presumed that he had a character, that he wasn’t simply a billboard, a blank page on which advertisers could scrawl their messages.
Borg seemed to me to have struck a Faustian bargain at some point in his young life and agreed to transform himself into an automaton in return for being made into the best tennis player in the world. Now a model of lobotomized decorum on court and off, he was praised as much for his tunnel vision and his remorseless one-dimensionality as for his metronomical ground strokes. With the tacit approval of the public and the cooperation of the press, he had suppressed every other aspect of his personality and ordered his existence to a single limited purpose. Each known fact about his life reinforced the notion that he was a sort of extraterrestrial being, alien yet friendly, and a fine example for kids.
He was said to have a pulse rate of thirty-five beats a minute, half that of the average human. He was said to sleep twelve hours a day. He was said to read Donald Duck comics and watch television during his spare time. A high-school dropout at the age of fourteen, he was said to be quite bright. A multimillionaire, he was said to have sound basic values. A tax exile in Monte Carlo, he was said to be a homebody.
Regardless of what he later became—in image, if not in reality—he didn’t start off as a poker-faced, exemplary little boy. According to Peter Bodo’s Inside Tennis, he “was an only child, and Saturday was designated as his day with his father, Rune. All Borg wanted to do was play competitive games… but when he lost, he would cry and carry on until he was sent up to bed. Many Saturdays ended in an early appointment with the sandman, until little Bjorn calmed down a bit and learned to suppress his frustration. Inside, he remained furious.”
As an adolescent he was still volatile, a screamer of obscenities, an enraged racket-thrower. When the Swedish tennis federation suspended him for six months, his conduct improved, but even after he set out on the international tour, he could be foul-tempered, headstrong, and obstreperous. During a practice session he and his coach, Lennart Bergelin, once got into a shouting match and nearly came to blows. When Bergelin smacked him on the head with a box of balls, Borg called his parents and threatened to quit tennis.
Although he never gave up the game altogether, he got a reputation for giving up in important matches. When the calls or the crowd were against him, he sometimes stalked off the court and refused to return. Other times, when an opponent got the best of him, he stayed on court, but acted as if he didn’t care whether he won or lost, and whenever questioned about his moody, unprofessional behavior, he refused to speak to reporters.
During this early period there was another spicy component to his image. With his long blond locks and lean Nordic face, he was portrayed as a heartbreaker pursued everywhere by groupies. One British newspaper went so far as to print a photograph—a palpable fake—of Borg unbuckling his belt for a tryst in Hyde Park.
Then, miraculously, within the space of a year or two, all this was forgotten and Borg underwent a sea change so dramatic that nobody dared remind people of his previous incarnation. By the time he won his first Wimbledon title at the age of twenty, he had shucked his reputation as a quitter and a playboy and acquired the image that has stayed with him—unflappable, indefatigable, impervious to pressure, impassive in victory or defeat, the Ice Man, the perfect machine.
Not until the emergence of John McEnroe did Borg begin to reveal his first serious cracks and fissures. To be beaten by a player whose moods were so transparent, whose emotions spilled forth like a spendthrift’s money, and whose demeanor was so offensive must have been truly shattering to the Swede. How else explain his behavior during his last full year competition?
In a match against McEnroe at the 1981 Volvo Masters, he objected to a call and refused to play on. Confronting the umpire, Mike Lugg, he kept mumbling, “Ask the linesman, ask the linesman.” He spoke as if in a trance and never once during the incident blinked his eyes, not even when he was given a warning, then a point penalty. Desperate not to default him, Mike Lugg had to summon the Supervisor to convince Borg to continue the match.
Then at the 1981 U.S. Open, having already lost his Wimbledon crown and having just been crushed by McEnroe, he regressed to childhood. Live, on international television, he walked off before the prize-giving ceremony. Newsmen and TV commentators, anxious to preserve the image they had helped create, claimed Borg wasn’t a poor sport. Due to a death threat, they said, Borg had been placed under police protection and whisked away from Louis Armstrong Stadium.
In fact, there had been a death threat. But Borg knew nothing about it when he left McEnroe, the tournament promoters, and television announcers stranded at the net. “I was just very, very disappointed,” he later admitted. “I couldn’t face the idea of making a nice speech in front of all those people. I suppose I was a bad boy.”
It struck me as the first entirely spontaneous thing Borg had done in years. Trapped for so long like a carcass in ice, he had warmed to his own emotions and awakened.
As the train rocked along the tracks to Monte Carlo, it intrigued me to consider the possibility that the robot had rebelled, the computer had willfully shut down, the automaton had determined to reclaim its humanity. Was there in Borg’s long layoff and in his reluctance to commit himself again full-time to the tour a parable of redemption?
***
The Monte Carlo Country Club, site of the tournament, isn’t in Monte Carlo. It clings to a craggy cliff just over the border in France. When I asked whether the tax-free privilege extended to the club, I was answered with the same stares of mute disbelief which met any question about homosexuality on the men’s tour. In Monaco, money may be an all-pervasive obsession, but it is a passion that dares not speak its name—at least not to the press.
A series of terraces, like steps designed for a giant, descend from the Moyenne Corniche to the sea, with practice courts on top, then the sprawling clubhouse, then a patio with chairs and tables, then the show court, then a parking lot. The clay courts, the tablecloths, and the clubhouse are all much the same salmon-pink color. Beyond a stand of cypresses that serve as a windscreen at the far end of the show court, the blue of the Mediterranean meets the paler blue of the sky.
The press box, situated just below the lunch tables on the patio, offers an excellent view of everything except tennis. Gazing down at the court through a grillwork of green railings, I could, if I sat up straight, see both players, but not the near baseline.
Set off at a discreet distance from the court, photographers knelt on a carpet, keeping a vigil for Borg. They hadn’t been there for the previous match and they wouldn’t wait around for the next. Similarly, most spectators—and there were more than a thousand, a decent crowd at any tournament—wouldn’t stay to watch the other qualifiers.
The ball boys and linesmen marched to their posts wearing beautiful powder-blue outfits provided by Ellesse. The promotional strips around the court showed a bias toward high fashion—Céline, Piaget, Jacomo, and Benetton. Yet Borg came on looking like the kind of character Monte Carlo’s omnipresent police would regard with rabid suspicion. Unshaven, his long hair lank and dirty, he wore a rumpled gray velour Fila warm-up.
Generally, the principality has no patience with the young, the long-haired, and the unwashed. The New York Times once call the place a “capitalist pustule” and said it had “a Mississippi-in-the-mid-fifties mentality.” But under the correct circumstances it can be as up-to-date as a newly minted dollar. It welcomed Borg, as well as Vilas, Clerc, and several lower-ranked players, just as it had welcomed a host of Grand Prix race-car drivers. It didn’t much care whether these men actually lived here. Whey shouldn’t Borg, a tax exile from Sweden, become a residential exile from Monte Carlo and buy a villa on Cap Ferrat in France? Prince Rainier remained more than willing to provide a refuge from various revenue agents so long as the tennis players participated in the annual tournament
