Word: borge
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What is it like to be the greatest tennis player of our time, perhaps of all time? Sport Writer B. J. Phillips, who did this week's cover story on Bjorn Borg, gained some surprising insights into the life of the Swedish superstar. Phillips spent two weeks with Borg at the French Open in Paris, watching him in action (he won the tournament handily), at practice and at rest. She talked with his fiancée, Mariana Simionescu, a tennis star in her own right, his parents and his coach. She had lengthy sessions with Borg himself, including...
Reporter-Researcher Peter Ainslie, who wrote the accompanying story on Borg's financial empire, has watched Borg play many times and is impressed above all with his good manners. "I've seen him angry only once," he said. "He turned and asked the umpire, 'Are you sure about that call?' For Borg, that is a tantrum." Ainslie interviewed many of Borg's tennis colleagues, including players, officials and promoters. "Fellow pros like John McEnroe, Stan Smith and Harold Solomon see one facet of Borg, but I got some surprising insights from talking to tennis umpires...
Phillips came away from the assignment with a very personal souvenir: Borg's coach, Lennart Bergelin, undertook to massage away her chronic case of tennis elbow. "Borg calls him Dr. Black-and-Blue, and now I know why," says Phillips. "After the massage, my arm swelled up and turned a rainbow of colors. But three days later I was able to lift my arm over my head without pain for the first time in a year." And her hands to the typewriter, for a pleasing and unique look at the incredible tennis machine...
...hunch is that Borg will fall this time around, probably to former-wunderkind now-daddy Jimmy Connors. In defeat, we might catch a welcome glimpse of emotion from Borg, who has too quickly surrendered his youth to a middle-aged staidness...
Where is the humanity behind Borg's implacable visage? At Wimbledon, it peaks through, but only fleetingly. Machine-like personality need not accompany machine-like precision. And while these observations in no way condone the brattishness that pervades tennis's upper echelons, it is possible to be both mannerly and flamboyant--witness the generation of great Aussies which, regrettably, has slipped from tourneys to tennis ranches...