HBO recently aired McEnroe/Borg: Fire and Ice.

I started paying attention to tennis in my early teens at a pivotal time in tennis.  The year was 1982.  Borg had basically retired.  McEnroe was the number one player.  Two players were on the rise: Ivan Lendl and Mats Wilander.  One veteran continued to battle for Slams: Jimmy Connors.

The 1970s were a turbulent period for tennis.  This was the decade that started with the remnants of 60s folk rock, then the pre-metal days of Led Zeppelin, then disco, and ended in the punk movement.  It was also the era where feminists in the US were not branded with the vitriol of the conservative right and there was a push for women to get equal rights.  The workplace routinely paid women less for comparable work to males partly, one assumes, because men didn’t like the idea of women being the breadwinners.

Some of this quest for equality echoed in women’s tennis.  Women were paid much less in tennis than men presumably because fans didn’t watch as much women’s tennis as men’s tennis.  Billie Jean King played wily senior, Bobby Riggs, and beat him in straight sets.  This was the Harding-Kerrigan watershed moment for tennis.  Tennis also had a bevy of colorful personalities that made it compelling to watch.

On the men’s side, there was Bjorn Borg that looked like a Viking god.  With long blond hair, Borg was tennis’s first rock star with adoring throng of women.  The shy Swede was transforming how tennis was played.  The 1960s marked the last golden era of Australian tennis.  Players like Laver, Rosewall, Newcombe, and Roche were at their peak.  However, 1968 marked a change in tennis that would forever change the sport: professional tennis.

Up to that point, only amateurs were allowed to play the Slams: the US, French, and Australian National Championships (they weren’t “open” then) and Wimbledon.  However, amateurs could only make a paltry living staying amateur, so those who could, turned pro.  There might have been fewer than two hundred players that were competing in tennis because of the lack of money.  Once money flowed into tennis, countries that had very little to do with tennis now had an incentive to produce tennis players.

Around that time, there was a technological revolution in tennis.  Manufacturers were experimenting with alternative materials for tennis racquets.  The two most prominent racquets were the Wilson T2000, one of the earliest steel racquets, and the Arthur Ashe Composite racquet which he used to win the 1975 Wimbledon.  These new racquets didn’t begin to supplant wood until a remarkable run to the finals of the US Open by one Pam Shriver.  The tall Baltimorean with curly hair used an oversized Prince aluminum racquet, and players who struggled with tiny, heavy wood racquets switched to the much larger racquet.

In addition to technological changes, there was a style change.  Although players like Cliff Drysdale hit with two hands on the backhand, they were considered oddities.  It was claimed that the reach was so significantly hindered that players were told not to learn the shot.  The real reason may be much simpler: teaching pros didn’t know how to teach a two-handed backhand.

Three players of note put two-handed backhands on the map: Bjorn Borg, Chris Evert, and Jimmy Connors.  It didn’t hurt that all these players spent time at number 1 and were at the top of the game.  Two-handers began sprouting up.  The group of Swedes that followed Borg hit mostly with two-handers: Mats Wilander, Joachim Nystrom, and Anders Jarryd.

It didn’t hurt that many of the top players of the 1970s had personality.  Chris Evert was seen as the wholesome girl next door, and yet her steady play and lack of emotion lead tabloids to call her the “ice queen”.  Her male counterpart was Bjorn Borg.

The story of how Borg got into tennis is legend.  His dad was a table tennis player who won a tournament.  His dad had a choice of many different prizes.  Bjorn begged his father to get a tennis racquet, and Borg began playing tennis shortly thereafter.  Borg was considered a wild teen.  He would yell at people.  He would throw his racquet.  Soon his parents were alerted and banned their son from tennis for six months.  Borg was an angel after that.  It’s not that he didn’t feel those emotions, but that he suppressed it.

Borg would hit against the garages in his apartment complex and would spend hours hitting.  In those days and the years before, players often invented their way of hitting.  Borg combined two sports he was most familiar with: table tennis, which influenced his backhand, and hockey, which influenced his backhand.

Borg didn’t invent topspin, but with his success and Vilas’s success, topspin became hugely important to tennis.  Before that, serve and volley tennis dominated.  The Continental grip was king.  Although a player like Rod Laver used the topspin backhand to great success, the topspin style was beginning to change how tennis would be played and it would become the solution to the big technological transformation in tennis: the graphite racquet.

McEnroe, by contrast, was the temperamental genius.  He was taught under the tutelage of Harry Hopman.  Hopman created the Australian juggernaut that dominated tennis in the 1950s and 1960s, but he recognized that Americans had to be good at tennis for tennis to flourish, so he moved to the US and created academies.  Hopman treated the emotional McEnroe with kid gloves afraid that discipline would extinguish the genius.

McEnroe was inspired by the great Aussies, Rod Laver most notably.  McEnroe had great touch, a weird serve born from a back issue, where he literally put his back to the net, and corkscrewed his way to one of the best lefty slice serves in the game.  Mac hit with a Continental grip and took shots off the rise.

In a way, McEnroe was the last of the old style of tennis and perhaps the most gifted.  Jimmy Connors was a kind of weird hybrid of old and new.  His two-handed backhand allowed him to hit hard, flat shots like no one that ever played.  Most players had to slice off their backhand and the backhand would be something of a liability except everyone came to net.  Borg was the start of a new way of playing tennis, and although Borg played with traditional wood during his career, it was the way to handle the power of modern racquets that transformed the sport in the early 1980s.

The HBO special focuses primarily on their relationship.  McEnroe was associated with Connors and Lendl, but he was not especially close to either player.  Connors was a loner, a rebel, and didn’t particularly care for John McEnroe.  They respected each other, but they weren’t friends.  Lendl, the father of modern tennis, picked up some of McEnroe’s surly mood.  His style was considered robotic, but his powerful style and his fastidious attention to detail changed how players prepared and played tennis.  Again, Lendl and Mac had respect but weren’t good friends.

While Borg was very good from the get-go, even being asked to play Davis Cup at the age of 15, McEnroe had one singular moment early in his career.  In 1977, McEnroe became the first qualifier to reach the semis of Wimbledon.  A bit like Sampras, McEnroe’s career would not quite catch fire right away.  He did reach the semis of the US Open in 1978, but lost in the opening round of Wimbledon that same year.

Borg wouldn’t meet McEnroe for the first time until 1978 in Stockholm.  McEnroe would win that match.  Borg would win their next encounter at Richmond.  In New Orleans, their third match, McEnroe would blow up as he was wont to do.  Borg would approach McEnroe and tell him to relax, it’s just a game.  McEnroe went on to win that match, but McEnroe would see this as a moment that Borg cared about Mac.  Mac had looked up to Borg admiring his ability to attract women.  He would try to imitate Borg’s look but where Borg had nice wavy blond hair, McEnroe’s hair was curly and unruly and it looked like he spent one minute putting on his headband where Borg would labor ten minutes to make his hair look just so.

Their names would inextricably be linked when the two played a marathon fourth set tiebreak in 1980.  Borg would have match points.  McEnroe would have set points.  McEnroe would win the set when Borg dumped a volley into the net.  Mac would win the tiebreak 18 points to 16.

Borg then lost the first two points of his serve in the fifth set.  After losing such a tiebreak, Borg thought he might lose.  But he regained control, and served well.  This was where Borg’s fitness won out.  McEnroe’s fitness was nowhere to modern players.  He didn’t like to practice and used doubles to keep sharp.  By the end, McEnroe was very tired and eventually lost the fifth set, 8-6.

McEnroe would eventually beat Borg at a Slam, later that year at the US Open, in five sets.  Mac then won Wimbledon and the US Open over Borg in 1981.  Borg went on sabbatical and retired shortly thereafter.

At the time, the speculation was that Borg couldn’t stand losing to McEnroe and needed a break.  But, Borg claims the real reason was that he was burned out.  Tennis is a solitary sport.  Borg had given up a great deal to be the best player in the world.  Unlike team sports where you have teammates that are going through what you are going through, Borg was mostly alone.

Borg did change tennis in one unusual way.  Because he was a teen, Borg traveled with his coach, Lennart Bergelin, who was part coach, part manager, part bodyguard.  At the time, almost no players had traveling coaches.  Vilas would travel with Ion Tiriac.  Eventually, coaches became fairly common.  Lendl worked with Wojtek Fibak then with Tony Roche.

The special talked about how McEnroe kept in touch with Borg even after Borg retired.  At one point, Borg had sold his Wimbledon trophies.   He had had various controversies.  He split up with his first wife.  He dated a Swedish teen model.  Some thought he tried to kill himself with sleeping pills.  He had problems with his initial business.  McEnroe would continue to play until about 1992, but he never won another Slam after 1984.

Patrick McEnroe recalls how his brother said he’d never play the seniors when he was on tour, but he did play, and played Borg in the early 1990s.  He felt John missed Borg and although the rivalry wasn’t the same, it was a way to reconnect with a rival that left the game too soon.  Borg did try a comeback but he was in his 30s, and he played with wood racquets.  He wasn’t able to deal with the power in the game (which is nothing like it is today) and wasn’t in the same shape he was as a pro.

There’s probably no two pros today that are as close today.  I think Federer is nice, but keeps a distance.  It’s hard to say if Nadal is really close to anyone.  Djokovic gets along with lots of people, but everyone seems to have their own entourage.  The days of McEnroe and Borg were more innocent.  Today, everyone is managed to an inch of their lives.

There’s one particularly amusing moment in the documentary.  Borg and McEnroe are at Wimbledon.  Borg admits that if McEnroe had broken him in that first game of the fifth set of the 1980 Wimbledon finals, he probably would have won.  McEnroe goes “arg”, knowing how important that break would have been.  Borg then adds “but you didn’t break me!”.

The two had a laugh.  When the skills have faded, and both have had long lives doing other things, what remains are memories and friendship.