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Björn Rune Borg ?(?) (born June 6, 1956, in Stockholm, Sweden)
is a former World No. 1 tennis player. During his relatively brief eight-year
career, he won 11 Grand Slam singles titles – five at Wimbledon and
a record six at the French Open – leading some to consider him the greatest
male tennis player of all time.
Career Overview
As a child growing up in Södertälje, a town near
Stockholm, Borg became fascinated by a tennis racket which his father had
won as a prize at a ping pong tournament. His father gave him the racket,
beginning one of the brightest careers in tennis history.
In 1972, at the age of 15, Borg became one of the youngest
players ever to represent his country in the Davis Cup, and won his debut
singles rubber in five sets over seasoned pro Onny Parun of New Zealand.
Later that year, he won the Wimbledon junior singles title.
In 1974, aged 17 years and 11 months, Borg won his first
top-level singles title at the Italian Open. Two weeks later, he won his
first Grand Slam title at the French Open. In the final, he came back from
two sets down to defeat Manuel Orantes in five sets 2–6, 6–7, 6–0,
6–1, 6–1. At the time, Borg was the youngest-ever male French Open
champion (though the record has since been lowered by Mats Wilander in 1982,
and Michael Chang in 1989).
Borg quickly gained a reputation for his strong base-line
game, with powerful ground-strokes and a punishing doubled-fisted backhand.
His great endurance and calm court demeanor earned him the nickname of the
"Ice Man". He hit the ball hard and high from the back of the court
and brought it down with excessive top-spin, making it very difficult for
opponents to attack him. In many ways, Borg developed the style of play which
has come to dominate the game in the decades that followed.
Borg retained his French Open crown in 1975, when he beat
Guillermo Vilas in straight sets in the final.
1975 also saw Borg help Sweden to win its first ever Davis
Cup title. He won two singles and one doubles rubber in the final as Sweden
beat Czechoslovakia 3–2. With his two singles wins in the final, Borg
had put together a run of 19 consecutive wins in Davis Cup singles rubbers
going back to 1973. That was already a record at the time. But Borg never
lost another Davis Cup singles rubber, and by the end of his career he had
stretched that winning streak to 33 - a Davis Cup record which still stands.
With two French Open wins and a Davis Cup under his belt,
Borg set his sights on winning Wimbledon. Borg did not make much of an impact
at Wimbledon prior to 1976, and many people doubted whether his strong base-line
game could be adapted to be successful on Wimbledon's fast-playing grass
courts. But after two weeks of solid practice in serve-and-volley tactics,
Borg swept through Wimbledon in 1976 without losing a set, defeating the
much-favored Ilie Nastase in straight sets in the final. Borg became the
youngest male Wimbledon champion of the modern era at 20 years and 1 month
(a record later broken by Boris Becker who won Wimbledon aged 17 in 1985).
Borg also reached the final of the 1976 US Open, where he lost to Jimmy Connors.
Some speculate that provided Borg's surviving the first week of Wimbledon,
when the courts were slick and fast, was key to his triumphing, for by the
second week of this tournament the grass courts are so stamped upon that
in some ways they approximate clay courts.
Borg repeated his Wimbledon triumph in 1977, although this
time he was pushed much harder. He won a thrilling five-set victory over
Vitas Gerulaitis in the semi-finals 6-4, 3-6, 6-3, 3-6, 8-6 [1]. And in the
final he was also pushed to five sets by Connors.
The end of the 1970s and the start of the 1980s saw Borg
at the height of his powers. He won both the French Open and Wimbledon for
three years running in 1978, 1979 and 1980. He also won the season-ending
Masters title in 1979 and 1980. And Borg was also runner-up at the US Open
in 1978 (lost to Connors) and 1980 (lost to McEnroe).
Borg's fifth consecutive Wimbledon title was won in an all-time
great final in 1980 against the new up-and-coming star of men's tennis John
McEnroe. In a 34-point fourth-set tie-breaker, Borg saved six sets-points
and McEnroe saved five match-points before McEnroe finally won the tie-break
18-16. In the end, Borg's renowned mental toughness prevailed in the decisive
fifth set, which he won 8-6.
Borg won what turned out to be his final Grand Slam title
at the French Open in 1981. In the final, he beat another of tennis' up-and-coming
stars, Ivan Lendl, in five sets. Borg's six French Open titles remains a
record for a male player.
In making the final at Wimbledon in 1981, Borg stretched
his winning streak at the All England Club to a record 41 matches. But it
finally came to an end in the 1981 final, where McEnroe beat him in four
sets.
Borg's last Grand Slam final was a four-set defeat to McEnroe
at the 1981 US Open. The US Open was undoubtedly Borg's "bogey tournament".
He reached the final four times but never won. (Borg chose to make the journey
to the Australian Open only once, in 1974, where he lost in the third round.)
The U.S. open final is always played at night, to catch the prime-time sports
viewing TV audience and Borg reputedly found himself hampered by playing
under electric lights. He tried unsuccessfully to lobby U.S. representatives
to shift the tournament to the afternoon.
The spark seemed to have burned out of Borg's game by the
end of 1981, and he was on the brink of burn-out. But Borg's announcement
in 1982 that he was retiring from the game at the age of just 26 was a shock
to the tennis world.
After retiring, Borg suffered a drug overdose, was rumored
to have attempted suicide and had a turbulent relationship with his then-wife,
the singer Loredana Bertè. He later bounced back as the owner of the
Björn Borg fashion label, whose most noted advertising campaigns asked
Swedes (from the pages of a leading national newspaper) to "Fuck for
the Future".
In the early-1990s (possibly pushed by financial difficulties
with his fashion label, which was not doing very well at the time), Borg
attempted a comeback on the men's professional tennis tour. However this
time around he was not at all successful. Playing with his old wooden rackets
in an attempt to regain his once-indomitable touch, he lost his first comeback
match in 1991 to Jordi Arrese at the Monte Carlo Open. A series of first-round
losses to lowly-ranked players followed over the next two years. The closest
he came to winning a match was in 1993 in Moscow, when he pushed Alexander
Volkov to three sets and lost a final-set tie-breaker 9–7. After that
match, he retired from the tour for good and confined himself to playing
on the senior tour, with modern rackets, where he has delighted crowds by
renewing his old rivalries with McEnroe and Connors.
Borg was ranked the World No. 1 in six different stretches
between 1977 and 1981, totaling 109 weeks. During his career, he won a total
of 57 top-level singles and 4 doubles titles. Borg was inducted into the
International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island in 1987.
Borg is one of only three individuals to have won the BBC
Sports Personality of the Year Overseas Personality Award twice. (He won
it in 1979 and 1984).
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