidden element in Borg’s bond with McEnroe, which began with the famous 18-16 tie-break in the 1980 Wimbledon final and became underpinned, it always seemed, by the concept of McEnroe as Borg’s counter-personality. In fact Borg had empathy with the American’s notorious temperament: anger was powerful within the Swede too.
As a junior Borg was banned by his local club for six months for tantrums and racket-throwing. The intensity of his reaction to this disgrace may have left him unable to release any sort of passion when on court, when interviewed or when-ever the public was around.
He became the Ice Borg and, once he had quit the courts and tried to become a businessman, the persona sank him. A capacity for holing himself below the emotional water-line probably remains.
Not that it was entirely his fault. National champion at 15 and French Open champion at 18, Borg in some ways was the male equivalent of Tracy Austin, Andrea Jaeger and Jennifer Capriati, whose teenaged disasters brought strict new rules about young players and the tour. With insufficient education beyond the age of 11 and a lack of understanding of the path he was treading, Borg kept astrological charts to help plan his future.
Instead he found misfortune, partly of his own making but not of his comprehension. Already at odds with his national association and the domestic press, Borg made his fateful premature decision to prove his worth at something other than tennis partly from a sense of rejection.
The damage cannot be repaired but, if it can be accepted, then the modest route planned for Borg’s new retirement coaching youngsters and occasional seniors tournaments offers hope of reconstruction.
The first exponent of the modern game, Borg had a style which was not only ahead of its time but has stood the test of time. The creator of the whippy table-tennis forehand, one of the pioneers of the double-handed backhand, he showed it was possible to win Wimbledon mainly from the back and he did it with small wooden rackets which today look like toothpicks.