Word: racquets
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...adult?with two hands for both his forehand shot and his backhand, the same way he wielded a hockey stick. Since the only way he knew to swing a racquet was the wristy stroke of the table-tennis player, he flicked tennis balls the same way. The Borg topspin thus was born. By all that is classic in the sport, everything about Borg's strokes was wrong. But his mother remembers one thing that was right: "Even then he loved to play. Even then he hated to lose. Even in his pretend games, he always wanted...
...disputed a linesman's calls, unleashed grimaces, tossed racquets or bashed balls. "Iceborg" they called him. In an era when tennis was turning from a game of gentlefolk to a showcase for the antics of ill-mannered Nastases, petulant Connorses and adolescent McEnroes, Borg seemed right out of Boy's Life?Goody Twoshoes with a tennis racquet...
...Borg too good to be true? Maybe, but once he was too bad to believe. At eleven young Bjorn cursed like a navvy, hurled his racquet, hectored officials and bellyached over every close call. "I was crazy, a madman on the court. It was awful. Then the club I belonged to suspended me for five months, and my mother, she took my racquet and locked it in the closet. For five months, she locked up my racquet. After that I never opened my mouth again on the tennis court. Since the day I came back from that suspension, no matter...
What makes Borg so good? Top-spin is one element. He often starts his forehand swing with the strings virtually parallel to the ground, turns the face of the racquet until it is perpendicular at the instant of impact, then twists it to the horizontal again. Thus he is whipping his hand from palm up on the backswing to palm down on the follow-through...