The saddest sight in sport is to observe a marvellous athlete not so much go into decline as suddenly burn out before one’s eyes. In almost seven decades of passionate association with sport – forty years as competitor and all that time and still continuing as avid spectator – I have watched a long line of sportsmen falter and fade from glory, and it is always a melancholy thing to behold. But nothing is sadder than the burnt-out case – the sudden and comprehensive collapse of morale and will leading to surrendering all that had meant everything previously.
The most tragic example of burn-out in sport that I can remember was that of Bjorn Borg, the great tennis player and Wimbledon champion, who suddenly retired in January, 1983, at the age of 26.What happened to him remains deeply instructive. It shows that beneath the glamour the soul can be destroyed. Ask Michael Jackson, ask Whitney Houston, just before they died.
In one of Graham Greene’s famous novels the chief character is a man who has been ravaged beyond repair. He is drained of all energy, hope, enthusiasm, ambition, and any joy in living. He has become a mere husk of a man. His life has made him a burnt-out case.
When Bjorn Borg retired prematurely the character in Graham Greene’s book flashed across the mind. Here was a man still full of youth, healthy and strong and wealthy beyond the dream of avarice, a hero of his times, and yet something had eaten out the core of him and left him a burnt-out case.
Borg remains a fascinating example of what the pressures of modern sport can do to a man. To the ordinary spectator big-time sport is bound to seem infinitely glamorous and its stars among the most enviable of mortals. There they are – rich and famous, receiving daily the adulation of the crowd, moving always in an aura of money, power and glorious publicity. What then is the canker in the rose? What ate the heart out of Bjorn Borg? Why did he visit a monastery in the Himalayan kingdom of Katmandu when he should still have been playing in grand slam championships?
That is not easy to answer – just as it is not easy to say why Marilyn Munroe, lapped in luxury and fame, one fine night decided to end her life with a box of pills; just as it is hard to tell why the young Thomas Merton, with a whole world of females, fun, and frolicking at his disposal took it into his head to become a Trappist monk for the rest of his amazing life. In the case of Borg, let us try to see why he suddenly felt this hollow in his heart.
For a start, there was perhaps an element of frustration that he had not achieved greater success. This may seem a strange thing to say of a man whose record of 5 successive Wimbledon Singles victories between 1976 and 1981 and 6 French Championships between 1974 and 1981 is unequalled in the annals of the game and is quite enough to ensure him everlasting sporting fame. However, Borg himself must have known that there was a serious reservation about his place in the all-time tennis pantheon. Unlike all the other great champions, he never won the US Singles Championship, despite 10 attempts. That is a failure that must have rankled in him bitterly. I think in his own heart anyway Borg sensed that for all his glory he had not quite scaled the heights he set himself.
However, I do not think this sense of comparative failure, when measured by the standard of tennis immortality, can have been the deepest cause of the burning out of Bjorn Borg. No, deep down in this man, I believe, had come the despair that comes to many men who drive themselves with a fierce single-mindedness towards some Holy Grail, only to find their victory turn to water falling through their figures while grasping for the prize. The honey as they sip leaves a taste of ashes on the lips. It is said when Alexander the Great had conquered all the known world at the age of 33 he sulked and lingered in his tent and nothing would amuse him. It came to Borg, that feeling of dissatisfied boredom, the final zero at the heart of all material things. He knew now the emptiness of ambition, the hollowness of fame, and the more driving the ambition, and the greater the fame, the more devastating would be the ultimate disillusion.
Borg’s precociousness probably also deepened the disillusion. He was the first of the teenage prodigies to emerge from the era of Open tennis. As a result he could aspire to become famous and fabulously wealthy as a teenager if only he could drive himself hard enough to excel in relentlessly intense competition. This he did, but by doing so he ran the risk of burning out at an age when, in the old days, ambition was still a consuming flame. The flame did indeed die at a very early age. The relentless grind of practice and expected performance wore his soul’s edge to an awful dullness. He heard the fatal whisper that all champions come to hear: even these, Oh Lord of Victories, even these will pass away, your riches, your glory and your prizes, even these, they too will pass away.
Some years ago a team of women mountaineers conquered the famous peak of Annapurna and were much acclaimed and feted for their great deed. At the chief reception to honour them the leader or the team said at the end of her speech of thanks some words which every sporting champion should always bear in mind. She said very simply:
“You never conquer a mountain. You stand on the summit a few moments, then the wind blows your footprints away.”
Poor Bjorn Borg! At an age when most men are just girding up their loins for the main ascent, he had already reached his summit. And then he watched with a burnt-out heart the wind begin to blow and his famous footprints fade.
And the sadness continued. After the days of greatness Borg woke up in a terrible void. His ex-wife said: “He wanted to have another life but he’d say all the time ‘What am I going to do now?’” He drifted around, went out with the night people, womanized, married an aging Italian rock singer who took to threatening to kill him or herself. He ventured into business deals and was taken for many rides. He himself took an overdose of pills and said it was food poisoning.
The only thing he ever truly knew was playing tennis, so he returned to that, trying to make a come-back. Boris Becker, who played with him shook his head and said “He hits with no druck,” using the German word for pressure, power. Borg tried to make up for that by putting himself in the hands of Tia Honsai, ne Ron Thatcher, a 79-year old Welshman and self-proclaimed specialist in the martial arts and in the sleep-inducing massage known as shiatsu.
Self-delusion. Sadness. Borg thought he would return to what once had been when he seemed immortal. He practised hard, he grew his blond hair long again and bound it as of old; he chose again the old wooden racket he once had used and asked Grays of Cambridge to custom-make 60 copies. It would all be again what it once was before the agony started.
In his first come-back match he was demolished by a young Spaniard ranked 52 in the world. The great man’s serve was a powder-puff. The great forehand was a halting half-swing. A sense of doom was in the air at Monte Carlo. At the match French spectators murmured a telling phrase: “la mer s’est elevee avec les pleurs.”
The sea has risen with tears.
