Eleven times Grand Slam winner, over 100 weeks at the top of the world rankings, five times champion in Wimbledon, style icon of the 70s: Björn Borg could hardly complain about too little admiration and honor in his active professional career.
In his opinion, the best is someone else, the Swede once said a few years ago. “Up to this point he’s the greatest player who has ever played the game,” he told CNN in 2016 in one of his rare interviews with Pat Cash about a Swiss named Roger Federer. Nevertheless – the experts agree – Borg remains one of the greats in the tennis world. Now he will be 65 years old this Sunday.
Beginnings at the garage door
With his successes, Borg laid the foundation for Sweden to become a great power in tennis over the years. It triggered a tennis boom in his home country, like the one that Germany experienced about a decade later through Boris Becker and Steffi Graf. This boom produced quite a few Swedish top ten players, including Mats Wilander, Stefan Edberg, Thomas Enqvist and many more.
It all supposedly started with a garage door that young Björn worked with fore and aft after his father gave him a tennis racket at the age of nine. Borg made his Davis Cup debut at the age of 16 in 1972 – and won in five sets. Since then, the talent, who grew up in Södertälje near Stockholm, has seen a steep upward trend, which in the mid-1970s resulted in Sweden winning the Davis Cup for the first time with Borg.
Wimbledon legend
Borg celebrated his greatest successes at Wimbledon, although he was actually considered a clay court specialist: From 1976 to 1980 he won the world’s largest lawn tournament five times in a row, this feat was only achieved after him by the American Martina Navratilova and said Federer. The Swede collected his six other Grand Slam victories on the red ashes of Paris, where he won the French Open in 1974, 1975 and from 1978 to 1981. The four titles in a row in Roland Garros were also a record in the Open Era, which only Rafael Nadal cracked.
With his variable grip position – forehand in Western grip, backhand in Eastern grip – and the strong topspin, Borg dominated and revolutionized the sport, and his two-handed backhand still brings tears of happiness to the eyes of many tennis fans. He stopped at the age of 26 and later attempts to make a comeback failed. “No men’s career in the modern era has been so short and bright,” writes the ATP about him.
Arch-rival and antagonist John McEnroe
But nothing remains as connected to Borg as the great rivalry with John McEnroe. The tie-break of the fourth set in the 1980 Wimbledon final is one of the great moments in tennis history. A film about them was even released in 2017, “Borg / McEnroe” with Sverrir Gudnason and Shia LaBeouf in the leading roles. Today, it is often forgotten that two more, Jimmy Connors and later Ivan Lendl, shaped this tennis era.
Borg and McEnroe were stylized as perfect opposites: McEnroe was always seen as an aggressive hothead, Borg as his stoic, always cool nemesis. This earned him the nickname “Ice Borg” in the media. “The calmest man on the pitch,” said the commentator in the said tie-break against McEnroe about Borg when it was just 16:16 and the Swede had already given away several match points. Others would have long since got an iron arm in this situation – Borg stayed calm and won 8: 6 in the fifth.
Every tennis player knows: the serenity shown on the outside is often just a facade. And that was even the case with the ice-cold Scandinavian, as he revealed in a talk with Federer and Tim Henman at the ATP Finals 2020. “Of course you get so frustrated as a player at times. You want to scream, but you still have to keep it in,” said Borg. He said he helped himself get a three-month ban after being angry about bad behavior at the age of 13. “When I came back from it, I kept my mouth shut because I didn’t want to be suspended again. Because I love tennis and wanted to play tennis.”
Family man Borg
And McEnroe? Eventually became a good friend. On the Scandinavian TV show “Skavlan”, the American described him as “my best rival, my great friend Björn Borg”, before telling a little anecdote about the underwear and fashion brand named after Borg. “He’s pretty nice,” said McEnroe. “He always gives me free underwear when I come to Stockholm.”
Today Björn Borg apparently enjoys life as a tennis retiree at the side of his third wife Patricia. The two are busy posting holiday pictures on the family’s Instagram channel, and there is also a photo taken with Boris Becker in Ibiza. And the next generation of tennis is already in the starting blocks: Leo Borg, Björn and Patricia’s son, has just turned 18 – and a few weeks ago he won his very first world ranking point in Turkey.
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