Ad In Ad Out: Collected Tennis Articles of Michael Mewshaw 1982-2015. Michael Mewshaw
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.”
ITALIAN OPEN: CAMPARI AND COMPLEXITY
The seasons in Rome sometimes advance so slowly, so subtly, that their changes can’t be felt any more than can the rotation of the earth. Only the effect, not the process, is perceptible. On a morning in late May one is apt to wake and abruptly realize that another spring is about to pass into summer, and one gets an overwhelming urge to hurry outdoors and seize the day.
Some head for the beaches at Ostia, others settle for a stroll in the Borghese Gardens. Setting out on my own annual rite of spring, I snake my way up the Tiber, swept along by a tidal wave of traffic that thunders beneath a colonnade of plane trees. Leaving the historical center of the city, I cross the river and arrive at the Foro Italico, site of the Italian Open tennis tournament.
A fair club player myself and a frequent commentator on the foibles of that curious subculture, the international tennis circuit, I attend the Italian Open every year, partly to watch the matches, primarily to witness—and participate in—the far more fascinating spectacle that swirls around the periphery of the courts. If a city as multilayered and complex as Rome can be said to have a microcosm, then the Italian Open is it, for the tournament compresses into a single week the essential elements of a 2,700-year-old metropolis that calls itself eternal, yet displays the frenetic energy of a fruit fly living only for a moment. All the Roman hallmarks are here—dazzling color and motion, dense golden light, copious food and wine, high fashion and low comedy, spontaneous friendship and rabid nationalism, grace under fire and ham-handed evocations of a real and imagined past.
Approaching the Foro Italico, one receives conflicting impressions of order and anarchy. The order is entirely architectural and not very interesting