BORG VS. MCENROE

                I watch sports movies when an interesting one comes along, and last week, via Netflix, I saw Borg Vs. McEnroe, a 2017 release. It’s not a great movie but it’s a good one, about the two tennis players who dominated their sport in the late 1970s and early ‘80s.

     

           Okay, you’re probably thinking, the contrast between the stolid Swede Borg and the mercurial American McEnroe would be the stuff of good drama. As the movie makes clear, though, that distinction was more apparent than real. Borg also had a fiery temper, he just controlled it better than Mac did.

         

             Indeed, a more-accurate title for the movie would have been Borg Vs. Borg and McEnroe Vs. McEnroe, because both men’s struggles were as much with themselves as with the guys across the net. That sort of inner drama probably is more frequent than we know at sports’ highest levels.

            

            The movie is a Swedish production, directed by a Dane, so it figures it would be more about Borg than McEnroe. Sverrir Gudnason, the Swedish actor who played Borg, is a dead ringer for the bland good looks of the tennis player, as are, I’d guess, a good many other young men in his native land. McEnroe is played by the American actor Shia Lebeouf, who bears only a passing resemblance to the real-life character. That alone made him harder to relate to.

            

            The focus of the movie was the epic 1980 Wimbledon final between the two men, sometimes hailed as the best tennis match ever. Borg, 24 years old at the time to Mac’s 21, won that one in five sets, so it’s ending likely was pleasing to the Swedish audience. The full rivalry was as close as it could be, with each man winning 11 times in their 22 head-to-head meetings. Twelve of those were in tournament finals and, again, their final toll was even at six.

 Mac had the last laugh, though, beating Borg in their last three Grand Slam finals, at the U.S. Open in 1980 and at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open in 1981. Borg would retire from tennis the year after that, and the case often has been made that his decision stemmed directly from those losses.

The best actor in the film is Stellan Skarsgard, a veteran Swedish performer with a long list of international credits; if you’re a movie fan you’ll recognize him when you see him.  He plays Lennart Bergelin, Borg’s career-long coach and constant companion. Really, the Borg of the movie was a Team Borg, a threesome consisting of him, the coach and Borg’s then-girlfriend and later wife (the first of three) Marianna Simionesca. She’s played by Tuva Novotny, a Swedish actress with a Czech name.e plays LennartH

The function of the coach and girlfriend seemed to have been to keep Borg from slipping off the rails enroute to his tennis destiny. Bergelin spotted the young Borg as a kid prodigy with a temper so volatile as to be potentially destructive; early scenes depicted the teenaged him (played by his real-life son Leo) breaking racquets, slamming doors and assaulting trees in a Swedish forest after tennis setbacks. Bergelin calls him out more than once, telling him to shape up or ship out. He finally does so but not without adopting obsessive routines and doing a lot of staring into space. Winning for Borg wasn’t everything, it was the only thing, and without it there was no point in playing. Thus, his early retirement.

McEnroe was the second banana in the piece. He’s portrayed as being almost as nasty off the court as on, with the disposition of a hornet and a vocabulary to match. At one point in the movie a fellow pro tells Mac “nobody likes you,” but he doesn’t appear bothered by the news. He’s as driven as Borg, only noisier.

Mac's short shrift was a shame because the movie didn’t answer the one question I always had about him, namely, how he could be in full tantrum one moment and a few moments later resume performing at the top of his fine-tuned game. Perhaps relatedly, and also not addressed in the movie, was the fact that McEnroe liked tennis a lot more than Borg did. Mac won his last Grand Slam title at age 25 but stayed on the main pro tour eight years more and then moved on to “masters” and “seniors” levels of competition, even until today.

Additionally, he became a Davis Cup captain and a television commentator on the sport, a role he still fills with distinction. From all appearances he’s become a pretty nice guy, someone, in the current parlance, you’d like to have a beer with.

I recall the Borg-McEnroe era fondly because, back then, tennis still had the stylistic differences that made the sport interesting to watch. The main division there was the baseliner-versus-net rusher one than the two players embodied, Borg the former and Mac the latter. Theirs wasn’t the last such classic men’s matchup (Sampras versus Agassi was) but it was a great one, maybe the greatest.

Alas, by around the year 2000 advances in racquet technology had given a decisive and perhaps permanent advantage to the baseliners that made the serve-and-volley game all but extinct. Using today’s high-powered racquetry, players can return serves with almost as much speed as they’re delivered, turning the net area into a no-man’s (or woman’s) land. Now, everyone plays the same game, and if the players don’t wear different-colored clothes it’s tough to tell them apart. I’m not one to yearn for the good old days, but with tennis I do.

FOOTBALL, CONTINUED

                By the evening of February 3, aka Super Bowl Sunday, most of us will have had enough of football for a few months, but for those who haven’t help will be at hand. Just six days later, on February 9, something called the Alliance of American Football will make its debut, beginning a 14-week run including playoffs. 

                There already is a “spring” pro-football circuit called the Arena Football League, but because its games are played indoors and on a 50-yard field with eight-man teams, it’s really football with an asterisk. The AAF will be football in the sense it is usually understood.

                The new league’s games will be staged in eight cities, all in the South or West where any weather problems shouldn’t (but still might) be severe. They are Atlanta, Ga., Birmingham, Ala., Memphis, Tenn., Orlando, Fla., Phoenix, Ariz., Salt Lake City, Utah, San Antonio, Tex., and San Diego, Calif. It will play a 10-week regular schedule followed by two weeks of playoffs involving the top four teams.

 Although there is no such formal designation, it will be a football minor league, its rosters peopled by athletes who aren’t judged ready for prime time, or no longer are. The standard contract will pay $250,000 to any player who spends three years in the league, or about $83,000 per. That’s in contrast to the average National Football League salary of about $2.1 million, or median of about $860,000, so the two leagues won’t compete on that score. The AAF has a television commitment from CBS, meaning that its near-term survival shouldn’t be an issue. If any sports entity might consider it to be competition it would be the NBA or NHL, and one suspects they won’t be too worried.

Nonetheless, the AAF inevitably will be measured against such insurgent football leagues past as the All-American Football Conference (1946-49), the American Football League (1960-69), the United States Football League (1983-85) and the XFL, wrestling impresario Vince McMahon’s cartoonish loop that died after one season (2001) but is threatening to be reborn in 2020. The first three of the above-named enterprises also are generally recalled with derision, but shouldn’t be. Two of them made lasting impressions on the professional game and the third survives as a thorn in the saddle of the established league.

You have to be about my age (80) to remember the All-American Conference first hand; I recall going to a Chicago Rockets’ game at which about 5,000 people populated the 100,000-seat Soldier Field, most of them forming thong-like strips up the 50-yard lines. The AAFC was a financial failure, its main sin being prematurity at a time when the football pie was a sliver of what it is today, but the league brought the pro game to new cities and three of its teams-- the Cleveland Browns, San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Colts—were taken into the NFL when it folded. Indeed, its Browns immediately became the game’s best team upon joining the NFL in 1950, winning titles that year and in 1954 and ’55.

The American Football League had its zany aspects getting started in 1960 but solidified itself after a few seasons and eventually forced a full-scale merger with the NFL, increasing that league’s size to 26 teams from 16 starting with the 1970 campaign. The Green Bay Packers of the older league won the first two interleague championship games in 1967 and ’68 (the game wasn’t called the Super Bowl until later), but since then parity has set in, with each conference winning 25 times.

The USFL started as a spring league, and had big-league aspirations, but lasted just three campaigns. Its demise came when its anti-trust lawsuit against the NFL was decided in its favor but resulted in an award of just $1, upped to $3 after treble damages were applied. The USFL lives on through the animosity of one of its team owners, Donald Trump, who suffered a bruised ego when his attempt to come out of the wreckage with an NFL franchise was rebuffed. He’s taken potshots at the NFL since, their affect amplified by his present position.

The AAF has dealt with the nutsy-owner problem by making all its teams league-owned. Its founders are Charlie Ebersol, who has a TV background, and Bill Polian, the former, highly regarded general manager of the Buffalo Bills. Other exNFLers, including players, have executive roles in the organization.

The league’s biggest names going in are coaches: football lifers Mike Singletary, Steve Spurrier, Rick Neuheisel, Dennis Erickson and Mike Martz all will guide AAF entrants. The league already has had player tryouts and drafts and has a “notable players” tab on its website, but I didn’t recognize any names on it and so will not pass any along.  The NFL talent net has holes, meaning that some pretty good players will have slipped through to the AAF, but we’ll have to wait until it plays a few games to learn who they are. 

Much of the initial interest in the league has come from the rules changes it has adopted. Shooting for a time frame of 150 minutes a game, against the NFL’s 180-plus, it has eliminated TV timeouts and shrunk the number of other commercial breaks. Time between plays has been reduced to 30 seconds from 40.

There will be no kickoffs; the “receiving” team will begin play at its own 25-yard-line after scores and at the game’s beginning and start of the second half. Instead of onside kicks a team wishing to get the ball back after it scores will have a 4^th-and-10 opportunity from its own 35-year line. If it makes it it continues, if not it turns over the ball where its play ended.

 Extra points will be two-point plays from scrimmage. Head injuries will be assessed by sideline physicians not working for the league or its teams, a really good move. Single-game tickets will sell for $20 and five-game season packages for $75, both amounts reasonable by any standard.

It’s a shame that the new league didn’t choose to monkey with the game further with an eye to opening it up, like the Canadian League has. Adopting the college game’s 15-yard penalties for pass-interference calls also would have been good. Still, its version should be worth a look or maybe two.  Our sports schedule is crowded but I guess there’s room for a bit more.