Sport: The Tennis Machine

Meet faultless Bjorn Borg. Is he, at 24, the best player ever to lift a racquet?

“Oh, I do look forward to coming back to Wimbledon. I can see myself an old man there.

I will sit and have tea, and I will talk about how things were better in the good old days, the time when I was young and a champion.”

This Monday afternoon an umpire at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club will peer down from his chair in Centre Court and in clipped tones inquire, “Gentlemen, are you ready?” A pause, and then: “Play!” Thus the 94th Wimbledon Tennis Championships are scheduled to begin. At one end of that storied court will stand Bjorn Borg, defending champion, the only modern player to win four straight Wimbledon titles — and, if the oddsmakers are correct, the first man to win five. Not quite ready yet for tea and reverie, he returns to Wimbledon seeking to etch even more deeply his record as the greatest champion in the history of the game’s most fabled tournament, and one of the most successful athletes of any sport, any time, anywhere.

Generation after generation of tennis champions have measured their worth against the memories of Wimbledon. But in all those years Centre Court, with its pampered lawn, its banked grandstand packed with royal patrons and regally sportsmanlike fans, has belonged to Borg as it has to no one else. The sight of him, Wimbledon Cup held aloft in vic tory, has become as much a part of the Fortnight, as the British call the pre mier tournament of tennis, as members taking tea in their rose-covered enclosure, or the hundreds of fans patiently queuing for strawberries and cream beneath green-roofed marquees.

Borg’s niche in Wimbledon history is already spaciously secure. In the modern tennis era, only one man, Australia’s Rod Laver, has won four Wimbledon crowns.

Just one, Fred Perry, won three in a row.

Borg’s four straight titles firmly establish his dominating presence in tennis. Should he win his fifth title in a row, he will set a record likely to stand for generations.

Borg need only win four early-round matches to eclipse Laver’s mark of 31 consecutive match victories in Wimbledon play.

So lustrous is Borg’s Wimbledon record that it somewhat obscures the other achievements of a remarkable champion:

>At 15 he helped Sweden’s Davis Cup team to a first-round victory in the European Zone competitions. Borg was then the youngest player ever to take part in Davis Cup competition. > At 17 he won the French Open Tennis Championship, a title he has now captured a record five times. He thus became the youngest man ever to win one of tennis’ grand-slam events.-Last month Borg won the French Open with such consummate, straight-set ease that he lost a mere 38 games while winning 126. > At 20 he won his first Wimbledon title in a straight-set trouncing of IIie Nastase. He was the youngest men’s champion in the game’s modern era. > At 22 he was victorious in six consecutive tournaments and three round-robin events—in all, 55 straight matches. Along the way, he tied Perry’s record for consecutive Wimbledon titles.

Now, less than a month past his 24th birthday, Borg is an incredible tennis machine, an inexorable force that is one part speed, one part top-spin and two parts iron will. With his topspin strokes, he has reduced errors in his game. His opponent must beat him on every point; he simply does not beat himself. Even more important, from his early teens, he has harnessed a fierce competitive spirit, organizing his entire life around a single goal: winning tennis tournaments. The child of the big-bucks, media-blitz era of sport, he has parlayed his on-court success into a personal fortune; this year he will earn an astonishing $5 million in prize money and endorsement income.

The 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 to win a bet. The patient base-line game has rarely been seen since Jean-RenéLacoste was outfoxing stronger foes in the 1920s. All the elements were there, but the mix awaited a slight Swedish boy and a train of serendipitous events.

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 win, I would have the racquet.

I was so nervous for him to win, I was crazy.”

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.’ ”

The next day Bjorn set out with two neighborhood friends and his proud new possession. There were two clay courts just minutes from the Borg apartment. He took to the game instantly: “From the first ball I hit, I loved it. At first, I was too young to play at the club near my home, so I would hit the ball on the garage door. I would pretend I was playing games in the Davis Cup. That was my first dream, to represent Sweden in the Davis Cup. I would play these imaginary games against Australia and America. Then I started to dream of Wimbledon.”

While he was making up matches, Borg was also making up a method of playing tennis. With no coach to help him, he gripped the racquet—a heavy model meant for an 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 to win.”

When he was ten, he was big enough at last to be allowed on the courts. Every w day hen he he got was up at ten, he 6:30 and was headed for the local park, hanging around until bedtime waiting for a chance to play. “Sometimes people would reserve the court for an hour, but only play 55 minutes,” he recalls.

“They would leave the court for five minutes, and those five minutes, I was in there hitting the ball. Everybody thought I was crazy.”

Before long, he had progressed from a scrawny kid who could hit the ball over the net two or three times in a row to a scrawny kid who could hit the ball back 20 times without missing. Then he started to play games — and to win them. His parents joined an indoor tennis club in Stockholm so that he could play during the winter months, often sitting Saturday nights over endless cups of coffee near the almost deserted courts while Bjorn played game after game, set after set. Says Margareta Borg: “He al ways said, ‘Just one more set, please, just one.’ It was never just one.”

When he started to play in junior tour naments, there was no mistaking his tal ent, but his unorthodox strokes were a bewilderment. As he grew stronger, he gave up using both hands on his forehand, but the two-handed backhand had be come a fixture of his game, as had the fondness for topspin.

As a teenager, Borg was pressured by a succession of well-meaning coaches to alter his game. One exception was Lennart Bergelin, appointed Sweden’s Davis Cup captain in 1970 and charged with dis covering and developing young players.

Bergelin, now 55, first saw Borg at a ju nior tournament. A year later the 14-yearold joined Bergelin’s team of Davis Cup hopefuls. Bergelin remembers the early criticism of Borg’s style: “No one had ever seen anything like the way this boy played, so no one thought he could play successfully. But it was his way, and for him it was the only way. I did not try to change him.”

It was just as well, for by then Borg had developed the unshakable will that has become the hallmark of his game. The man who will run after every ball hit to him, refusing to concede a winning shot, was evident in the boy who listened politely to his critics—and ignored them. “When I was twelve, people told me that if I want to be successful, I must change my style, change my grip, give up this two-handed backhand. I said I would change, but I knew I wouldn’t. The truth is I am a very stubborn person. I was hitting the ball and it felt good to me, so I said to myself, why change? It is important to find your own personality in the game, your own style. You have to find it; no one else can find it for you.”

In one other respect, Borg at twelve was Borg at 24: unflappable on the court, a mannerly competitor who rarely 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.

Is 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 happened, I behaved on the court.”

When Borg was 14, he started to travel extensively with a junior squad of Sweden’s Davis Cup hopefuls. At 15, in his first match against a professional, he defeated New Zealand’s Onny Parun, 25. A good student (4.4 average on a 5.0 scale), he left high school at age 16 to turn pro. Today he possesses one of the world’s most famous lucky-charm beards, his annual Wimbledon growth, but he wasn’t old enough to shave the first time someone approached him for an autograph. “I was 14 and I was so proud when they asked. But every time I signed my name, it looked different. I was so embarrassed. I was only 14 and I couldn’t get it right twice in a row. So I practiced signing my name until I finally had an autograph.”

Before Borg was old enough to get a driver’s license in Sweden, his ground strokes had earned him recognition as one of the world’s premier clay-court players. But his baseline style and his weak serve and volley made him a less effective player on the fast surfaces of grass and artificial outdoor and indoor courts. He caused teeny-bopper riots when he first came to Wimbledon in 1973 at age 17. But he bowed out, undone on the speedy grass.

Then at 20 Borg underwent a transformation. In six weeks he changed his life and his game. The first part was easy: he fell in love. At the French Open in Paris, he called Rumania’s young tennis hope, Mariana Simionescu, and invited her to dinner. They had enjoyed a nodding acquaintance at tournaments, but Borg decided to try to improve on that. “He told me I was the first girl he ever called for a date,” Mariana remembers. “He had a girlfriend when he was a boy in Sweden, but I was the first girl he ever had asked out formally. We went out to eat, then we walked around Montmartre, just like all the rest of the tourists.”

Borg won the French Open, then left for London to practice on grass courts. He had been close to only one person other than his parents, Lennart Bergelin. The coach was anxious for Borg to concentrate on improving his game, and Borg was willing. But the young man, who had limited his long-distance telephoning to habitual every-other-day calls to his parents, was also anxious to locate Mariana. “I was playing a tournament in Scotland,” she says. “Somehow he found me. We talked and talked.”

But Bergelin had his way, too. In order to win at Wimbledon, Borg had to improve his serve. Bergelin had an idea. In the past, Borg had lined up to serve with his left foot parallel to the base line, his left shoulder pointed toward the net. As a result, Borg’s toss was loopy, off to his right, and he could bring power to the stroke only with his arm. Bergelin—who had already cured Borg’s tendency toward overly whippy wrists by going into a factory and designing a special, extra-heavy racquet—suggested a minor change: line up with the left toe pointing toward the base line. It was a 90° change of one foot, but it turned Borg’s body square to his opponent, putting his toss in front of him so that he could use the full weight of his body to add power to the serve.

Players usually spend the weeks before Wimbledon fine-tuning their games. Borg spent the weeks before the 1976 tournament overhauling the most difficult shot in the game. Two hours a day for 14 days, he did nothing but serve. That regimen so strained the muscles in his chest and abdomen that he played in pain throughout the tournament. But it worked. ; “The new serve was why I won Wimbledon the first time,” says Borg. “The people in the crowd had been used to seeing me serve for years, and suddenly, here I was, serving so different. They could not believe it was Bjorn Borg. And it was during Wimbledon that Mariana and I started to live together. I got Mariana and my new serve in the same ten days, I was pretty lucky.”

It was in those ten days that luck ran out for the rest of the tennis world. Borg has played 60 tournaments since his 1976 Wimbledon victory; he has won 37 of them. The only major title to elude him is the U.S. Open. He lost a close match to Connors in the 1976 finals (“My most bitter defeat”). A shoulder injury caused him to default in 1977. He was beaten again by Connors in 1978, when an injured thumb severely hampered his game. Last year he was eliminated by Roscoe Tanner, one of the few players around with the kind of big serve that can negate Borg’s base-line game. His frustration at failing to win the American leg of the grand slam has never healed. “The U.S. Open is my biggest goal. That’s a tournament I want to win very, very badly.”

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.

That brushing motion puts tremendous spin on the ball, generating air pockets below it that pull the ball down like a lead weight, no matter how hard it is hit. Thus Borg can swing away and know that it will drop within the base line. Equally important, he can hit the ball high over the net and still pin his opponent deep in the court. With classic, flat tennis strokes—the kind hit by such stars as Connors and McEnroe—the margin for error is reduced to an area some 6 in. over the net: hit the ball lower, it will catch the tape, higher and it will sail out of play. With topspin, however, the ball can fly several feet above the net and still drop down into play. After it clears the net, a topspin ball falls shorter and bounces higher than a conventional shot.

There is nothing new about topspin.

Laver was an expert practitioner during his prime in the ’60s, and nearly every how-to book on tennis has many words on the subject. But most observers think Borg has mastered topspin as has no player since French noblemen developed the game in the Middle Ages.* As a result, he plays more of that crucial space above the net than anyone in the history of the game. Says Tennis Coach Vic Braden: “Bjorn can make the ball drop so fast it will untie your shoelaces. If you want to get back far enough to take it on the bounce, you’ve gotta call a cab.”

What is most remarkable, however, is Borg’s consistency. His strokes remain the same, whether it is match point at Wimbledon or a practice session at home in Monte Carlo. Altering the angle of the racquet face just 1° at the moment of impact can translate into as much as a 6-ft. difference in where the ball lands on the other side of the net. As a result, Borg never knows those secret fears so familiar to weekend hackers: “I hope he doesn’t hit it to my backhand …” On the contrary, Borg is confident that he can win any point with any stroke in his repertory: “I am never afraid to hit any of my shots.”

Borg’s most difficult matches, oddly enough, have not occurred during the pressure-packed finals of major tournaments. Instead, he is shakiest in the early rounds, “before I have a chance to get the feel of the court, the atmosphere of the tournament, the sense of my game.” Ironically, his opening round opponent at Wimbledon is Egypt’s Ismail El Shafei, 32, one of three players to beat Borg there. He eliminated the Swede in the third round of the 1974 Wimbledon.

Borg’s closest call during his championship reign at Wimbledon came in the first round of the 1978 tournament, when towering (6 ft. 7 in.) Victor Amaya had him on the ropes. Amaya led two sets to one and had a 3-1 lead in the fourth set, but Borg came back to win. Says Amaya: “He looked as if he was spaced out, but all of a sudden he came to life. Sometimes he seems to go into limbo, and then he wakes up before the end.”

Another of Borg’s assets is his icy self-control. He rules his emotions so completely that so much as an on-court frown leaves fans and fellow players awestruck. In an exhibition match last year against Vitas Gerulaitis, Borg actually uttered a Swedish oath after missing a shot.

Gerulaitis dropped his racquet in amazement. Some 10,000 fans, grateful to be present at the miracle of the parting of Borg’s lips, gave him a standing ovation. “Bjorn does have emotions, but he has a special talent for masking them,” says Gerulaitis.

Says Nastase: “In the locker room he might not talk to anyone for an hour. They should send Borg to another planet. We play tennis. He plays something else.”

Perhaps Borg’s most effective weapon is his unbending determination. Tennis is not just a game, but a contest of wills comparable only to that between two prizefighters or a pitcher and a hitter. For all its elaborate etiquette, its hushed crowds and blazered officials, its serene and verdant settings, tennis is hand-to-hand combat. It is the sizzling serve that leaves an opponent unable to lift the racquet, the passing shot that crushes the spirit, the drop shot or lob that bounces and dies far beyond reach. In the closing games of the fifth set, more than three hours after both players began running in the broiling sun, it is will that wins the final points. Borg is will made flesh. He says: “It does not matter if I am so tired that I do not think I can take one more step, I will not give up that point. I am too stubborn. I will keep going.”

The will to keep going has helped make Borg the best tennis player of his generation. But is he the greatest of all time? No one, of course, will ever know how many Wimbledon titles Laver might have won had not the rules against professional players of that era exiled him from the tournament for five years. Nor can it be said how Fred Perry, Big Bill Tilden, Jack Kramer, Pancho Gonzalez and Don Budge might have fared against Borg. But the quality of his competition suggests he may be the best ever. Undoubtedly, more fine players contest tournaments today than at any time in history; incontestably, Borg is the best of them. The match records are astounding: Borg 18, Gerulaitis 0; Borg 17, Guillermo Vilas 5; Borg 11, Tanner 4. He is only 14 and 10 against Connors, but Connors has not beaten him in their eight meetings since 1978.

McEnroe, victorious over Borg in two matches out of five, marvels at the Swede’s stamina.

When Borg was 18, tests at a Swedish sports medicine clinic showed that he had a resting heartbeat of 38 per minute, nearly half the norm. His cardiovascular capacity then was the kind found only in mature distance runners and swimmers. Says McEnroe: “He’s in the best shape of anyone. He’s just got a great physical build for tennis. He’s thin, and he can run all day. Some guys you see panting. You never see Borg do that. You never know if he’s tired.” Says Vilas: “John Newcombe once claimed that Borg’s arm would wear out in five years because he swings at the ball so hard. Nonsense. Borg’s body is his best stroke.”

At 5 ft. 11 in., 165 Ibs., Borg is lean as a greyhound, his limbs long and supple, his shoulders almost incongruously broad. He practices at tournament speed four hours each day to keep in condition. No other player spends more time in workouts. Bergelin explains Borg’s success with two gestures. First he slaps his thigh: “It’s all here.” Then he points to his head: “And here.”

Harold Solomon, ranked sixth on the pro circuit, has never beaten Borg in 14 attempts. He has a different idea about the mainsprings of Borg’s success. Says Solomon: “He has this operating range that goes from about 5 or 6 ft. behind the base line to 3 or 4 ft. inside the base line, and he’s like a god in there. To try to beat him in that range is almost impossible. I think he’s two or three levels above everybody else. My playing him is almost like some good high school team playing the Pittsburgh Steelers.”

Even Borg’s racquets are a notch above the norm. A strong club player will have his racquets strung to a pressure of 55 Ibs. per sq. in. Pro players, whose skill enables them to control the ball better, will gain extra power by having their strings tightened to as much as 60 to 65 per sq. in. Borg’s racquets are strung to a slab-hard 80 per sq. in. The strings are under such tremendous pressure that they often snap even when they are not being used. “At night sometimes in the hotel, they’ll wake us up,” Borg says. “The strings will break, ping, ping, ping.” Mike Blanchard, 73, a tennis umpire at international competitions for five decades, has seen his share of tennis players, but he has never seen racquets like Borg’s: “It’s like playing with a board. The ball jumps off the racquet so fast because there’s no give to it. The reason other people don’t do it is they can’t get control. But Borg just caresses the ball.”

To keep himself in fully strung supply, Borg carries some 30 racquets to every tournament. Fortunately, he suffers from none of the superstitions of baseball players, who view damage to a favorite bat as a death in the family. Only two men in the world, one in Stockholm, the other in New York, are skilled enough to string racquets to Borg’s shattering standards, so he unsentimentally packs up the ones that go ping in the night and ships them off for restringing.

Off-court, Borg leads a quiet, unpretentious life, especially for a multimillionaire. He and Mariana rent a one-bedroom apartment in Monte Carlo; they will continue to live there after then-marriage in Bucharest next month. “It is nice, but not fancy,” she says. “We do have a balcony that overlooks the Mediterranean, and we love to eat breakfast outside when the weather is nice.”

But for nine months of the year, they make their home in hotels, Mariana, who severely curtailed her competitive career after a frantic year of tournaments in separate cities, washes their tennis whites in the tub. If the couple goes out to dine, they will be swamped by autograph seekers (and often not presented with a check), so they tend to subsist on room service. Says Mariana: “We get up and order breakfast from room service. Then we practice, come back to the hotel and order room service. Then Bjorn practices again, if he’s not playing a match, and then we come back and order room service. Very glamorous, isn’t it?”

This spartan existence is as much a matter of temperament as necessity for Borg. Others may sacrifice a night on the town; Borg prefers to stay at home. “I have to sleep nine hours if I am going to feel good during a tournament,” he explains. Borg gets his sleep. Recalls Arthur Ashe: “I saw Bjorn in Las Vegas and asked him if he’d had any luck at the tables. He couldn’t understand why I want ed to talk about the furniture.”

Borg stokes up for tournaments on steaks, but nothing else in par ticular. He will hoist an occasional beer and en joys a glass of wine with meals, but only during those rare weeks when he is not competing.

During a tournament, he is abstemious. Though he sometimes drops by the establishment of international Disco Doyenne Regine on Spain’s Costa del Sol, he never shakes his booties when there is a match to be played. “Sure I would like to go out, but I never really felt that bad about the things I missed. That feeling you have after you win a hard match is good enough.” Mariana says he “is a pretty good dancer, but he would be real good if we could go discoing more often.”

Not surprisingly, recollections that begin “I remember the time Bjorn . . .” are as scarce as tales of his defeat in a tournament. He is no stick-in-the-mud. In a night of horseplay with fellow pros at Jamaica’s Montego Bay in 1978, he jumped into a swimming pool fully clothed. But he seldom indulges in nights of horseplay. His reverie is of the perfect day: “To be at our summer place in Sweden, to go out with the boat, to be on the sea. You are by yourself. No one is talking. There is just the wind.”

When he was a teen on the tennis circuit, much was made of Borg the high school dropout who passed his time reading comicbooks. His taste now runs to World War II novels and histories, but he finds it difficult to keep his mind on such tomes during a tournament. “No one believes how hard you have to concentrate on the court. After four hours of thinking, thinking, on every point, I come back to the hotel, and I am so mentally exhausted, all I can do is lie on the bed and watch the ceiling.”

Borg’s closest friend on the circuit is Gerulaitis, a free spirit whose disco-haunting life-style seems the antithesis of Borg’s stay-at-home predilections. “Vitas likes to practice as much as I do,” Borg explains. Gerulaitis calls Borg “a very private guy. He’s got opinions on lots of subjects but doesn’t talk much.” So Borg remains an enigma to most of the players. Says Solomon: “I spent a week playing exhibitions with him, and I don’t think we talked a total of ten minutes. Bjorn is quiet, real quiet and contained.”

That containment extends to every area of his life. Borg’s very existence is tuned to a single goal: winning tennis tournaments. Bergelin screens his telephone calls, tends to the constantly pinging racquets, arranges courts for practice, even massages away the muscle kinks. Skilled financial advisers invest his winnings, negotiate his contracts. Plane and hotel reservations, cars and drivers materialize in cities around the world, the work of agents and secretaries. Borg moves through life a charmed man; all considerations save tennis have been spared him.

Borg remains a modest man. He attributes much of his success in tennis to his quiet off-court life. “Since I met Mariana, there is more to my life than tennis, tennis, tennis. I can take a loss better than I could before, because now I have someone to go home to and the defeat is not so lonely. But also since I met Mariana, I have had my greatest success in tennis. I have won the big tournaments, the titles I wanted to win so that I could become a great champion.” Whatever the reasons, Borg’s fellow pros find him a gracious competitor. Says Tom Gullickson, who has beaten Borg once in their three meetings: “He’s a real gentleman. He doesn’t make excuses when he loses. Bjorn wins with class and loses with class.”

Borg focuses on the major tournaments with single-minded determination. Grand slam events like Wimbledon demand two weeks of unremitting play at the highest level. A minor injury, the briefest lapse in concentration can result in elimination. Borg sees to it that he is at the top of his form for the major events, rested and ready. He arranges his schedule to provide a break from match tension, with at least a week to practice on courts that duplicate the tournament surface.

Then Borg is nothing less than a tennis juggernaut. Only his eyes betray the fierce competitive fires within: when the ball is hit toward him, they widen, then darken with concentration as he follows the ball to his racquet. He runs so well that he seems never to reach for a ball; he merely awaits it.

No matter where a ball is hit, it seems to have an invisible cord leading back to Borg’s racquet, which is cocked to unleash a blazing passing shot.

“When I go out on the court and I sense I am playing well, I feel there is no way a guy can hit a winner, because I am going to be there. I think I can do anything with a tennis ball. It is the best feeling. Then I will try something I have never done before, and that works too. I don’t really know what I’m doing out there because something strange is going on. I think I am Superman, and I start to try all kinds of things because suddenly, I know I can’t miss the ball. I make an unbelievable shot, and it feels just like all the others. So then I want to show the people even more, give them these most fantastic shots that maybe they have never seen before in their lives. But I want to show them these shots because suddenly, I know I can. I cannot miss, not even one shot can I miss. It is like I am dreaming. It is wonderful.”

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.

That is what it is like to be young and a champion.

And this too: “I don’t regret any thing in my life. I remember how I used to take the train to Stockholm every day after school to play, coming home late, studying, getting up to go to school, getting on the train again, all those years.

It has gotten results. But even if it hadn’t, even if I wasn’t able to become a champion, I would still know that I gave it my best shot. I tried. I got on the train and tried.” —By B. J. Phillips

*Twice Laver won the French Open, Wimbledon, the U.S. and Australian Opens in the same year. Don Budge, Maureen Connolly and Margaret Court won the grand slam once. “Though tennis was first played by ecclesiastical students in the 15th century, the game quickly became so identified with French royalty that Shakespeare contrived for a British king to threaten the French crown with a tennis metaphor. In Henry V, King Henry warns the French Ambassador: “When he have match’d our rackets to these balls,/ We will in France, by God’s grace, play a set/ Shall strike his father’s crown into the hazard/ Tell him he hath made a match with such a wrangler/ That all the courts of France will be disturb’d.”