Word: borge
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That is what it is like to be Bjorn Borg. To have taught himself to play a game, then to grow within that game, to change it, to refine it. On rare occasions, the game within takes on a life of its own, so that fleetingly, the control of its possibilities is absolute...
...irony is that Borg's unusual playing style was once a coach's nightmare, a self-taught batch of skills rarely seen singly, much less in combination. The two-handed backhand seems part of the tennis landscape now that Jimmy Connors, Chris Evert and Tracy Austin have made it respectable. But when Borg first came to public notice, no one had used the shot since Australian Vivian McGrath in the 1930s. Needless to say, Borg's method was considered idiosyncratic, a stylistic dead end. For that matter, topspin was viewed as the last refuge of Bobby Riggs trying...
...Rune Borg, a salesman at a men's clothing store in Sodertalje, a suburb of Stockholm, was an accomplished amateur table-tennis player in the 1960s. He cannot remember the name of his opponent in the finals of a tournament the summer his son was nine, but that victory introduced Bjorn Borg to tennis. An only child...
Bjorn had played games with his parents since he was a toddler, catching and throwing balls, taking up soccer and hockey, and, by the age of seven, trying table tennis. "I thought I would like to be like my father," Borg recalls. "But when I was nine my father took me to a tournament to watch him play. They had a big table with all the prizes spread out on it, and right there, in the middle of the table, was this beautiful tennis racquet. When I saw it, I wanted him to win so bad, because if he could...
...Rune Borg won the tournament. His son rushed up to congratulate him?and asked him to claim the racquet. "There were other prizes on the table," the elder Borg remembers, "and I wanted to have a joke on Bjorn. So I picked up another prize, a fishing rod. His face fell so, he looked like he would cry. I put down the rod real quick and picked up the tennis racquet and said, This will be my prize...