QUITTING TIME –
September 18, 2025 – “I’m a person who doesn’t say very much,” Björn Borg says with a wry smile. 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.
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.
