John McEnroe and Björn Borg’s fury in their battle shocked…
Roger Federer has faced Rafael Nadal forty times in the past seventeen years, nine of those matches being in Grand Slam finals. Since 2006, he has played 50 times against Novak Djokovic, including twice in five-set Wimbledon championship matchups that Djokovic won. Furthermore, 58 matches between Nadal and Djokovic have been played, nine of which have taken place at the French Open.
In contrast, from 1978 and 1981, Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe participated in 14 matches. Nevertheless, they gave rise to one of the most intense and well-discussed rivalries in sports history.
Borg, who was just twenty-five years old, had already won the French Open six times and the Wimbledon championship five times in a row from 1976 to 1980, when he was defeated by McEnroe in the 1981 final. He stayed close to McEnroe for the majority of the U.S. Open final; in fact, they led 4-2 after splitting the opening two sets. But Borg appeared to lose his mind as McEnroe struck back to even the third set. Merely losing the fourth set, he shook hands and vanished.
In August, McEnroe commented over the phone from his Malibu, California, home, “To me, it was bittersweet.” The way it ended—whimpering—and how he left the floor ahead of the ceremony, vowing never to play again. I wish we could have continued playing, even though winning Wimbledon and the Open back-to-back and taking the No. 1 ranking was an incredible experience for me.
“I used to ask him, ‘When are you coming back?’ whenever I saw him for years. “This is absurd, let us go on,” McEnroe, an ESPN tennis analyst for many years, continued. It took me a few years to come to terms with the fact that there seemed to be a gap. It was too awful, in my opinion, for the sport as well.
