Tennis: The end of John McEnroe and Björn Borg at the Laver Cup

What happens in the dressing room stays in the dressing room. This principle is one of the most important unwritten rules in sport, which even applies to a not entirely serious competition such as the Laver Cup in tennis: Casper Ruud, 25, a tennis professional from Norway, nevertheless ignored it because he was asked and because he is a polite person. He shared an anecdote from the Team Europe team dinner in Berlin, which took place recently under the chairmanship of captain Björn Borg: Borg, now 68, told the players over dinner about earlier days when he had jetted to New York in just three hours on the Concorde; everyone was suitably impressed, except for the Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz. “He didn’t even know what the Concorde was,” said Ruud amusedly: “We had to google it for him, he’s just too young.”

No one will blame a 21-year-old tennis pro, born in a time when billionaires beam themselves into space for personal reasons, for missing out on the bygone era of supersonic passenger flights on commercial aircraft. But Caspar Ruud’s message was aimed at another point: the Laver Cup works. Because, as a team competition, it brings together young and old world-class athletes, heroes of wooden racket sports and their imitators with high-tech racquets; because they exchange ideas, because they listen to each other and tell stories – even when it’s about airplanes with a nose that can be lowered.

Looking back, it was a remarkably clever idea by Roger Federer and his management to sign the two former tennis greats Björn Borg and John McEnroe as team captains for their team competition, the Laver Cup, which was launched in 2017. Not only because both the Swede Borg and the New Yorker McEnroe admire the now 86-year-old Australian Rod Laver, to whom the cup is dedicated: Laver won the real Grand Slam twice, in 1962 as an amateur and in 1969 as a professional – that is, all four major tournaments in Melbourne, Paris, Wimbledon and New York on different surfaces in one year, something no one has managed since then.

Borg and McEnroe, for their part, marked the beginning of an era in their brief rivalry, which culminated in the Wimbledon finals of 1980 and 1981. The first of these grass-court battles between two different temperaments, which still set the standard today, was won by the calm, cool Björn “Eismann” Borg in the fifth set 1:6, 7:5, 6:3, 6:7, 8:6. When the hothead John “Brat” McEnroe triumphed in both the singles and doubles the following year, he ended the supremacy and soon also the career of his Swedish opponent. To this day, people ask them about these duels, which captivated the up-and-coming tennis middle class of the 1970s and early 1980s on both sides of the Atlantic. “We were like yin and yang,” says McEnroe.

The idea behind the tournament? To put young players on the bench next to legends

Having long since become good friends, they also transferred the principle of opposites to the black court of the Laver Cup, with one, the fiery McEnroe, representing Team World in a fiery red tracksuit jacket, and the other, Borg, representing the European selection in ice blue. In this way, they actually gave a meaningful value to Federer’s invitational tournament, which travels around the world and which the ATP Tour includes in its calendar but does not award world ranking points: The players who swing their rackets on the court may change, as may the venues from Prague to Vancouver to Berlin; but the story, embodied by the tennis yin-yang, remains.

This weekend’s Berlin tournament is the last of seven matches between the two rivals; Borg’s European team has won five of them – initially with Federer himself and Rafael Nadal as teammates. When the Laver Cup 2025 stops in San Francisco, eight-time Grand Slam tournament winner Andre Agassi, 54, from the USA and Frenchman Yannick Noah, 64, will take over as captains. A new tournament format also needs innovation, said Tony Godsick, Federer’s long-time manager in his role as president of the Laver Cup, as he praised McEnroe and Borg’s work. Their contracts have been extended three times, by the way.

One of the founding ideas of this team competition was actually to put young players “on the bench next to McEnroe and Borg,” as Godsick says. Federer, undoubtedly an excellent businessman but also always a tennis romantic, regretted that the retired legends no longer had access to their sport. And where, asks Godsick, would they have gone – apart from perhaps being guests at Wimbledon in the Royal Box? The Laver Cup has brought the generations back into conversation with each other.

What do they discuss? According to Stefanos Tsitsipas, 26, the Greek player and number 12 in the world rankings, Borg still doesn’t make big speeches, at least not on the court. But that’s not necessary: ​​”It’s more the aura that’s important to me.” Sometimes, Tsitsipas explained in a touching tribute, it’s not important what is said, as long as you feel the closeness of a soul mate sitting on the bench between rallies; that’s more like “spiritual communication.” Of course, he also wanted to make the great Borg proud because he “somehow belongs to my environment.” Borg laughed: “Like a grandfather,” he said.

McEnroe always remained connected to tennis – it was only the Laver Cup that brought Borg closer again

Of course, top player Tsitsipas is also elated when a five-time Wimbledon winner confirms that he has performed world-class after his confident two-set victory over the Australian Thanasi Kokkinakis. But the captaincy has also given Borg a lot, in addition to selecting and deploying the professionals and caring for their souls. “For me, it was always the best week of the year,” he said, and he was grateful that he was able to spend so much time with the young players, that they told him their stories and put their trust in him despite his age.

In contrast to John McEnroe, 65, who remained closely connected to tennis after his active career, first as Davis Cup captain of the US team and later as a television commentator, the Laver Cup has actually brought his Swedish companion closer back to the white lines that were the playing field of his life.

He would miss the Laver Cup, said Borg, as the two captains stood on stage at the evening gala in the Westhafen in Berlin. As always, they joked a little about each other, about the flow of speech of one and the silence of the other. Then Björn Borg asked his old friend John McEnroe: “Call me at least once a month from now on!”