Sport: The Tennis Machine

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disputed a linesman's calls, unleashed grimaces, tossed racquets or bashed balls. "Iceborg" they called him. In an era when tennis was turning from a game of gentlefolk to a showcase for the antics of ill-mannered Nastases, petulant Connorses and adolescent McEnroes, Borg seemed right out of Boy's Life—Goody Twoshoes with a tennis racquet.

Is Borg too good to be true? Maybe, but once he was too bad to believe. At eleven young Bjorn cursed like a navvy, hurled his racquet, hectored officials and bellyached over every close call. "I was crazy, a madman on the court. It was awful. Then the club I belonged to suspended me for five months, and my mother, she took my racquet and locked it in the closet. For five months, she locked up my racquet. After that I never opened my mouth again on the tennis court. Since the day I came back from that suspension, no matter what happened, I behaved on the court."

When Borg was 14, he started to travel extensively with a junior squad of Sweden's Davis Cup hopefuls. At 15, in his first match against a professional, he defeated New Zealand's Onny Parun, 25. A good student (4.4 average on a 5.0 scale), he left high school at age 16 to turn pro. Today he possesses one of the world's most famous lucky-charm beards, his annual Wimbledon growth, but he wasn't old enough to shave the first time someone approached him for an autograph. "I was 14 and I was so proud when they asked. But every time I signed my name, it looked different. I was so embarrassed. I was only 14 and I couldn't get it right twice in a row. So I practiced signing my name until I finally had an autograph."

Before Borg was old enough to get a driver's license in Sweden, his ground strokes had earned him recognition as one of the world's premier clay-court players. But his baseline style and his weak serve and volley made him a less effective player on the fast surfaces of grass and artificial outdoor and indoor courts. He caused teeny-bopper riots when he first came to Wimbledon in 1973 at age 17. But he bowed out, undone on the speedy grass.

Then at 20 Borg underwent a transformation. In six weeks he changed his life and his game. The first part was easy: he fell in love. At the French Open in Paris, he called Rumania's young tennis hope, Mariana Simionescu, and invited her to dinner. They had enjoyed a nodding acquaintance at tournaments, but Borg decided to try to improve on that. "He told me I was the first girl he ever called for a date," Mariana remembers. "He had a girlfriend when he was a boy in Sweden, but I was the first girl he ever had asked out formally. We went out to eat, then we walked around Montmartre, just like all the rest of the tourists."

Borg won the French Open, then left for London to practice on grass courts. He had been close to only one person other than his parents, Lennart Bergelin. The coach was anxious for Borg to concentrate on improving his game, and Borg was willing. But the young man, who had limited his long-distance telephoning to habitual every-other-day calls to his parents, was also anxious to locate Mariana. "I was playing a tournament in Scotland," she says. "Somehow he found me. We talked and talked."

But Bergelin had his way, too. In order to win at Wimbledon, Borg had to improve his