Deuce!
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Image: Corbis
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CLASH OF THE TITANS Bjorn Borg congratulates John McEnroe for his win at the US Open in 1981
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very time I hear or read a sports-related discussion, I’m reminded of a cartoon I once saw on a Web site. One stick figure says to another, “A weighted random number generator just produced a new batch of numbers.” “Let’s use them to build narratives!” replies the other.
The descriptor at the bottom? “All Sports Commentary.”
Sports fans spend a lot of time building narratives; one can argue that sports-watching wouldn’t be much fun if we didn’t do it. We are all guilty of reading too much into statistics, or tossing off smug statements about this or that player. (Try counting the number of times you’ve heard the remark “He can’t handle pressure”, made about someone who has been ranked in the top 10 of his sport for years.) We think we know what is going on in the head of our favourite player, and we make whimsical connections between athletes who lived decades apart. Even the more balanced, self-aware viewers frequently succumb to the human tendency to see patterns.
Aiding us in this is the sports media, which specialises in creating stories with a dramatic arc (they’d be out of their jobs if they didn’t). So we regularly get headlines about eras ending and batons passing rapidly from one champion to another when, in fact, sports history is more often marked by slow, incremental changes. The careers of top players overlap for long periods; a champion may begin his decline or get overtaken, but then return for a last hurrah when no one expects it. When he entered the 2002 US Open, the once-dominant Pete Sampras had gone 33 tournaments without a title — the ‘Sampras Era’ was well and truly over — but he won that trophy against all expectations. Before him, Jimmy Connors reached the semi-finals of the 1991 USO at the age of 39, eight years after his last Slam win and more than 15 years after his peak. Sporting narratives are rarely cut and dried.
All that said, it’s easy to see why so many tennis experts consider the 1981 US Open historically significant and the end of an important era in the men’s game. It was the last major, or Slam, for Bjorn Borg, who had been the most dominant male player of the previous few years. His rock star-like status had defined the first decade of the Open Era, a period when the sport’s class division came to an end and drastic changes did take place. And Borg’s own career, unlike those of most athletes, ended on a genuinely dramatic note: Shortly after losing the USO final to his younger rival and nemesis John McEnroe, he announced his retirement, aged only 25.
It’s no surprise, then, that Stephen Tignor — one of the best tennis writers at work today — has written a book that focusses on the 1981 USO as the culmination of a dynamic decade, as well as a harbinger of the decade to come. But in looking at the era through the prism of its most celebrated rivalry, Tignor’s High Strung also recognises that the friction between competitors is what makes sporting contests so compelling.
The Borg-McEnroe story had every element you’d want from a dramatic storyline, not least an attention-grabbing contrast in personalities. Anyone familiar with Tignor’s work for Tennis magazine will know that he is a writer with a head for nuance, but even he can’t resist titling the first chapter of his book ‘The Angel and the Brat’, and setting one legendary persona against another: Borg the Ice Man, under whose imperturbable surface burnt hidden fires, versus McEnroe the Superbrat, perpetually on edge, scourge of umpires and genteel viewers. Weaving in and out of this story is the other top player of the time, and the Open Era’s first blue-collar brat, the mercurial Jimmy Connors, who had separate intriguing rivalries with Borg and McEnroe. But there’s no question who the two protagonists are.
There is a temptation in sports writing — particularly in individual sports — to cast major rivals as doppelgangers with an almost mystical bond; players who form an ambivalent relationship as they come to realise that their names will forever be linked.
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