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For decades tennis has served as a cornerstone of the spring social season in Monte Carlo, and with the finals scheduled for Easter Sunday, the tournament has always started on the preceding Monday. At least as far as the public was concerned, it started Monday. Although there were always qualifying rounds, these prompted little or no interest. But this year was different. This year Bjorn Borg was making a comeback, and because he had refused to play ten Grand Prix events, he had to qualify.

Borg had to qualify! To many people in and out of tennis, the idea sounded absurd. After a five-month layoff he was still ranked number 4 in the world. To force him to qualify… why, it was like making Muhammad Ali fight in the Golden Gloves, like putting Pélé back on a vacant lot in Brazil with a ball fashioned out of old rags, like shunting Niki Lauda into the slow lane, like expecting Joe Namath to employ a dating service.

It was all the fault of tennis politics, newspapers complained, all part of the war between WCT and the Grand Prix. If you were a member of the Pro Council, you could attempt to explain that the ten-tournament rule was reasonable, that without it the top players would concentrate on exhibitions and let the tournament system that supported the rest of the players wither and die. You could, like Sandy Mayer, point out “the greed” in Borg’s schedule. You could accuse the Swede of limiting himself to “shopping expeditions” at the Grand Slam events. But, finally, you were wasting your breath. For most people, Bjorn Borg was a great champion and a fine gentleman, and it was ridiculous to force him to qualify.

Ridiculous it may have been, but it was also a box-office bonanza. The tournament in Monte Carlo was quick to realize this, and it announced that the event would officially begin on April 1. The qualies attracted two hundred journalists and several dozen photographers. General admission was $5 for the first three days and $10 for the finals on Sunday—the finals of the qualies, that is.

That week several mass-circulation magazines carried features on Bjorn and Mariana Borg. Paris Match ran a cover photo of the young couple embracing, and a cloying article praised their love match. The Borgs were said to be planning a family—presumably long-range planning, since Mariana and Borg hadn’t been living together lately. Still, Mariana held out the fervent hope that children would arrive within a few years.

My own family had arrived more promptly from Rome. A friend had lent us his apartment outside of Cannes, and I became a commuter. Each morning my wife drove me down to the tiny station in La Bocca, where I boarded a train for Monte Carlo, thirty miles up the coast. On one side of the track the Mediterranean spread like a cerulean platter toward a horizon lost in a haze. On the other side the purple hills of Provence, flecked with yellow mimosa and dark-green cypresses, rose toward the Maritime Alps, whose peaks were still snow-capped.

Most of the passengers appeared to be tourists and day-trippers. But there was also a colorful contingent of blacks who hustled fake ivory carvings, glass beads, fly whisks, snakeskin wallets, and leather bush hats. I imagined a vast factory in Marseilles mass-producing African kitsch and sending out these poor souls to sell it. I never saw anybody buy a thing.

The train passed through Cannes, curved along the beach at Golfe Juan, cut through Juan les Pins and came to Antibes. Then it was on to Nice and the breath-catching bay at Villefranche and the tiny town of Beaulieu, which, viewed through a fringe of palm fronds, lived up to its name, Beautiful Place. And finally, just before Monaco, there was the modest village of Cap d’Ail, the garlic cape, home of those humble workers who swept the streets, serviced the condos, and drove the limos of the tax-free enclave next door.

It should have been a pleasant trip. But I had just had an umpire tell me enough about

professional tennis to fill me with despair. I wasn’t on my way to the Monte Carlo Country Club to watch Bjorn Borg make his comeback. I was on my way there to try to find out whether he had rigged a match with John McEnroe.

Like everybody on the circuit that winter, I had talked and thought incessantly about Bjorn Borg. Despite all that had been said and written about him, I decided that nobody had taken a comprehensive look at the man and attempted to piece together the incongruent shards of his character. This, of course, presumed that he had a character, that he wasn’t simply a billboard, a blank page on which advertisers could scrawl their messages.

Borg seemed to me to have struck a Faustian bargain at some point in his young life and agreed to transform himself into an automaton in return for being made into the best tennis player in the world. Now a model of lobotomized decorum on court and off, he was praised as much for his tunnel vision and his remorseless one-dimensionality as for his metronomical ground strokes. With the tacit approval of the public and the cooperation of the press, he had suppressed every other aspect of his personality and ordered his existence to a single limited purpose. Each known fact about his life reinforced the notion that he was a sort of extraterrestrial being, alien yet friendly, and a fine example for kids.

He was said to have a pulse rate of thirty-five beats a minute, half that of the average human. He was said to sleep twelve hours a day. He was said to read Donald Duck comics and watch television during his spare time. A high-school dropout at the age of fourteen, he was said to be quite bright. A multimillionaire, he was said to have sound basic values. A tax exile in Monte Carlo, he was said to be a homebody.

Regardless of what he later became—in image, if not in reality—he didn’t start off as a poker-faced, exemplary little boy. According to Peter Bodo’s Inside Tennis, he “was an only child, and Saturday was designated as his day with his father, Rune. All Borg wanted to do was play competitive games… but when he lost, he would cry and carry on until he was sent up to bed. Many Saturdays ended in an early appointment with the sandman, until little Bjorn calmed down a bit and learned to suppress his frustration. Inside, he remained furious.”

As an adolescent he was still volatile, a screamer of obscenities, an enraged racket-thrower. When the Swedish tennis federation suspended him for six months, his conduct improved, but even after he set out on the international tour, he could be foul-tempered, headstrong, and obstreperous. During a practice session he and his coach, Lennart Bergelin, once got into a shouting match and nearly came to blows. When Bergelin smacked him on the head with a box of balls, Borg called his parents and threatened to quit tennis.

Although he never gave up the game altogether, he got a reputation for giving up in important matches. When the calls or the crowd were against him, he sometimes stalked off the court and refused to return. Other times, when an opponent got the best of him, he stayed on court, but acted as if he didn’t care whether he won or lost, and whenever questioned about his moody, unprofessional behavior, he refused to speak to reporters.

During this early period there was another spicy component to his image. With his long blond locks and lean Nordic face, he was portrayed as a heartbreaker pursued everywhere by groupies. One British newspaper went so far as to print a photograph—a palpable fake—of Borg unbuckling his belt for a tryst in Hyde Park.

Then, miraculously, within the space of a year or two, all this was forgotten and Borg underwent a sea change so dramatic that nobody dared remind people of his previous incarnation. By the time he won his first Wimbledon title at the age of twenty, he had shucked his reputation as a quitter and a playboy and acquired the image that has stayed with him—unflappable, indefatigable, impervious to pressure, impassive in victory or defeat, the Ice Man, the perfect machine.

Not until the emergence of John McEnroe did Borg begin to reveal his first serious cracks and fissures. To be beaten by a player whose moods were so transparent, whose emotions spilled forth like a spendthrift’s money, and whose demeanor was so offensive must have been truly shattering to the Swede. How else explain his behavior during his last full year competition?

In a match against McEnroe at the 1981 Volvo Masters, he objected to a call and refused to play on. Confronting the umpire, Mike Lugg, he kept mumbling, “Ask the linesman, ask the linesman.” He spoke as if in a trance and never once during the incident blinked his eyes, not even when he was given a warning, then a point penalty. Desperate not to default him, Mike Lugg had to summon the Supervisor to convince Borg to continue the match.

Then at the 1981 U.S. Open, having already lost his Wimbledon crown and having just been crushed by McEnroe, he regressed to childhood. Live, on international television, he walked off before the prize-giving ceremony. Newsmen and TV commentators, anxious to preserve the image they had helped create, claimed Borg wasn’t a poor sport. Due to a death threat, they said, Borg had been placed under police protection and whisked away from Louis Armstrong Stadium.

In fact, there had been a death threat. But Borg knew nothing about it when he left McEnroe, the tournament promoters, and television announcers stranded at the net. “I was just very, very disappointed,” he later admitted. “I couldn’t face the idea of making a nice speech in front of all those people. I suppose I was a bad boy.”

It struck me as the first entirely spontaneous thing Borg had done in years. Trapped for so long like a carcass in ice, he had warmed to his own emotions and awakened.

As the train rocked along the tracks to Monte Carlo, it intrigued me to consider the possibility that the robot had rebelled, the computer had willfully shut down, the automaton had determined to reclaim its humanity. Was there in Borg’s long layoff and in his reluctance to commit himself again full-time to the tour a parable of redemption?

***

The Monte Carlo Country Club, site of the tournament, isn’t in Monte Carlo. It clings to a craggy cliff just over the border in France. When I asked whether the tax-free privilege extended to the club, I was answered with the same stares of mute disbelief which met any question about homosexuality on the men’s tour. In Monaco, money may be an all-pervasive obsession, but it is a passion that dares not speak its name—at least not to the press.

A series of terraces, like steps designed for a giant, descend from the Moyenne Corniche to the sea, with practice courts on top, then the sprawling clubhouse, then a patio with chairs and tables, then the show court, then a parking lot. The clay courts, the tablecloths, and the clubhouse are all much the same salmon-pink color. Beyond a stand of cypresses that serve as a windscreen at the far end of the show court, the blue of the Mediterranean meets the paler blue of the sky.

The press box, situated just below the lunch tables on the patio, offers an excellent view of everything except tennis. Gazing down at the court through a grillwork of green railings, I could, if I sat up straight, see both players, but not the near baseline.

Set off at a discreet distance from the court, photographers knelt on a carpet, keeping a vigil for Borg. They hadn’t been there for the previous match and they wouldn’t wait around for the next. Similarly, most spectators—and there were more than a thousand, a decent crowd at any tournament—wouldn’t stay to watch the other qualifiers.

The ball boys and linesmen marched to their posts wearing beautiful powder-blue outfits provided by Ellesse. The promotional strips around the court showed a bias toward high fashion—Céline, Piaget, Jacomo, and Benetton. Yet Borg came on looking like the kind of character Monte Carlo’s omnipresent police would regard with rabid suspicion. Unshaven, his long hair lank and dirty, he wore a rumpled gray velour Fila warm-up.

Generally, the principality has no patience with the young, the long-haired, and the unwashed. The New York Times once call the place a “capitalist pustule” and said it had “a Mississippi-in-the-mid-fifties mentality.” But under the correct circumstances it can be as up-to-date as a newly minted dollar. It welcomed Borg, as well as Vilas, Clerc, and several lower-ranked players, just as it had welcomed a host of Grand Prix race-car drivers. It didn’t much care whether these men actually lived here. Whey shouldn’t Borg, a tax exile from Sweden, become a residential exile from Monte Carlo and buy a villa on Cap Ferrat in France? Prince Rainier remained more than willing to provide a refuge from various revenue agents so long as the tennis players participated in the annual tournament and the racers entered the Grand Prix every May.

While Borg was stony-faced and serious, his opponent, Paolo Bertolucci, Italy’s “Pasta Kid,” was utterly relaxed. The ATP Media Guide listed Bertolucci at 170 pounds, which is probably a twenty-pound underestimate. But why quibble? Paulo soon figured to be fatter.

“Thanks to Borg, I’ll stuff myself,” he told reporters. “ I had a bet with some friends that I’d wind up playing Borg in the qualifying. Each one owes me ten dinners.”

“It’s a strange business,” Bertolucci said. “I’ve had some good results in my career. I’ve won tournaments in Hamburg, Florence, Berlin, and Barcelona. But now that I’m twenty-eight and playing the qualies, I’m a star overnight. I’ve never given so many interviews, I’ve never been followed by photographers before today. I’ve never taken a set from Borg, but I’m happy to play him. At least I won’t lose to some unknown guy.”

Lose he did. Bertolucci held a service break and seemed in control of the first set, but Borg managed to pull even, then broke to win 7–5. The second set was a formality, 6–0.

The consensus was that Borg looked rusty, indecisive, and vulnerable. At a press conference Bertolucci confirmed that anybody in the top thirty could have beaten Borg today. Although the Swede didn’t respond to that, he admitted there had been moments when he felt “deconcentrated.” For the next week he would make himself sound like a frozen orange juice—concentrated one minute, deconcentrated the next.

When a journalist suggested that, much as he might not like playing the qualies, he needed them to regain his timing and match-toughness, Borg didn’t see it that way. It was stupid, he said, to force him to qualify. The Pro Council had made a mistake with its ten-tournament rule and he demanded they change it. Unless they did, he might not defend his French Open title. He might skip Wimbledon as well. These weren’t idle threats, he declared. He had no intention of compromising. The Pro Council had made the mistake, not he, and he wasn’t going to help them save face.

Borg left the room before I could reach him. When I tried to arrange an interview through one of the tournament press officers, he gave me the same glazed look I had got when I inquired about the Country Club’s tax status. Everyone wanted to speak personally to Bjorn, the press officer said, and he didn’t want to talk to anybody, not even to Sports Illustrated or the London Sunday Times. I’d just have to ask my questions at the daily press conference.

I explained that mine weren’t the kinds of questions that could be asked in public. To which the man replied, those were precisely the kinds of questions Borg detested. I could write him a letter or try to pass a message through his coach, Lennart Bergelin, or his agents at IMG. But, frankly, the press officer thought I was wasting my time.

***

Over the weekend and on Monday, while Bjorn Borg reduced two more qualifiers to smoky rubble, then started play in the main draw, I continued my attempts to reach him, and as I did so, I became better acquainted with Monte Carlo and its Country Club. I even bumped into the Grimaldis—quite literally bumped into them at the buffet lunch, which journalists got to eat for a mere $15 while the public had to pay $22. Princess Grace wore large sunglasses and a floppy straw hat that hid her pale, plump face. With her were Princess Stephanie, looking like a street gamine in tight jeans, a T-shirt, and gobs of makeup, and Price Albert, also in jeans and T-shirt, but looking like a young banker who had gone slumming.

Perhaps I should have asked Prince Albert to help me reach Borg. With his Walkman headset, its antenna quivering, the Prince appeared to be maintaining communications with sources throughout the hemisphere. Surely he could contact the reclusive Swede.

As I watched several early-round matches, I wondered whether any other sport was played under such drastically varied conditions. This past Sunday, Ivan Lendl and Peter McNamara had met in the finals of a tournament on a fast indoor carpet under artificial lights in Frankfurt. Now, two days later, they were outdoors on clay, contending with the sun and wind of the Côte d’Azur and having trouble with lowly opponents.

Indoors, outdoors, daytime, nighttime, carpeted courts, cement courts, composition courts, European clay, American clay, English grass, Australian grass—each new condition demanded an adjustment from a player. Blessed with more raw talent than McNamara, Lendl had less trouble regearing his game. After saving one set point, he rolled past a Chilean, Pedro Rebolledo, 7–5/6–2. But McNamara never found his rhythm and fell to the pint-size German Peter Elter, 6–3/6–2.

There were also serious psychological adjustments exacted by professional tennis. For Chris Lewis, a gifted player from New Zealand, the price of coming so far in his career has been constant fear and he has never shown any reluctance to admit it. Lewis is terrified of flying. Yet if he wants to go on playing, he knows he has to spend hundreds of hours in airplanes, and still more hours on the ground dreading the next flight. With a pharmacopoeia of tranquilizers—Mogadon, Tranxine, Equanil, Valium—he copes as best he can and arranges his schedule to restrict his time in the air. He also keeps cars on three continents—Australia, Europe, and America—and drives to tournaments whenever possible.

Still, for all his planning, there are frequent complications. He had just flown from Australia to Germany, where he was supposed to pick up a new Mercedes and motor down to Monte Carlo. But when the Mercedes wasn’t ready, he had to rent a car and hadn’t arrived here until Sunday night. The thirty-hour flight from Australia, then the long drive from Frankfurt, plus the fact that “I was loaded up with pills,” resulted in the inevitable. Facing Guillermo Vilas in the first round, he played like “a piece of garbage” and lost 6–1/6–1.

***

Next day I came close to Bjorn Borg, but there was no chance to talk to him. He swept into the press lounge of what politicians call “a photo opportunity.” Nicola Pietrangeli and Ilie Nastase were with him. Pietrangeli stroked Nastase’s Adidas sweater. “That’s nice,” he said. “Do they make them for men, too?”

Nastase and Borg, the journalists, assorted sycophants, and hangers-on guffawed. Only Bambino, Nastase’s bodyguard, was unamused. Or rather, he was amusing himself in a different manner. He had cornered one of the hostesses, pressing his Falstaffian belly against her slender frame. “I kiss all the pretty girls.”

When the photographers had finished, people swarmed over Borg and indulged in a feverish laying on of hands. Pietrangeli hugged him, Nastase squeezed his shoulder. Reporters patted him on the back. Tournament officials compressed him. Women kissed him. Finally, Bambino hugged and kissed him, too.

Far from icy or aloof, Borg appeared giddy with pleasure. He giggled and kept mumbling in answer to all questions, “Beautiful. Everything is beautiful. Just beautiful.”

Before they left, I asked Bambino whether it was true, as I had read in a newspaper, that Nastase had given him a $9,000 ring he had won in a raffle.

Bambino laughed and replied with his version of “no comment”: “Journalists are shit.”

***

The following day, in a fashion familiar to commuters the world over, things fell apart. I arrived at the station to discover that the 10:24 train had been canceled. Since the next train wasn’t due until 11:23, I bought a newspaper and read it over a second cup of coffee that set my pulse racing and my mind jumping about. The 11:23 turned out to be two filthy cars, already crowded to overflowing. I stood up as far as Antibes, where most passengers got off and I sat down. The relief was short-lived, however. A conductor announced there was trouble on the tracks ahead and everybody had to switch to a bus to Nice.

A minor inconvenience, I decided. I might be a few minutes late for the start of the Bjorn Borg–Adriano Panatta match. But there were worse things than riding in a clean, comfortable bus along the Mediterranean coast. The next train to Monte Carlo was scheduled to leave Nice at noon and I assumed it would wait for connecting passengers. I assumed we would arrive in time to catch it. Even if we were a few minutes late, I assumed it would wait for connecting passengers.

I assumed wrong on both counts. We reached the station just as the train was pulling out; the next one wasn’t due for an hour. Since I had already wasted almost two hours covering twenty miles, the idea of another delay was insupportable.

“Why didn’t the train wait for us?” I asked a lady at the information desk.

“I don’t know.”

“Who does know?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who should know?”

“I don’t know.”

“This is the information bureau, isn’t it?”

She shrugged, bored by my questions.

“I’d like to speak to the person in charge here,” I said.

She waved vaguely. “He’s gone.”

“When will he be back?”

“I don’t know.” The woman must have employed Ivan Lendl as a dialogue coach.

“Who does know?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s your name?” I asked, lowering my voice malevolently like a man who might have some influence with the Railroad Commissioner.

She remained unimpressed. “I don’t have to tell you that.”

“Why? Don’t you know your name?”

“I don’t have to tell you anything,” she snapped.

“You haven’t told me anything.” My voice rose and ignominiously cracked.

“I told you the hour of the next train. It comes at one o’clock. Pleasant journey, monsieur.”

I barged out of the station and, with an hour to kill, went to eat lunch. Next door was a fast-food outlet called Flunch. Flunch for lunch! I should have known better. But it looked harmless enough—looked, in fact, like a simulacrum of McDonald’s, right down to the menu, which offered frites, milk shakes, and a choice of Burger Simple, Burger Fromage, or Burger Big.

“Big Burger, s’il vous plaît,” I said to the girl at the counter.

“You want what?”

“Big Burger,” I repeated.

“Ça n’existe pas,” she said. “That doesn’t exist.” Not that they were out of it or no longer sold it. No, it simply didn’t exist.

I pointed to the menu.

“Alors,” she said, smiling. “You mean Burger Big. I didn’t understand. You see, in French the adjective comes after the noun. You should learn our language.”

“It’s my language!” I bellowed. “‘Burger’ and ‘big’ are English.”

“As you wish,” she muttered.

“That’s what I wish. A Big Burger!”

But I was lying. What I wished was to lay waste to all of France. Where else in the world would one have to endure a lecture on grammar from a fast-food cashier?

***

Of course, the one-o’clock train was late. Of course I arrived at the Country Club quivering with rage, nervous exhaustion, and nausea—the Burger Big had lodged somewhere in my esophagus. But I figured the worst had to be behind me as I settled down to watch the rest of the Borg–Adriano Panatta match, which was knotted at a set apiece and three games all in the third set.

Other members of the press were in no better mood than I. The day was overcast and chilly, yet they had come dressed to work on their tans. Fortunately, I had had the foresight to wear a ski parka.

Borg got a service break, thanks to a double fault by Adriano Panatta. But then, unlike the old Borg, who seldom slipped when he was in the lead, he had difficulty clinging to his advantage. Serving sloppily, he gave Panatta several chances to break back, and if the Italian wasn’t equal to the opportunity, that had less to do with the Swede’s iron will than with Panatta’s poor play.

At the press conference, reporters were interested in Panatta only to the extent that he could comment on Borg’s shaky form. Once they had Borg in front of them, they abruptly shifted gears and were less interested in his form than in whether he would play Wimbledon. For British journalists, this was a favorite subject, their singular obsession.

Although I believed a public press conference was the wrong place to ask whether Borg had rigged a match with McEnroe, there seemed other questions that should have intrigued

journalists more than the odds on his playing Wimbledon. Repeatedly he had recited the short list of Grand Prix tournaments he had deigned to enter in 1982. But I wanted to know how many exhibition matches he would play this year.

As the room turned ominously silent, he fixed upon me what Russell Davies of the London Sunday Times has referred to as “those mutely piercing narrow eyes… I’m sure the Turin Shroud is one of his old towels.” After a significant pause Borg said, “ I have no idea. I play the Suntory Cup in Tokyo. After that, I don’t know.”

“Let’s forget the rest of the year. What’s your exhibition schedule for the next three months?”

“I—have—no—idea.” The words, spaced for emphasis fell on that cowed roomful of journalists like icy slabs from a glacier.

“The next month, then?” I persisted.

“I—have—no—idea.”

As every reporter knew, but few had informed their readers, Borg’s tournament schedule consisted exclusively of events where he had endorsement contracts or where his agents at IMG served as promoters. Whether these constituted illegal inducements or not, they obviously provided an added incentive. I assumed, as did most people in tennis, that that was why Borg was willing to qualify for those seven tournaments, but refused to do so at Roland Garros and Wimbledon, where he had no incentive except the same prize money available to everyone else.

Yet when I asked Borg why he played the qualies here and would again in Las Vegas, but not at the Grand Slam events, he muttered that he had to put his foot down somewhere.

Why didn’t he put it down in Monte Carlo?

“I decided to give the Pro Council until the French Open to change the rule.”

I waited for the other journalists to follow up on my questions. I had broken the ice. All they had to do was dive into the cold water with me. But they were less interested in whether his tax deal locked him into the Monte Carlo tournament than in the shakiness of his first serve.

Borg returned to his orange-juice metaphor. He said he was still feeling deconcentrated.

***

As at most Grand Prix events, there was a tournament for the press in Monte Carlo and I had entered, thinking it would be a welcome diversion. Now I wasn’t so sure. I had yet to recover from the nerve-racking train ride and the nauseating lunch, and my encounter with Borg had done nothing to improve my digestion. Still I decided to go ahead with my match.

Upstairs in the clubhouse, in a room reserved for umpires, ball boys, and journalists, I put on my tennis shorts and shoes. It was an elegant, old-fashioned changing room with oak-paneled walls, wooden benches, and lockers. Since all the lockers were filled, I hung my clothes on a hook, as I had seen others do.

Then I wondered what to do with my watch and wallet. Surely they would be safe here. After all, this was Monte Carlo, cops were ubiquitous, crime was said to be nonexistent, and several officious attendants oversaw the changing room. But finally I dropped my valuables into a racket cover and carried them onto the court.

Two hours later, having been run ragged by a diminutive Japanese photographer, I returned to the changing room and found my clothes in a damp knot on the floor. My pants pockets had been ripped inside out. My ski parka and equipment bag were gone.

Calling one of the attendants, I pointed to the pile of clothes. “I’ve been robbed.”

He was irate—at me, not the thief. “It’s not my fault.”

“I didn’t say it was. But I thought you’d like to know there are robbers in your locker room.”

“I’m not responsible. I can’t watch everything.”

I lacked the energy to argue. After showering and pulling on my disheveled clothes, I went outside, pondering the revelation that crime wasn’t nonexistent in Monte Carlo, just ignored. I stopped by the press room to pick up the transcript of Borg’s press conference. Generally, such transcripts give the essence, if not the entirety, of each question and answer. But the transcript of Borg’s interview contained neither my questions nor his evasive responses.

***

Despite Borg’s erratic performance thus far, few would have predicted what transpired in the quarterfinals. It wasn’t that the Swede played badly. He barely played at all and appeared not to care how lackadaisical he looked. Once a paragon of patience, he now rushed the net behind punchless approach shots. When serving, he usually stuffed the spare ball into his pocket, but today he kept it in his left hand, which made it impossible for him to hit his two-fisted backhand. Yannick Noah had little trouble breaking Borg twice and holding his own serve three times at love.

Yet, even after Borg dropped the first set 6–1, the crowd expected him to rally. They had seen him come back before; they were convinced he could do it again today. So it was doubly upsetting to watch him shamble through the second set, detached and absent-minded. Once he lost track of the score and started to serve from the wrong side. Another time he hit a short lob and, not bothering to wait for Noah to smash it away, he strolled to his chair and sat down. By the end of the match, if he was anxious about anything, it was only to get off the court.

At the press conference Noah sounded as incredulous as the crowd had been. “I could hear him whistling to himself during change-overs. I didn’t know what to think. Was he trying to win?”

In Noah’s opinion, Borg stood no chance of regaining his championship form unless he played more. “Maybe if he plays a lot of exhibitions, that might help, but not as much as tournaments would.”

Bjorn Borg arrived looking as impassive and uncaring as he had on court. Witnesses in the locker room claimed that he had shuffled in whistling and dumped his rackets on the floor. Yet he told reporters he didn’t remember whistling during the match. He couldn’t account for what Noah heard and he didn’t want to discuss it.

No, he wasn’t disappointed. How could he be disappointed, he asked, when “I felt all the time I was outside the match? And when you’re not in a match, you try to do something different. You rush, but you don’t realize you rush. I must be more patient.”

Still, he said, he was satisfied to reach the quarterfinals after such a long layoff. Perhaps it was to demonstrate his satisfaction that he left the press conference whistling.

***

In the past it was rare for Borg to celebrate publicly even after a triumph. So it was nothing short of astounding when he showed up at Jimmy’Z after his calamitous loss to Noah.

In the purple, throbbing prose of Society, a flak magazine published by Société des Bains de Mer, Jimmy’Z is a discothèque “presided over by the ‘Queen of the Night’… Régine herself.” It’s a place “where crazy celebrities can dance until dawn just like the princesses in the fairy tale. …Jimmy’Z is young and fearless, and open to the stars, and all are free to laugh and dance and mix with the rich, the beautiful, and the bizarre, who may be loaded down with precious jewels or covered in magnificent evening gowns; it doesn’t matter, the moonlight performs a strange magic and all the world is young again and we are suddenly and quite inexplicably bewitched.”

Without a doubt, Borg acted bewitched, whether by the disco beat or some basic change in body chemistry, it would be impossible to say. While José Luis Clerc chatted up Princess Stephanie—the Princess appeared to have a crush on Argentinians; earlier in the week she had been observed doing cartwheels beside Vilas’ practice court—Borg preferred to dance with Nastase’s bodyguard, Bambino, who had appropriated a tablecloth and bath towel to dress himself in drag.

The next evening Borg skipped a scheduled appearance at a cocktail party where he was to receive a special award for excellence. He left Monte Carlo and was rumored to have gone to Geneva or Tokyo or Cairo. Wherever he went, he was unreachable. When I called his agents at the International Management Group, I was shunted from person to person until a perky woman with a British accent asked what she could do for me. I said that I had been told by an umpire that he had overheard Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe arranging to split the first two sets of a match to make it more exciting and to fill a television time-slot. Would Borg or the IMG agency care to comment? Still perky, still upbeat and positive, the lady said there would be no comment.

Soon afterward, Borg announced that he wouldn’t play the French Open or Wimbledon. He was canceling his entire schedule of tournament events and would henceforth participate in nothing but exhibitions. In effect, he had become the first of a new breed. Just as players during the shamateur era routinely turned professional as soon as they won a major title that would get them a good contract, Borg had quit the pro tour as soon as it no longer served his purposes. For years competitive tournament tennis had been a minor part of his program, just a form of advertising that kept his price at astronomical levels for commercial endorsements and exhibitions. Now at the age of twenty-six he had decided to devote himself full time to the most lucrative divisions of the sport/ business—marketing and entertainment.

John McEnroe wasn’t any easier to reach than Borg, but his father, John Sr., who served as his lawyer and agent, granted an interview and although he complained that he didn’t have much time to talk to me, he rambled on and on until the cassette on my tape recorder ran out an hour later.

Mr. McEnroe Sr. seemed to have the metabolism of a jockey. As he spoke, he jawed on a stick of chewing gum; he fiddled with a pair of nail clippers; he put his feet up on his desk; he scratched his face; he gestured histrionically with his hands, his left gleaming with a fat gold watch and a ring as big as a walnut; he tugged at his knee-length socks. He was lively as a leprechaun—a hard-bitten leprechaun with a New York accent full of grit and vinegar instead of blarney.

When I told him about the match that his son and Borg were alleged to have rigged, he began to stammer and labor for le mot juste. “I know of no such, uh, I’m not saying, as I said before, it never happened. I know of no such…” He groped for words to describe what he hadn’t known. Leaning back in the chair, he slipped a hand under the waistband of his trousers, reached down and rearranged his private parts. Perhaps he had learned this more from Jimmy Connors. “I’d be inclined to think that’s probably not too likely in John’s case. But, uh, I’m not trying, again, I’m not trying, I’m not commenting on that with respect to John. I just don’t, I don’t know that that’s so. I would doubt it. Although I don’t want to sound naive. I realize that there are times when that may make a certain amount of sense.”

“Why?” I asked.

“If they were doing it from and entertainment-value viewpoint, that may make sense at times. I mean, if it’s something that’s labeled an exhibition and is nothing more than and exhibition. Uh, that may be, uh, not terrible.”

In fact, it wasn’t labeled as an exhibition, but Mr. McEnroe Sr. rushed on with his disclaimer. “As I said, I do not know of it and, uh, in any of the events with which I am associated, which are very few—which are none.” He burst out laughing. “I’m not associated with any of them.” Yet with respect to all those events with which he was not associated, he asserted, “It doesn’t go on. It wouldn’t go on.”

“Would that trouble you legally?” I asked. “I mean, if these matches were broadcast, for example, or televised and something like that was going on?”

Mr. McEnroe’s volubility evaporated and he subsided into silence for several moments. Then he said, “I’ve never given it a moment’s thought, to be perfectly honest with you. I’ve never given it a moment’s thought.”