Björn Borg: An Ode to Wimbledon’s Greatest Champion

It was the warmest summer of the 20^th century when Björn Borg would walk out to compete at Wimbledon for the first time as a professional tennis player. By that point, a 20-year-old Borg had already scooped the French Open twice and he duly raced to the final of Wimbledon without losing a set. In the final Borg would face Ilie Nastase, a tricky Romanian who just two years earlier had been named the world’s number one tennis player for the second consecutive year. The experienced Nastase quickly raced ahead with a three game lead before Borg finally found his rhythm in the game, pulling the game back to 3-3 in games before eventually taking the first set 6-4. Towards the end of the match, Tim Pearson recounts the moment when, finding Borg at the net, a frustrated Nastase thumped the ball at Borg in a burst of anger as he began to feel the championship slipping away to the new protégé. “Borg barely flinched as it flew past his ear, and out; he stared at Nastase, who had turned towards the baseline… ‘What the bloody hell you looking at?’ Nastase growled… Borg turned and walked back to his baseline. He’d made his point, in a small but telling display, not of machismo but of a quiet, contained manliness”, as Pearson recalls.

This is just one example that captures the icy cool of Björn Borg which earned him his nickname in the English press as the Iceberg. A colossal figure who loomed over tennis and radically changed the face of the sport in the late ‘70s, Borg refused to rise to Nastase’s rage. Instead, he calmly completed what would become a routine victory for Borg, dispatching the Romanian in straight sets (6-4, 6-2, 9-7).

Borg was a man of firsts, a trend setter as well as a record breaker: he was the first man to reach six consecutive Wimbledon finals (winning five); the first man to reach four consecutive French Open finals; the first man to win Wimbledon and the French Open in the same year more than once—no mean feat considering the dramatic difference between grass and clay courts, and one that hasn't been matched until this day. At his career peak, Borg went for five consecutive seasons with a winning percentage of 90%. But while the sports world was in awe of this incredible Swedish phenomenon, unable to believe that anything other than a robot could perform which such consistent devastation, Borg would always remain the coolest man within a hundred mile radius of the court. While Borg’s successor, John McEnroe, would be remembered as much for his bursts of verbal vitriol as his huge talent, Borg garnered a reputation as the gentleman of tennis with the impervious front. He would have no trouble dozing in airport lounges or court changing rooms, requiring 9-10 hours of sleep every night to recharge his nervous cells. Following a defeat to McEnroe in his final game in the 1981 US Open final, Borg would nonchalantly walk straight from the court to his waiting car which took him to the airport in his tennis gear before jetting off home where he would announce his premature retirement from the sport.