Bjorn Borg’s post-career life was a cautionary tale about the hazards of mixing fame, youth, boredom, and an estimated $75 million fortune. After burning out on tennis, he tried rally car driving; he tried commentating; he started and folded a sportswear company; he lent his name to a line of aftershave; he partied. Only the latter activity lasted for long.
“He didn’t know what to do; he didn’t know his place,” his first wife, Mariana, told Sports Illustrated’s Curry Kirkpatrick. “It was so sad. Bjorn would watch TV, then go out with the night people. He wanted to have another life, but he’d say, ‘What am I going to do now?’”
What Borg did was ask Mariana for a divorce over the phone and father a son with a teenage model he met while judging a beauty contest. A few years later, he married Loredana Bertè, an Italian pop singer whose bestknown hit was called “I’m Not a Lady.” The low point of Borg’s decadelong descent had to be when he was rushed to a Milan hospital to have his stomach pumped after allegedly taking too many sleeping pills. Where else could he go but back to the only home he had ever known, professional tennis?
In the spring of ’91, Borg set the sports world on its ear by announcing that, at 34, he would start playing tour events again. When he took a wild card into his hometown event in Monte Carlo, fans, reporters, and celebrities descended on the principality. There they found a figure who seemed to have jumped straight from their memories. The long blond hair; the taped-up fingers; the thin headband; the Diadora sneakers; the black wooden racquet he had specially manufactured for the occasion: Borg, it seemed, was determined to make time go backward.
By the time the Monte Carlo draw ceremony was under way, Borg’s wilderness years were forgotten. The star-studded affair was attended by Prince Albert and Alain Delon, and Borg added to the already colorful festivities by showing up to practice with a motley entourage that included two ballerinas, named Tanya and Doreen, and a 79-year-old mixed-martial-arts Svengali who went by Tia Honsai (real name: Ron Thatcher).
“He should go all the way,” Honsai told a scrum of journalists. “There’s nothing to stop him.”
Or so fans had hoped. The consensus at the dawn of the ’90s was that tennis had seen better days. Superstars like Borg, John McEnroe, Jimmy Connors, and Chris Evert were either gone or in decline. Their replacements—Ivan Lendl, Boris Becker, Steffi Graf—hadn’t captured the public’s imagination in the same way, at least not yet.
In the early ’90s, though, U.S. men’s tennis would receive an injection of new blood. Out were the irascible McEnroe and Connors, in were the mild-mannered Pete Sampras, Jim Courier, and Michael Chang. Yet even as fans applauded this new, gentlemanly generation, they still yearned for the Wild West 1970s, and the roughnecks who first made them fall in love with the sport.
During 1990 and ’91, though, McEnroe, Borg, and Connors, with their prime years well behind them, would stagger across the sport’s stage one last time.
They had been the first heroes of tennis’ professional era, as well as its pioneers and guinea pigs. They were the first players to become millionaires, and the first to run themselves ragged and burn themselves out in the new, yearround, global chase for those millions.