Björn Borg

Swedish tennis player

• Born: June 6, 1956
• Place of Birth: Södertälje, Sweden

Borg became the first male tennis player to win five consecutive Wimbledon championships. He also captured a host of other honors, including six French Open championships.

Early Life

Björn Borg was born in Stockholm, Sweden, on June 6, 1956, as the only child of Rune and Margaretha Borg. He spent his childhood in a Stockholm suburb (Södertälje) noted for producing automobile parts and hockey stars. In fact, Borg’s first love was ice hockey. At the age of nine, he was the starting center for Södertälje’s junior team, with visions of one day playing for the Swedish national team. Borg’s father, however, was one of the country’s leading table-tennis players. In 1966, after winning the city championship, the elder Borg selected a tennis racket as his prize and gave it to his son.

Björn was elated at his father’s choice. Even though he continued to play hockey, it was immediately obvious that tennis would become his sport. Unable to be enrolled in the beginners’ program at the Södertälje Tennis Club because it was overcrowded, Borg spent the next six weeks batting tennis balls against the family garage door. Finally, a vacancy opened in the junior program, and Borg was able to practice in more formal surroundings.

In 1967, the nationally known tennis coach Percy Rosburg came to Södertälje to scout another player for Sweden’s Davis Cup team. Rosburg was amazed by the ability of the young Borg, especially by his uncanny facility to return almost any ball hit to him. Borg was, therefore, asked to train with Rosburg at the Salk Tennis Club in Stockholm. The invitation meant a ninety-minute train ride each way, but Borg seized the opportunity.

From the beginning, Borg was an unorthodox player in that he used a two-handed grip. This resulted from the fact that his first racket was simply too heavy. As his strength developed, he began to hit his forehand shots with one hand, but he retained, despite substantial criticism, a two-handed backhand. The consensus in the tennis world was that no male tournament player could succeed with a two-handed backhand. Borg was convinced he knew better. Indeed, despite his apparent handicap, he won his first tournament at the age of eleven and followed that the next year with a victory in his age division in the Swedish National School matches. At the age of thirteen, he was triumphant in both the thirteen-year-old and fourteen-year-old age divisions in the Swedish National Junior Championships.

While it was obvious the young Borg was a tournament contender, a substantial obstacle loomed in his path: school. It was not that Borg was a bad student, but the time required for effective tournament play had a deleterious effect on his academic standing. In fact, several of his teachers suggested that he should complete his education before undertaking a career in tennis. Borg’s reaction was to suggest to his parents that the most sensible course was to leave school instead. Borg’s decision was heartily supported by the Swedish Tennis Association. Faced with such pressure, the school system capitulated.

Borg promptly competed in the Madrid Grand Prix (March 1972), where his victory over Jan Erik Lundquist allowed him, at the age of fifteen, to qualify for the Swedish Davis Cup team. In addition, Borg captured the junior crowns at Berlin, Barcelona, Milan, Wimbledon, and Miami. He was, as a consequence, considered the junior world’s champion.

Borg’s debut in the Davis Cup competition was quite spectacular. He won both his singles matches and became a national hero. Borg’s participation in Davis Cup competition brought him into contact with Lennart Bergelin, the leader of the Swedish Davis Cup team. It was Bergelin, after Rosburg, who was most responsible for Borg’s development as a tournament player. Bergelin insisted not only that his players should develop a considerable degree of mental toughness but also that intensive daily practice was essential. In Borg, he found an individual who was more than willing to subordinate everything to the game of tennis. In 1972, Borg turned professional.

Life’s Work

Turning professional involves more than a simple act of will and a public announcement. Most important, the individual competitor must secure financial resources sufficient to meet considerable expenses. Fortunately for Borg, the Swedish Tennis Association was so desirous of keeping him available for Davis Cup competition that the association arranged for him to be employed by Scandinavian Airlines as a public relations officer. Borg was thereupon obligated to play in all major Swedish tournaments and the Davis Cup for a salary of $400,000 a year, plus free air travel anywhere. With his immediate financial needs satisfied, Borg could concentrate on becoming the best tennis player in the world.

Borg’s performance on the tennis circuit in his first years was somewhat erratic. Nevertheless, he acquired an increasing confidence in his game and refined his already impassive on-court demeanor. Indeed, reporters and fans alike were astonished at his ability to ignore distractions that elicited vitriolic displays from other players. He was often called “Ice Borg.”

Borg was particularly fortunate in that his appearance at the 1973 Wimbledon tournament coincided with a boycott of the competition by the Association of Tennis Professionals. In consequence, the appearance of the young, blond, teenage Borg provided the tennis media, in the absence of other possible stories, with an opportunity to create an overnight sensation.

Although Borg had yet to win a major tournament, he was successful in defeating several of the reigning luminaries of the game, such as Roscoe Tanner and Arthur Ashe. On June 3, 1974, Borg disposed of Ilie Nastase in the Italian Open, becoming the youngest player to win a major international tournament. Borg followed that impressive performance within two weeks in Paris, becoming the youngest player ever to win the French Open. Unfortunately for Borg, his efforts in the French and Italian tournaments exhausted his physical and mental resources, so much so that he was destroyed in the third round of the 1974 Wimbledon competition.

Borg quickly rallied, however, to win a tournament in Sweden as well as the US Professional Tennis Championship. As a result, his commercial endorsements became so numerous that Borg found it necessary to employ an agent to supervise his burgeoning financial empire. Borg undertook so many endorsements, in fact, that he became the object of numerous humorous asides. Borg went his own way even to the extent of moving his mother and father to Monaco when he determined it was necessary to avoid steep Swedish taxes.

Borg continued to play on the international circuit, winning the French Open again as well as the US Professional Tennis Championship in 1975. He helped Sweden beat Czechoslovakia for its first Davis Cup the same year. (By the end of his career Borg had won thirty-three consecutive Davis Cup matches, a record.) In addition to his tournament play, Borg undertook a series of exhibitions that afforded him publicity and substantial revenues. Nevertheless, despite considerable improvement in his game, he failed to advance to the Wimbledon final round.

The year 1976 opened auspiciously for Borg with a victory over Guillermo Villas in the World Championship of Tennis. Unfortunately, this triumph was followed by a devastating loss during the opening rounds of the French Open. This defeat proved a blessing in disguise, however, as Borg gained an unexpected respite before Wimbledon. He used the occasion to develop a powerful, accurate first serve, a deficiency that had proved his undoing in the past. Borg then proceeded to astonish the tennis world by defeating the heavily favored Ilie Nastase for the Wimbledon championship. Borg, at twenty, was the youngest Wimbledon champion in forty-five years and the first in twenty-three years to survive the tournament without the loss of a single set. Still, Borg followed his victory at Wimbledon with yet another loss in the US Open. Despite Borg’s truly impressive effort, including one of the most spectacular tiebreakers in history, Jimmy Connors frustrated Borg’s attempt to win the only major tournament to escape his grasp.

Indeed, such was to be the pattern for the remainder of Borg’s career. He won the Wimbledon championship on an unprecedented five occasions in a row, a feat not equaled until 2007 (by Roger Federer). Because of his victory over Connors in 1977, the Association of Tennis Professionals ranked him first in the world in August. However, the most celebrated of his victories came at Wimbledon in 1980, when he defeated John McEnroe. The five-set duel, pitting the stolid Borg against the mercurial McEnroe, is considered among the best singles matches of tennis ever played. After a grueling fourth set, during which they exchanged leads in a thirty-four-point tiebreaker, McEnroe won. Borg responded by taking the next nineteen points, winning the nearly four-hour match. The next year, after a come-from-behind victory over Connors, Borg was defeated by McEnroe in four sets.

Borg won the French Open a record six times (four in succession); in fact, the 1981 victory brought him his last major title and a host of exhibition matches and invitational tournaments. Yet he never captured the US Open, a prerequisite for the coveted Grand Slam of tennis. His last entry into a Grand Slam final, in fact, was in the US Open in 1981, when McEnroe again prevailed in four sets. By then, however, he had won enough Grand Slam victories (eleven) to make him third on the list of all-time champions, and he had defeated more players in singles finals (nine) than any other player.

Borg’s approach to tennis required not only an awesome mental commitment but also rigorous and lengthy daily practice to keep his mind and body in near-perfect union. As the 1981 season ended, he was physically exhausted and mentally drained. He entered only one tournament in 1982, losing in the quarterfinals. Not surprisingly, therefore, in 1983, after fifteen years of competition, Borg announced his retirement at the age of twenty-seven. The all-consuming demands of the game had taken their toll. His career finished with 576 match victories and 124 losses, an 82 percent game win rate, and a total of 62 singles titles. These successes had earned him more than $3.6 million in prize money.

In the early 1990s Borg, playing with an old-style wooden racket, attempted a comeback. He retired two years later after losing all his matches. Borg did, however, join the over-thirty-five Nuveen Tour along with Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, and others later in the 1990s.

In 1979 Borg won the Sports Personality of the Year Overseas Personality Award from the British Broadcasting Association, and in 2006 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award. He was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1987. In 1999 a Swedish jury voted him the best Swedish sportsman of all time. Various sports publications have named him among the greatest tennis players of the twentieth century.

Long taking part in coaching Sweden’s top junior tennis players, by 2017 Borg had entered into a new competitive tennis coaching venture at the adult level. Opposite his former rival McEnroe, who captained Team World, he served as the captain of Team Europe in the newly established Laver Cup team tournament. Involved in everything from recruiting top-ranked players for his team to leading practices and offering encouragement on the sidelines, Borg helmed Team Europe to victory in the first four installments of the annual tournament. In 2024 it was announced that Borg would end his tenure as captain after that year's event.

Borg’s personal life after professional tennis was sometimes troubled with controversy. In 1989 an accidental excessive dose of sleeping pills taken after he was left weak from food poisoning was announced in the media as an intentional drug overdose. His clothing line ran into financial difficulties in 1990 and had to be liquidated; it was revived a year later. When in 2006 he announced that he was going to auction away his Wimbledon trophies and two of his rackets, he caused an uproar among fans and fellow professionals. Only an outraged call from McEnroe prompted him to change his mind.

Borg married his third wife in 2002. He had two children.

Significance

Borg was not, by conventional standards, a great tennis player. He was not tall enough, at five feet, eleven inches, to give himself a natural advantage while serving or executing overhead smashes. His famous two-handed backhand and his consummate mastery of the topspin forehand never found favor with other professionals. Still, he was a superb athlete whose absolute concentration, agility, and swiftness allowed him to exhaust and defeat his opponents. His most impressive victories were the result of exhaustive campaigns of attrition, in which Borg systematically blunted his opponent’s offense with a consistent counterattack.

Aside from his many accomplishments, Borg’s impact on the game of tennis was quite profound. He dramatically affected recreational tennis in that his use of heavy topspin on ground strokes spawned millions of amateur imitators. Moreover, he was the first legitimate international tennis superstar. The attention lavished on the young phenomenon by fans and the sports media was largely responsible for catapulting the game into the big business it became. Equally important, Borg’s performance on the international circuit galvanized the Swedish Tennis Association’s program of junior education, so much so that in 1985, Sweden had as many players among the top sixteen seeds at the US Open as did the United States, despite the enormous disparity between the two countries in terms of population.

Bibliography

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