Sharada Iyer – Tennis With An Accent
“Consistency to his character.” Tennis historian Steve Flink, who has published numerous and captivating books about the sport and its greatest figures, offered that description of Bjorn Borg when Tennis With An Accent talked to Flink about the Swedish tennis icon.
Backed by a reputation of professionalism that has well-outlived his professional days, there’s not much of Bjorn Borg that’s unfamiliar to the tennis world. Yet, as it always seems to happen with subjects we consider to be very familiar, a new facet of understanding emerges from our long journey with a high-profile athlete. We can think that we know a public figure in endless detail, and yet after 50 years, we find a fresh angle that lends a newer perspective to our field of awareness.
“Consistency to his character.”
If one were to think about how Borg’s career unfolded from 1973 until 1981, and then about his short-lived comeback in the early 1990s, consistency is the word that seems to best describe him standing in the centre of these events on either side of his near-decade-long retirement between 1983 and 1991.
If one were to look back at the first part of Borg’s career, the nine years between 1973 and 1981 saw him hit his peak right away.
The first time he played Wimbledon in 1973 – the 50th anniversary year of his debut at The Championships – the then-teenage Borg reached the quarterfinals, losing to Great Britain’s Roger Taylor. The following year, in 1974, came Borg’s earliest loss at the British major in the third round. It was also the last time he exited the tournament in the first week. The next seven years saw Borg reach the finals on six consecutive occasions – 1976-1981 – after a quarterfinal departure in 1975.
In five of those years – 1976-1980 – Borg became the first player in the Open Era to win five straight Wimbledon titles. If this weren’t an awe-inspiring statistic in itself, Borg winning Roland Garros prior to his Wimbledon title in three of these years – 1978-1980 – is even more amazing to appreciate after all this time.
Within the last two decades, Borg’s feat has been replicated by men’s tennis’ “Big Three.” In 2008 and 2010, Rafael Nadal won the French Open and Wimbledon combo, while in 2009 it was Roger Federer’s turn. In 2021, it was Novak Djokovic’s turn to unlock this achievement for himself. They all did what Borg did, but not as often. True, they got in each other’s way, but the fact remains that the “Channel Double” is immensely difficult. Borg did it three years in a row.
The monumental nature of winning the “Channel Slam,” however, is the only similarity this trio prominently shares with Borg, according to Flink.
“In those days, the clay wasn’t really much different. But the grass was very different. It was more chewed up and it was much faster,” Flink explained. “He (Borg) had to play all these players like (Vijay) Amritraj, (Mark) Edmondson and Victor Amaya, who attacked and made him very uncomfortable, and he had to sort of squeeze out five-set wins against these players just to keep himself alive to play his best at the end. And he did it year after year, the only easy one when he had was ‘76. He just blitzed through the field.”
On court, if his ability to adapt to the two contrasting surfaces brought about laurels for Borg, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that off court, it was this meticulous preparation of that helped him accumulate the success he had.
Flink elaborated on this point: “The other thing that was great about him was how he adapted his game. He changed his game more. Borg felt when he got on the grass that he couldn’t play the way did on clay. On clay, he just was going to stay back there and wasn’t going to miss for hours on end. And you know, he used heavy topspin and just camped out of the baseline and barely came in. And nobody could beat him from the baseline. But at Wimbledon that was never going to work.”
“So, Bjorn made the effort on the grass to serve bigger and that helped. The other thing he did was he hit a lot of slice backhand approach shots; came in behind them down the middle; he served and volleyed some; he just changed; and adapted enough and played a different brand of tennis in some respects. Still, he was able to make all his great passing shots. But it’s one of the great feats when he did those three years to win those because it was harder to do that. You know it happened with Roger and Rafa, and Novak. It’s still a fantastic achievement, but you didn’t have as big a difference. In the grass-court game from the clay-court game, it wasn’t as big an adjustment for them. So, the achievement was great, but somehow, I think for Bjorn, it was even greater.”
The Darker Side to Borg’s Consistency
Borg didn’t win a U.S. Open title, although he did reach the finals in four different years, including in 1981, his last biggest year on the circuit. He also didn’t play the Australian Open in any of these years. However, the six French Open titles and five Wimbledons he won helped him get to 11 majors. This, too, became an Open Era record at the time. It’s also one which, despite all the players and their winning numbers beside them, holds its relevance in the contemporary times.
The other side of this commitment was, perhaps, the way his career wound to a halt in late 1981 and early 1982. Borg opted to leave the sport after what he thought was a dismal year by his standards, having suffered losses in the finals at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open to John McEnroe. According to Flink, however, his work ethic possibly led to him mentally fade away and hasten his retirement:
“Even though he was only 25. He was a little burned out. He was. He had worked hard and been so consistent, especially from ‘74 through ‘81. ‘73 was a very good year too. But ‘74, that’s when he won his first major in Roland Garros. And from that point on, he worked hard. He was completely dedicated and professional and I think it caught up to him as it does a lot of players,” Flink observed.
Flink also noted that Borg’s personality as a non-talker played its part in preventing his audience from guessing about his decision-making. “As someone who watched him a lot, I wouldn’t have seen it coming. I just felt like you never knew what he was carrying around inside him,” Flink said.
“And when he won those five Wimbledons in a row and held back McEnroe in the epic Wimbledon final of ’80, all that stuff, I guess the judgment I would make is yes, that caught up to him. He relied as much on that as he did on the flexibility of his game at Wimbledon and his speed and his passing shots, all the strengths that he had, but he had to be strong mentally to win. And so maybe when that started to desert him, maybe when he started to drift away after the ‘81 season, it was not something that he could ever bottle up again. It got out of the bottle and he couldn’t get it back. So that’s how I looked at it, which was sad.”
Then, fast-forward to the 1990s. It was perhaps this keenness to resurrect the discipline he had built for himself as a professional tennis player that brought Borg back to the sport’s fold. A lot has been said about how Borg’s choice to keep playing with a wooden racquet didn’t let him get his career going the second time around. Flink, however, stated that the racquet was just one contributing factor to the whole fall of dominoes which marked Borg’s second stint as a tennis pro.
“What happened was, I think, from all I can gather once he got away from his training, it was very hard for him to get back into the regimen. He was so disciplined, worked so hard for so long, that once he let go of that recapturing it was very hard for him. So, basically the years went by and the comeback was belated and ill-fated. If he was going to come back, it had to be, at the latest, by 1984-‘85. Once we got past that and then it was going to be no viable comeback,” Flink reminisced.
The Consistency of Borg that still endures
For Flink, had Borg’s return been successful, it would’ve been “a fantastic story for writers,” but beyond that, what comes through the most about Borg for Flink is the way he comported himself, both in his glory and gloomy days. That is what still makes Borg so special among the varied mix of names the sport proffers, while retaining the element of consistency Flink mentioned.
“There was something in the way he carried himself that was maybe unique, in that he just didn’t seem to take himself more seriously once he reached the top. He was serious about what he was trying to achieve. But he didn’t suddenly get this big head and change his ways and make life difficult for you,” Flink shared.
This trait of his hasn’t changed, according to Flink, despite the various other roles he has performed in and around the sport over the years.
Thus, it’s only fair to say that this aspect of Bjorn Borg’s character has added to the recurring theme of consistency surrounding his name. Five decades after he first stepped into tennis’ biggest stages at the All-England Club, and four decades past his first retirement from the game, the now 67-year-old’s presence invokes the same respect it once did just as his achievements seem to be burnished by the passing of these years.
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