‘I tried to escape with drugs, pills and alcohol’: Björn Borg on his misery and mayhem after quitting tennis | Tennis

‘I’m a person who doesn’t say very much,” Björn Borg says with a wry smile. Which may be the understatement of the century. Borg, the greatest tennis player of his day, has spent 42 years saying nothing since he announced his retirement at the age of 26.

When he broke that news in 1983, it was one of the biggest shocks in the history of sport. Not simply because he was at his peak, but also because he was the rock star tennis player – beautiful, mysterious and followed by a flock of teenybopper fans. When Spain’s Carlos Alcaraz triumphed in the US Open earlier this month, aged 22, he became the second youngest player to have won six major tournaments. Borg beat him by four months.

Björn Borg in Stockholm last month. Photograph: Rebecka Uhlin/The Guardian

Borg was actually only 25 when he stopped playing major tournaments in 1981. That season, he had appeared in three of the four grand slam finals, winning the French Open and losing at Wimbledon and the US Open. In total he won Wimbledon men’s singles five times in a row (a record matched only by Roger Federer) and six French opens.

And then he was gone, without a word. Borg devotees were traumatised. But perhaps they shouldn’t have been surprised at the lack of an explanation. The Swede was the samurai of tennis – immensely strong, disciplined and virtually silent. The “Ice Borg” never showed emotion on court, but many of us assumed there was a tumult roaring inside. And so it proved.

At the age of 69 he has finally written his memoir, Heartbeats, and it answers every question we’ve been asking for the best part of half a century. It contains revelation after revelation, and is all the more shocking for the understated style in which it is written. Drugs, alcohol, despair, near-fatal overdoses, failed relationships, shame and self-imposed exile: for any Borg fan – and I was a huge one, growing up – it’s a painful read.

We’re talking via video link. He’s in Stockholm at his publisher’s offices. His hair is now grey, but still luxuriant. He looks super-fit, partly because of an exercise regime so batty that only Borg could come up with it. From the off, he tells me how much he disliked talking in the old days. This accounts for the fact that so few TV interviews exist of him (you won’t have to look hard to find footage of rivals such as Jimmy Connors or John McEnroe, or, from the women’s game, Martina Navratilova and Billie Jean King). Borg tried his hand at commentary, but that proved a short-lived career when he just sat there in silence.

“I’m a very secret person,” he says. “And I’m a very stubborn person.” That stubbornness, or discipline, was at the heart of his success – never giving up, never giving in to emotion, never giving into temptation. It was also at the heart of his failings – refusing to mix with his old tennis friends after he quit, refusing to use the new turbocharged rackets when he briefly returned in 1991 (which meant he had zero chance of winning) and refusing to explain why he retired in the first place.

So why has he decided to tell his story now? “It’s been bothering me for many years. People know me as a tennis player, but not what I went through. The decisions I took in my life were stupid, so I wanted to tell that story.” It’s so Borg-like that he feels the need to own his stupidity rather than his success. But, he says, he knew he couldn’t tell his story to a stranger, and he didn’t feel capable of telling it himself.

Borg and his wife, Patricia Östfeld, watch their son Leo Borg playing against Australia’s Aleksandar Vukic in Stockholm earlier this year. Photograph: Jonas Ekstromer/TT News Agency/AFP/Getty Images

A few years ago he asked his third wife, Patricia Östfeld, whom he has been with for 23 years, if she would help him write the book. “I was very happy she said yes because if she hadn’t this book would never have come out. I would have taken my story to the grave. She said, ‘What d’you want to put in it?’ and I said, ‘Everything. I want to be open.’”

Borg adored tennis in the early days – not just the success, but the game itself. But by 25 he was burnt out. “Up to that point I was entirely focused on my tennis. I was eating, sleeping, practising, playing matches. And I loved it. I had a great time.” So what happened? “I lost my motivation.”

Borg with his first wife, the Romanian tennis player Mariana Simionescu, in 1983. Photograph: Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

By the end, his desire had gone, he was depressed and had become divorced from his roots. He moved away from Sweden and was living as a tax exile in Monte Carlo. Borg was a hero to some in Sweden, and a tax-dodging traitor to others. He and his first wife, the Romanian tennis player Mariana Simionescu, were catnip for the world’s media – young, gorgeous and clearly in love. But their relationship changed. She gave up the sport to look after Borg’s career and ended up more of a mother figure to him than a partner. At the 1981 US Open, the last major he competed in, he received death threats before and during the final. After losing the match, he was escorted off court by security before the awards ceremony.

Did the death threats contribute to his decision to quit? “No, they had nothing to do with it,” he insists. The real reason, he says, is that he felt he no longer had a life. “In hotels when I checked in there were at least 100 people in reception wanting autographs. If I went to a restaurant there would be 15 photographers outside waiting and following me. In the end, when I was playing I just stayed in my room. I ate in my room. I didn’t go out. This is why I stepped away from tennis. I thought: ‘Is this going to be my life in the future?’ That was the reason I said enough is enough.”

Sports people today prepare themselves for life after sport. They have agents, they have people who guide them. I had no one. I did everything by myself

The first year of freedom was great, he says. He did exactly what he wanted, and loved it. He moved to America, lived on Long Island, New York, and partied. And then he partied some more. But he realised something was lacking – the buzz that tennis had given him. In the summer of 1982, he was introduced to cocaine. “I said to myself, ‘Oh, this is a different feeling. This is a different thing.’” In Heartbeats (so called because Borg has an exceptionally low resting heart rate of 32-34 beats per minute, and also a reference to a time he nearly died after overdosing), he writes: “I got the same kind of rush I got from tennis. The feeling itself was new, and it made me feel incredibly energised. I was hooked immediately.”

The trouble was, Borg says now, he had nothing to fill his life with. “I was happy to step away from tennis, I could do anything, but I didn’t have a plan.” He was still struggling with depression. “It comes to a point where you ask yourself, ‘OK, what do I do now to be happy? To have joy, to feel good about myself, to feel good about life? I want to have the same satisfaction I had when I played tennis.’ I was lost. That’s why sports people today prepare themselves for life after sport. They have agents, they have people who guide them in the right way. I had no one, and I did everything by myself.”

With his son Robin in Monaco in 1988. Photograph: Patrick Siccoli/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

And he did it the wrong way. He started taking more cocaine, mixing it with uppers and downers and booze. He and Simionescu divorced in 1984, and in 1985 he fathered a son, Robin, with the Swedish model Jannike Björling. He says Robin was the only good thing that happened to him in the 1980s. But he was in no state to be a good father, and was lurching from relationship to relationship, usually before the previous one had finished. He continued to party hard. But the way he tells it, it sounds like the most miserable party on Earth. “When you feel bad you try to escape. I tried to escape with drugs, pills and a lot of alcohol. I was looking for something; I didn’t know what, though. So using these things, you don’t have to think about your problems.”

When did he realise it was harming him? “In 1989, when I took the decision to start to play tennis again. I knew I couldn’t continue to live a life like this. I needed to find something else.”

Was he an addict? “Put it this way: I wasn’t doing drugs, pills and alcohol every night. So not in that way.” But it was still enough to devastate his life. This was the year he married the Italian singer Loredana Bertè, moved to Milan and “life turned into a chaotic mess” – more drugs, a dysfunctional marriage, a young son based overseas in Sweden, and the bankruptcy of his fashion business, the Björn Borg design group. Despite keeping physically fit through running and the gym (he was obsessive about maintaining his matchplay weight), he was destroying himself.

I wondered, ‘Did I really play this sport before?’ I played so bad, it was ridiculous

In 1989, unsubstantiated stories emerged that he had tried to kill himself. Borg says this was untrue. Although he was in despair and no longer saw the point in living (in the book he writes: “I just thought: I can’t take this any more. I’m done”), he never actively tried to end his life. But that February an accidental overdose almost did for him. When Bertè couldn’t wake him, she called an ambulance. It saved his life.

But he hadn’t learned his lesson. Once he recovered, it was back to the drugs, pills and alcohol. Eventually, he realised that he had to make a complete break – from Bertè, Milan and a lifestyle that was devouring him. In 1990, for the first time in eight years, he picked up a racket. “I wondered, ‘Did I really play this sport before?’ I played so bad, it was ridiculous. Then I told myself, ‘I’m not doing this to be a tennis player, I’m not doing this to win tournaments – I’m doing this for a different reason.’” He moved to London, went into rehab and began practising at Queen’s Club. Amazingly, this never made it into the newspapers.

Then, in 1991, at the age of 34 and almost a decade after quitting, he announced he was coming out of retirement. That was when he returned with his tiny relic of a wooden racket. His professional comeback was as ludicrous as it was poignant. In April, he played at the Monte Carlo ATP tournament. Friends told him he should choose a smaller, less glitzy event. But this was Borg. Of course he ignored them. He played Jordi Arrese, a Spaniard ranked 52nd in the world, and lost 6-2, 6-3.

Borg celebrates defeating Jan Kodes of Czechoslovakia during their men’s singles match to win the Davis Cup for Sweden in December 1975. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images

He says the Monte Carlo match was one of his happiest days on a tennis court, ranking it alongside his fifth successive Wimbledon triumph when he beat McEnroe after the famous tie-break (which he lost 18-16) and the defeat of Jan Kodes in 1975 to win the Davis Cup for Sweden when he was 19. “Afterwards, I’m sitting in the back seat of the car and my parents are in the front, and they see me and they say, ‘You look so happy.’ Yes, I was so happy and satisfied. It was a wonderful moment coming after all the things I had been through. Sitting in the car, I was so satisfied that I’d done this thing. I felt, ‘I’m back in life. Finally I’m back in life.’ Only my parents knew the real reason why I came back to tennis. No one else.”

What was that reason? He takes me back to his final days in Milan. “I told myself if I continued with this sort of life I’m not going to survive. If I had continued, you and me, we would not be talking to each other today. So I said, ‘I need to do something that makes me happy, something that makes me feel comfortable with myself. I need to wake up in the morning to do something and have a schedule. I need to do something in life to survive.’ So I said to myself, ‘Yes, I’m going to start to play tennis again.’”

So you didn’t come back to win – you came back to stay alive? “Yes,” he says quietly. “To stay alive, exactly.” Between 1991 and 1993, he played 12 professional matches and lost every one. But it didn’t matter to him. He was surviving.

The one guy who called me all the time and said, ‘You cannot quit, you cannot retire from tennis,’ was John McEnroe.

I ask him what he said to his fellow players after he retired initially. “I didn’t keep in touch with the players,” he says. “When I left tennis, I left all my friends. I left everything. Everything. And that was a huge mistake. I went into a different crowd, people who weren’t interested in sport. That’s why I started with drugs and pills and drinking.”

You had so many friends, I say. He nods. “Yes, so many.” Did they try to stop you? “The one guy who called me all the time and said, ‘You cannot quit, you cannot retire from tennis,’ was John McEnroe. He called me so many times. ‘What are you doing? I want to play you so many times. Björn. How can you leave tennis? You’re not even 26 years old,’ John said to me. ‘I’m sorry, John, I’ve taken this decision.’ He was very disappointed. Very sad.”

John McEnroe and Borg before their finals match at the 1981 US Open tennis championships, which McEnroe won. Photograph: PCN Photography/Alamy

It makes sense. McEnroe was his greatest rival. They were opposites in style and temperament – Borg Zen and patiently overpowering his opponent; McEnroe feral and predatory on court. Tennis star Arthur Ashe said Borg was a sledgehammer of a player while McEnroe was a stiletto. The 2017 biopic Borg vs McEnroe is about their rivalry, and culminates in the Wimbledon final of 1980, regarded as one of the finest matches in tennis history. The film depicts Borg in his relentless intensity – travelling with 50 rackets, testing their tension by listening to the notes produced by the strings, never shaving and always wearing the identical Fila Settanta polo shirt at Wimbledon. The schoolboy Borg was played by his younger son Leo, from his marriage with Östfeld, today a 22-year-old tennis professional. Borg says Sverrir Guðnason’s depiction of his older self was a little too dour, even for him.

Borg vs McEnroe recreates the scene in which they earned each other’s respect (albeit in a different match from the one where it actually happened). In 1979, Borg had just beaten McEnroe in Richmond, Virginia, and a week later was beating him again in New Orleans. “He was going completely crazy on the court. You would think this guy is coming out of the mental hospital,” he says. “So I said to John, ‘Can you come to the net?’ and he looked at me as if I was crazy. He came slowly to the net and said, ‘What d’you want?’ and I said, ‘It’s only a game, John,’ and again he looked at me like I’m crazy. So we went on playing. I had match point, and he won the match. After that everything changed. I respected him so much. And then all the matches we played after that he never said a word. But then when he played other players he could be a little complicated on the court, if you put it that way.”

They renewed their friendship when Borg returned to tennis, and McEnroe was best man at his wedding in 1997. I say I think the two of them got on so well because they were opposites. “Yes, exactly.” You reminded me of a Bergman character when you played, I say – impassive on the outside, with a torrent of emotions raging internally. He laughs. “Yeah, you’re right, absolutely.” But he says it used to be different. As a boy, the rage was there for everybody to see. “When I was 12 they suspended me for six months in my home town. My parents’ tennis club had a meeting because I was behaving so badly on court, swearing, throwing rackets, cheating. Very, very bad. They said, ‘It’s embarrassing for this guy to walk on the court; it’s embarrassing for us.’ When they suspended me I was destroyed.”

Borg on his way to defeating McEnroe in the men’s final of the Wimbledon Championships with a score of 1–6, 7–5, 6–3, 6–7 (16–18), 8–6 on 5 July 1980. Photograph: Colorsport/Shutterstock

The young Borg was almost as good at ice hockey as tennis. “I played ice hockey in that time, but I couldn’t play tennis. When I came back I didn’t say a word because I was scared that if I showed my feelings again they might suspend me again. That was my first step in my behaving on the court. I was boiling inside, but I didn’t say anything. Then I told myself I had to learn to behave in a good professional way on the tennis court. It took a couple of years for me to understand what to do and not to do. After two or three years I was no longer boiling inside – I knew exactly how to behave. I was thinking, ‘Focus on the next point and then the next point’ until one day I was perfect. I knew exactly how to behave on the tennis court.”

That’s when he became the samurai? “In a way, yes.” The closest he got to showing emotion mid-game was blowing on his knuckles while waiting to receive serve. When he won major titles, all that pent-up feeling would pour out as he fell to his knees at the moment of victory.

After he lost in the 1980 Wimbledon final to McEnroe, he didn’t return until the centenary tournament of 2000. Every year, we would see former winners take their seat of honour on finals day, but Borg was always conspicuous by his absence. The commentators never mentioned his non-attendance, as if it was too painful to acknowledge. At times, it felt as if the spectre of Borg hovered over Wimbledon.

As a businessman in Monaco, March 1983. Photograph: Alain Mingam/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

The real turning point in his recovery came not when he returned to the professional circuit but when Jimmy Connors launched the senior Champions tour in 1993. Borg knew it was pointless trying to beat the new generation, even with a modern racket. But he believed he could hold his own against his former peers. “The first year we had three or four tournaments and then it grew more and more. It was perfect for me to play in the senior tournaments, and people were really interested in seeing our generation – me, John, Jimmy, [Guillermo] Vilas, Vitas [Gerulaitis, who had been his best friend on the circuit and died from carbon monoxide poisoning owing to an improperly installed propane heater aged 40 in 1994]. I started to slowly get back into the tennis.” He even won five of the tournaments.

But most importantly, returning to the fold was part of his recuperation. “I started to talk a lot to the other players, even if I had some relapses in the 90s. They knew what I’d been through because I spoke a little bit to them about that too.” He had now moved to Los Angeles and was spending time at the Playboy founder Hugh Hefner’s mansion. “The place was full of temptations of every kind, and it was hard to say no,” Borg writes in the book.

I fell down, and the next thing I knew I was was waking up in hospital with tubes in me

Despite this, the media still never really got hold of his story. (The closest he came to being exposed was in 1990 when a Swedish magazine quoted Jannike Björling saying he used cocaine. He sued and won about £6,700 in damages.) That’s surely a sign of how loyal your fellow players were to you, I say. Yes, partly, he says, but it’s also because it was a different age. These days, if he was seen drunk or stoned, he thinks it would probably be on social media within hours.

Fan favourite … Borg at Wimbledon in 1973. Photograph: Harry Dempster/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

His worst relapse occurred in 1993 and resulted in another near-fatal overdose. He struggles to talk about it because he is so ashamed of what happened. Borg was with his father in Holland for an exhibition tournament. The previous night he had been at a party, drugs were there for the taking, and he weakened. “My father and I were walking to the club to play the final of this exhibition tournament. And I said to him, ‘I don’t feel too good. I don’t think I can make this.’ My father said, ‘Just take it easy.’ Then I fell down on the ground, and the next thing I knew I was was waking up in hospital with tubes in me. My father told me the ambulance came very quickly, and the doctor said, ‘You were very close to dying.’ That was probably the worst thing I ever did. It was terrible. When I woke up in the hospital I saw my father in front of me, and I was so embarrassed. When we flew home to Stockholm we didn’t say a word to each other. He was disappointed, sad, and I’m sure he was angry too.”

The relapses became less frequent, and were never again as extreme. In 1999, he met Patricia, an estate agent. He got clean that year and has remained so ever since. In 2000, he returned to Wimbledon for a special parade at the Millennium Championships. The former champions were introduced to the crowd one by one. Nobody got a roar like Borg did.

‘It was such a relief when I came back to Wimbledon. I feel at home there. I feel comfortable’ … Borg, right, with Boris Becker, left, and McEnroe marking Wimbledon’s Millenium Championships in 2000. Photograph: Gerry Penny/AFP/Getty Images

Perhaps the saddest thing in the book, I say, is when you write that you stayed away from Wimbledon for so long because you were ashamed of what had become of you. “It’s true. They invited me all the time, but I didn’t feel comfortable. The way I’d been living, what had happened, all these things. But then one day soon after I met Patricia, I said, ‘Now I feel ready to go back to my favourite tournament.’ And I’ve been back almost every year since then. It was such a relief when I came back to Wimbledon. I feel at home there. I feel comfortable.”

A 90s magazine advert for Borg’s underwear brand. Photograph: Retro AdArchives/Alamy

There are still testing times. He struggles with seasonal affective disorder, and knows that every autumn a mild depression will creep in. So now he spends these months in Ibiza where old tennis friends visit (including Boris Becker, who was jailed for financial misconduct related to bankruptcy fraud, with whom he bonds over the bad choices they’ve made).

But over the past 20 years, he has enjoyed a new stability as a husband, father, now grandfather, entrepreneur (part of his business was bought out of bankruptcy by another company, rebranded as the Björn Borg Collection, and has made him wealthy once again from the royalties), captain of Sweden’s Davis Cup team and ageing former tennis giant. In 2014, he was voted Sweden’s top sportsman of all time by the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, which meant a huge amount to him.

‘I’m so much lighter now’ … Borg in Stockholm. Photograph: Rebecka Uhlin/The Guardian

At the end of the book, just as we’re anticipating the perfect happy ending, he reveals that he was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer a couple of years ago. It comes as a shock, like so much in Heartbeats. In 2024, he was operated on. “A few days after the operation the surgeon said, ‘This was really, really bad. But you’re OK.’” He is dealing with it as calmly as you’d imagine the samurai of the 70s would have. “I have these sleeping cancer cells in my body. They could be sleeping for many years, but they could come out and give me problems. I just have to wait and see. I have to go back for six-monthly checks. Right now I feel good, no problem.”

The cancer has done nothing to dampen his extreme fitness regime. Of all his revelations, perhaps the most astonishing is that he walks 12 miles (20km) a day around the TV couch in his Stockholm apartment. He can’t be serious? “Yep. I can think in that time.” He writes that Patricia can get “really annoyed” when she’s trying to relax with him and he suddenly gets up and starts walking.

You’re bonkers, I say. He nods happily. Then I confess that I run around my living room (not 20km, I hasten to add). He laughs. “You do that? You’re like me! We’re the same! Haha! That’s good to hear.” What’s more, I say, when I played tennis as a teenager, I used to wear a headband like yours and blow on my knuckles when waiting to receive serve. “Oh, you did that with the hand, like I used to do?” Again, he laughs. It’s so lovely to see – the one thing we never saw in his playing years.

Rarely has an interview left me so emotional. Partly it’s my age and what Borg means to me. But you’d need a heart of stone not to be moved by somebody who’s been through so much and has finally made peace with himself. Being able to talk about everything seems to have liberated you, I say. “Yes,” he says. And now his smile verges on the ecstatic. “Yes, I’ve got my backpack off my back. Liberated, exactly, that’s the word.” He exhales loudly. “I’m so much lighter now.”

Heartbeats: A Memoir by Björn Borg is published by Sphere (£25). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply