What Björn Borg Left Out of His Story

Legendary investigative tennis reporter Michael Mewshaw discusses the crucial elements and context missing from Björn Borg's new autobiography, "Heartbeats"

Björn Borg’s new book, Heartbeats, and Borg in 2013 (Photo by Henrik Mill)

One of the biggest stories in tennis over this past month has been the release of Björn Borg’s new memoir, Heartbeats, the 69-year-old Swedish tennis icon’s first time opening up about his precipitous fall from grace after a dominant career which abruptly ended in the early 1980s.

Essentially disappearing from tennis before his 26th birthday, the 11-time major champion Borg became one of tennis’ first—but certainly not the last— cautionary tales of burnout. But until this book, the famously quiet Borg had left the details of what happened to others.

Borg’s heyday and downfall occurred well before my own tennis consciousness, of course, but I was still fascinated by how Borg’s new account of his life would resonate with those who had covered tennis and his disappearance from it at the time.

And so I was delighted to enlist one of the sharpest and most unflinching journalists to ever cover tennis for this project: Michael Mewshaw.

Anyone who has been in tennis for any length of time will know how many things get swept under the rug in this sport, but Mewshaw’s fearless determination to lift the sport’s very lumpy rug to find what lies beneath was unmatched. Most indelibly, his 1983 book Short Circuit, which already began to explore Borg’s disappearance, exposed the underside of men’s professional tennis in ways that shook the sport.

Mewshaw, who is a novelist in addition to his journalism and has published a total of 24 books, had also written a 1989 article about Borg’s reported suicide attempt that year (which I had read when it was included in a 2016 collection of his tennis work), so I knew he had tracked Borg’s post-career perils as much as anyone.

Mewshaw and I both read Heartbeats this week and chatted over the phone about our reactions to it. There is some vulnerable honesty from Borg in the book, to be sure, but there are also crucial parts of his story and his era which get left out through various sins of omission.

In this critical look at important events and context which Borg’s account left out, Mewshaw and I also discuss some of the larger issues which Borg’s book glances upon, including the ways in which cocaine radically altered the course of men’s tennis in the 1980s, the all-cash marketplace of appearance guarantees in tennis, mental health, the harms of tennis players’ lacking education, and more.

This is a long, wide-ranging conversation of 7,000+ words, and I think tennis fans past and present will find tons to mull over—including reillumination of some dark, forgotten moments for some of the biggest stars of 20th century tennis which may surprise readers who are newer to the sport, since the powers-that-be in tennis made sure most of them were quickly forgotten.

Our in-depth conversation is for Bounces subscribers only, so thank you for subscribing! It’s worth it, I promise! -Ben