[In honor of Bjorn Borg's return to competition on Friday in the Alex Tennis Classics at Eindhoven (A Blackrock Tour of Champions event) - and a resumption of his rivalry with John McEnroe, TW spiritual adviser Miguel Seabra has filed a special, two-part report on the Swedish hero. Borg meets McEnroe in a round-robin match on Friday evening. Enjoy - Pete]
What is the most celebrated picture of a tennis player commemorating a tournament victory in the history of the sport?
It has to be one of Bjorn Borg kneeling in triumph - and disbelief - after he finally beat John McEnroe in that five-set 1980 Wimbledon epic that remains, in my opinion, the single most important tennis match ever played.
In an era when players were still unaccustomed to playing to the camera or rehearsing their victory celebrations, that spontaneous moment from a champion who had the reputation of having ice-water instead of blood in his veins set the standard. Never mind that moments later, Borg was a bit clumsy using his racket as a crutch to rise. That photograph remains frozen in our minds. How far we've come from the late 1970s, when players would awkwardly throw their racquet over their heads and leap (!) the net to congratulate beaten opponents.
By now, kneeling in the de facto Cathedral of Tennis has become a popular ritual even before the championship match. But has anyone else noticed that those who fall to their knees before a final, as Nadal, Gasquet, and Marion Bartoli did his year, rarely go on to win the title?
I saw that 1980 Wimbledon men's final at age 12, and it is partly responsible for why I became a tennis writer. I was rooting for McEnroe then, but that image of Borg proved unforgettable. But there was another incident that, to me, remains just as much part of the Borg folklore.
At the Monte-Carlo Open in 1992, one of the very first big international events I covered outside Portugal, Borg was attempting a come-back. After almost a ten year absence from the tour, and wielding an anachronistic wooden frame, Borg lost in his very first comeback match in 1991 on the same court to the Spanish journeyman, Jordi Arrese. He was giving it a final go, this time using a more contemporary racket. He was pitted against up-and-coming Wayne Ferreira, and ultimately had ample chances in the first set before he lost, 7-6, 6-2. At the end of the match, a fan jumped out of the crowd and, holding a crown of some sort, ran onto the court and tried to put it on Borg's head.
Stunned, The King without a throne ducked the freaky coronation. The symbolic - and tragicomic - episode also remains in my mind. I even recall a conversation I had with a French 10 year-old who had also watched the match.
“What do you think of Borg?” I asked.
“He is a great champion and it is very good that he is back. But he is very old, so maybe he shouldn’t play again,” he said.
I laughed at the contradiction: “So, should he play again or not?” And the kid, very seriously, replied: “Both."
That story was on my mind as I arrived recently to cover Borg again at the Vale do Lobo Grand Champions. I wondered, should Borg, at 51, be back playing the Tour of Champions against much younger, faster and powerful opponents?
Bjorn had played a four-man exhibition at Vale do Lobo in 2002, before the event became a part of the official senior circuit. It was almost painful to watch see Emilio Sanchez lose to Borg on purpose, and then to see Jeremy Bates trying to do the same in the final match. But despite his best efforts, Bates won. The only saving grace was that Borg had a serious foot injury that subsequently sidelined him for months.
Five years later, he was back – allegedly for a $200,000 (USD) fee. His first match was the last of the day, so I went back to my family's beach house (less than a mile away) for dinner and didn't get back to the site until after the start of Borg's match with Andres Gomez, the "Gentle Giant" from Guayaquil, Equador. I was immediately struck by how well Borg was moving – although anyone might look speedy paired with Gomez. That is a bit deceptive: Gomez is faster than he looks and the left-handed former French Open champion still hits a darned good ball. But the Swede’s footwork was on a different level.
The other thing that struck me was Bjorn’s look. He was wearing a black short/red shirt combo reminiscent of a vintage Manchester United soccer outfit, and the retro design of his polo shirt reminded me of the shirts Bjorn wore circa 1976. Of course, that blond aura was long gone; his grey hair now looks more like Richard Gere’s, and the famous, trademark Fila headband was nowhere to be seen. History buff that I am, I managed to find one of the originals at home and, in a sentimental moment, stuffed it in my pocket.
It was also strange to watch Borg play with the same Wilson frame used by Federer. I'm just not used to seeing that particular racket deployed to hit two-handed backhands. And that ‘W’ logo stenciled on the strings made me think less of Borg than of his old-school nemeses, McEnroe and Connors.
Looking sharp and playing against someone only four years his junior, Borg won that match with Gomez, 6-7, 6-3 and 10/8 in the match tiebreaker (which is played instead of a third-set). It was the match Borg was supposed to win in his group. I sat there, appreciating the glimpses of greatness. I especially enjoyed the way he drew elipses on the court as he danced to-and-fro, preparing for his next shot. He was aggressive in his footwork, much like Nikolay Davydenko is nowadays.
I thought Borg's movement was much more fluid than his groundstrokes, which seemed overly fabricated. But his service motion is still simple, efficient and rock solid. He was hitting flatter trajectories off both wings, and I noticed a difference in his trademark two-fisted backhand: Back in the day, he let his left hand fly off the handle on his follow-through, now he was prudently keeping both hands on the racquet until the finish.
We had a pleasant conversation afterwards in the press conference room. Bjorn was obviously happy having won, but mostly because of the way he was able to play. He confided he’s been practicing up to five hours a day with Swedish juniors and playing a bit of ice-hockey. . . "but no gym!" He talked a bit about the event, and about his Bjorn Borg clothing line. He seemed genuinely happy, and that was the impression he created all week.Here was an open-minded, almost talkative man at peace with himself and happy with his life and family - a far cry from the robotic, Ice-Borg image a lot of people still has of him.
Borg said: "I’m really pleased. I came back first of all because I wanted to play matches against those guys again, but when you walk on the court the thing you want to do the most, even now, is to win. It’s not the end of the world if you lose anymore, but I still don’t like to lose. To win my first match back is a big satisfaction… I was unsure how I would play because, even after all those years playing tennis, it’s a long time since I played with an umpire, ball kids and a crowd, and it takes a while to get used to it. Around the middle of the first set I started to feel more confident."
Borg confirmed that he was playing with Federer’s 90 sq. in Wilson frame (not the slightly more powerful 95, the commercial version), but gently declined offering more precise information about the stringing tension he is using nowadays. He would only say, “A lot fewer kilos than I used to play”.
As was about to leave the room, I took the old Fila headband out and showed it to him. He looked surprised and smiled – then I told him about the homage Svetlana Kuznetsova (who plays in Fila clothing) paid him at Wimbledon this year. She wore the old Fila/Borg headband for a match, but after losing the first set and falling behind in the second, she took it off - and ended up winning.
"Really?" He laughed.
In his second match, Borg played another former French Open champion, and one who grew up idolizing Borg, Thomas Muster. Those who used a wooden frame most of their careers, like Borg, play in an unmistakingly way, and seem to struggle to get the most out of today's frames.I always felt that was one reason why Andre Agassi, who began using the Prince Graphite Oversize (110 sq. in) early in his career, was able to play longer on the circuit than Pete Sampras and his smallish 1984 Wilson Pro Staff frame (85 sq. in). But against Muster (the Nadal of the 1990s), Borg (the Nadal of the 70s) had a struggle. He couldn't keep up with the Austrian’s aggressive topspin.
Muster still remembers hitting balls against a wall, fantasizing that he was locked in combat with Borg. He said after his win: “For me, to play Borg is how a young musician must have felt if he got the chance to play in a band alongside John Lennon. Bjorn is still a great player and I don’t think people expect him to still be so quick. He is also a nice and funny guy, not the ice-cold person that people think”.
That Borg-Muster match was played at night, under the lights, and Muster won 10-7 in the match tiebreaker. Knowing Borg's historic aversion to night play, I had to wonder if he considered the night conditions a factor. Borg said:
"It's different for sure when you play under the lights, and some players don’t like it. But here the lights are very good”.
I couldn't resist following up: "Better than those at Flushing Meadows, against big servers?"
Borg smiled. “Well, let’s say at the time the lights could have been a little bit better. . ."
Borg also said he would never trade any of his Wimbledon trophies for the US Open title that eluded him, and feels he should have won perhaps two titles in New York. "I was a little bit unlucky. If I could go back, that would be my the goal, to win one of those.”
I also asked Borg if he had any regrets not having played the Australian Open, in order to round out his oddly asymmetrical Grand Slam resume - and add the equivalent of a gimme to to his tally. He turned serious. “These days, people talk a lot about records, Grand Slam titles, clay court matches, winning streaks. . . But back then, no-one cared about records! Maybe if they had moved the tournament date, like they did afterwards, I would have played in Australia."
That’s right: we tend to forget that those were different times. In the 70's, players often didn't bother to sit on changeovers,and sometimes they ran out of strung racquets - even during Wimbledon finals (Ilie Nastase, vs Stan Smith). At the time, the Australian Open was a Slam in name only, much like the French Open had been before Phillipe Chartrier took control of the event and built it into the World Championships on Clay.
The easier, flatter way Borg is hitting the ball these days was even more evident in his last match, against Brasil’s Fernando Meligeni. Before the encounter, the gregarious Meligeni had said that he would get on on his knees on the court when he played Borg. This was, after all, the guy who played a Roland Garros match on the 25th anniversary of Borg's first title there in a rendition of the Fila kit that Borg made famous.
As it turned out, Meligeni did not genuflect, and he had to notch up his game before he got the best of Borg. He said of Borg afterwards, "He still plays incredible. The stronger I was hitting, the faster the ball came back – that’s the mark of the great players. When he played on clay, he used to position himself on court a bit more behind the baseline; here, on hardcourts, he changes pace a lot, is continuously moving forward and back. He anticipates very well and plays flatter and more aggressive when he has to. He’s still a great player”.
Actually, in that last match against the lefty Brasilian wild card, Borg’s used his backhand more agressively than in previous matches - and I swear Bjorn hit a lot of backhands a la Connors, striking the ball hard and flat, on the rise. He seemed more vulnerable when Meligeni was hitting behind him, but he still displayed a dynamic on-court presence and never hesitated to make transitions in order to try to finish the point at the net. His volleys, though, are still poorly executed – if there’s one shot I still remember from the famous 1980 Wimbledon final, it's that easy volley that Borg horribly shanked into the bottom of the net to give McEnroe The Tiebreaker, 18-16.
Meligeni qualifed for the championship match by virtue of his win over Borg, and he was crushed in the final by Sergi Bruguera. I qualified, too - for a one-on-one interview with the legendary Swede. I'll reprint that interview in Part 2.
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-- Miguel Seabra*