PARIS, FRANCE - June 09: Björn Borg of Sweden prepares to present the trophies on Court Philippe-Chatrier during the Men's Singles Final at the 2024 French Open Tennis Tournament at Roland Garros on June 9th, 2024, in Paris, France. (Photo by Tim Clayton/Corbis via Getty Images)
Bjorn Borg is a part of tennis folklore.
He won 11 Grand Slam tournament titles – six French Opens and five Wimbledons – and transformed the sport in the 1970s and 1980s with his style on and off the court. With John McEnroe, he formed one of the greatest rivalries in tennis history, the Swedish “Ice Borg” to the American’s fire, before burning out and retiring in his mid-20s, despite McEnroe’s pleas that he continue.
So what then happened to a player who, by his own admission, has always been a closed book? Before turning 70 next year, Borg wants to tell his story.
“I had a big backpack on my back. I wanted to throw that away,” he said in a video interview last month, before the US release of his autobiography, Heartbeats, which was last week.
Borg opens up on his relationship with his parents, romantic partners and children, as well as his partying days centred on the New York nightclub Studio 54. As has been reported, he reveals that he has been living with a prostate cancer diagnosis, and that a reliance on drugs, pills and alcohol in the years after he quit tennis brought him to his lowest ebbs, including two near-death experiences in the 1980s and 1990s.
“I was lost in this world,” Borg said of the period after he officially left the sport in January 1983. “I didn’t have any help. I didn’t have a team or agents to push me in the right way. I did everything by myself. I didn’t really have any help during that time, and it’s very tough to fix yourself.”
Borg’s unflappability and success on the court made it seem that little bothered him. He was impossibly cool, with his good looks and an aesthetic that made him one of sport’s first true global superstars.
But his fame, combined with a sport that was not really ready for its transformation from being a bit stiff to becoming incredibly popular, weighed on him more than he then let on.
“I never express my feelings,” he said. “You could see myself when I was playing tennis. I didn’t open my mouth. I’m a Gemini, I am two people. If one sleeps, the other one goes out. And this devil on my shoulder, he tried to put me down so many times.”
Borg was generally able to keep the devil on his shoulder quiet during his playing career. He was one of the first players to really worry about diet and sleep, and claims to be the first to have a fulltime coach travelling with him (Lennart Bergelin, who died in 2008). Bergelin also gave Borg regular sports massages, which at the time was revolutionary – likewise the meditation and yoga Borg started in the early 1970s.
Borg also used less conventional methods to get an edge, such as working with a medium after a heartbreaking US Open loss in 1979. In Heartbeats, he writes: “She told me the stars were never aligned for me at the US Open, and that I’d never win there, and I never did. It was eerie how accurate she was. But I was hooked, and I kept working with her for the next three years.”
During his reign at the top of the sport, which took in five consecutive Wimbledons from 1976 to 1980, Borg also needed a release from time to time, and lived a glamorous lifestyle during a golden age for tennis characters. McEnroe, Jimmy Connors, Ilie Nastase and Vitas Gerulaitis were among the giants of the sport at the time, and while Borg’s relationship with McEnroe has been discussed at length, Gerulaitis may be more important to Borg’s story.
Gerulaitis, an American, was a continual source of support for Borg and opened doors to the celebrity world. Borg would stay at Gerulaitis’ place on Long Island, New York, where he had a court that matched the surface of the US Open, and from there the city was their oyster.
Paul Simon, Aerosmith, Elton John, Rod Stewart, Sting, Tina Turner and Mick Jagger were just a few of the artists Borg recalls hanging out with, but he said that while he was still a player, Studio 54 was more of a break from the structured life of a pro athlete than an invitation to party to excess.
It was after he stopped playing, in 1982, that the devil on his shoulder took over. After a 1981 US Open final defeat to McEnroe, who also beat him in the final of that year’s Wimbledon, Borg left Flushing Meadows before the trophy ceremony, went to a prearranged after-party and realised that this life was no longer for him.
“All I could think was how I didn’t belong in this world anymore,” Borg writes. “All I could think was how miserable my life had become. The thoughts grew heavier by the second, and suddenly, everything felt ice cold and crushing.
“Now I knew there was absolutely no joy left in it for me.”
Borg started “self-medicating” through drugs and alcohol, first taking cocaine in 1982. In the ensuing years, the impact of his habits on his health worsened. In 1989, after the clothing business he had set up went bankrupt, he nearly died after taking a cocktail of drugs, pills and alcohol in Milan.
He makes clear that it was not a suicide attempt; his second wife, Italian singer Loredana Bertè, called emergency medical workers, who saved his life. Borg had by then fathered a son, Robin, with a Swedish model, Jannike Bjorling, having divorced his first wife, Romanian tennis player Mariana Simionescu.
Borg was racked by guilt about the impact of his actions on Robin, and an attempted tennis comeback in the early 1990s was an attempt to save himself. The comeback did not last long, one match, a defeat, in Monte Carlo in 1991, then 11 more, all losses, in 1992 and 1993. His attempts to play with an outdated wooden racket were tragicomic, but, as he put it, “If I don’t take that decision, maybe you and I will not be sitting here today talking.”
It was after that comeback, in Borg’s view, that the devil on his shoulder came closest “to pulling me down to stay down all the time”. At a seniors’ event in the Netherlands in the mid-1990s, Borg had a heart attack and collapsed in front of his father, Rune, on a bridge. Borg, an only child who described his father as his best friend, still regrets letting him down. Rune died the same year as Borg’s coach, Bergelin, which Borg described as brutal; Gerulaitis, his best friend in tennis, had died at age 40 in 1994.
Despite the wilderness that greeted the end of his career, Borg has no regrets about quitting tennis young, acknowledging things might have been different had he been playing in a different era. Security and the cultural understanding of how fame affects players off the court have both changed drastically in the past 45 years.
But those thoughts do not bother him much. And even with the cancer diagnosis two years ago, and a subsequent lifesaving operation in February 2024, he says he is in a much better place. He has checkups every six months, the last of which was clear in August. He does push-ups and he cycles every day in his living room in Stockholm, where he lives with his third wife, Patricia Ostfeld.
They have been married for 23 years, with a son, Leo, who is a professional player. Borg and Ostfeld wrote Heartbeats together, after Borg had turned down numerous requests earlier in his life. When not in Sweden, they spend a lot of time in Ibiza, but worked on much of the book, which took around two-and-a-half years, in Cape Verde, off the coast of West Africa.
Borg still watches tennis regularly, enjoying the Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz rivalry and identifying Ben Shelton and Jack Draper as possible threats to their supremacy.
“I love tennis,” Borg said. “I love to watch tennis. I’m not going to let tennis go, never ever, because that’s part of my life. It’s part of my heart to be involved with tennis because it’s something I missed without realising it when I stepped away. I hung around with the wrong crowds, the wrong people, but now I’m in the right moment.”
Borg sometimes has such vivid dreams that he is back competing that the bed shakes, he said. He remains in touch with old friends like McEnroe and Boris Becker, but writes that he has a strong sense that Gerulaitis is “still with me, watching over me, and that he sees I’m finally happy”.
His hopes for the future, meanwhile, are simple.
“I have two beautiful sons,” he said. “I have two beautiful grandchildren, aged 12 and 10. And I’m kind of a family man, and I want to spend a lot of time with the family. And that’s important for me.”
Borg, whose nickname from a young age was the Jar because of how he kept a lid on everything, hopes that after his book “people understand me as a person,” as well as the tennis player of folklore who won all those titles as if they were carved from ice.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Charlie Eccleshare / The Athletic
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES