When the Washington Post published its three-part serialization, it was punctilious about identifying the book title and the author’s name. But like Harper’s, the Post unilaterally decided to delete the names of players and sources I had identified.
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Playboy Italia, for reasons never explained, didn’t run the excerpt they bought. But a tennis magazine in Milan published extensive quotes which it attributed to another American journalist. It took a year and the intervention of a lawyer to persuade the magazine to pay for what it had printed.
I had high – and misplaced – hopes that television would redeem some of the depredations of the press. When a BBC camera crew, producer and commentator came to interview me in Rome, I spent a day answering questions, giving them names and phone numbers of sources who could confirm my allegations and providing a videotape of an interview with Arthur Ashe. The BBC professed to be pleased with the material and asked to refuse all other television interviews until their program aired.
During Wimbledon, BBC broadcast what it referred to as its own special investigation of pro tennis. I played what might most politely be called a peripheral role. Identified as “the most hated man in tennis,” I was shown on camera for one minute during the course of the half-hour program and my book was never mentioned. Instead BBC trotted around to the same sources I had tapped for Short Circuit, asked the same questions and, miracle of miracles, made the same discoveries.
Worse was to come. Associated Press, which had provided me with press credentials and paid me to file stories as a stringer during the early stages of my research, publicly denied that I had ever worked for the news agency and claimed that I had had no right to apply for credentials through the AP. In a letter to the International Tennis Federation, AP’s European sports editor disavowed any connection between me and his organization. The letter was photocopied and widely distributed during Wimbledon, then at the U.S. Open.
Again, it took months, the threat of legal action and a lawyer’s ministrations to convince AP to issue a correction and come to an out-of-court settlement.
By then I was in Paris for the publication of the French translation of Short Circuit and my editor, an urbane and philosophical soul, listened patiently to my complaints and agreed, “It’s a shame, but you’ve got to realize the place of books today. As a writer, you’re in the research and development department of the entertainment industry. Your job is to produce raw material. After that it’s out of your hands. As far as anybody in the media is concerned, the material doesn’t belong to you any more than a diamond belongs to the poor black South African miner who digs it up.”
I was content to come away from France with that one nugget of wisdom. But I received an unexpected bonus. A magazine in Paris published the best photograph of me ever taken. Nearly life-size, printed in full color, it hangs framed on the wall of my office and its caption, in prominent block letters, reads: “MEWSHAW: PARANOID?”
MONTE CARLO: ON THE TRAIL OF BJORN BORG
For decades tennis has served as a cornerstone of the spring social season in Monte Carlo, and with the finals scheduled for Easter Sunday, the tournament has always started on the preceding Monday. At least as far as the public was concerned, it started Monday. Although there were always qualifying rounds, these prompted little or no interest. But this year was different. This year Bjorn Borg was making a comeback, and because he had refused to play ten Grand Prix events, he had to qualify.
Borg had to qualify! To many people in and out of tennis, the idea sounded absurd. After a five-month layoff he was still ranked number 4 in the world. To force him to qualify… why, it was like making Muhammad Ali fight in the Golden Gloves, like putting Pélé back on a vacant lot in Brazil with a ball fashioned out of old rags, like shunting Niki Lauda into the slow lane, like expecting Joe Namath to employ a dating service.
It was all the fault of tennis politics, newspapers complained, all part of the war between WCT and the Grand Prix. If you were a member of the Pro Council, you could attempt to explain that the ten-tournament rule was reasonable, that without it the top players would concentrate on exhibitions and let the tournament system that supported the rest of the players wither and die. You could, like Sandy Mayer, point out “the greed” in Borg’s schedule. You could accuse the Swede of limiting himself to “shopping expeditions” at the Grand Slam events. But, finally, you were wasting your breath. For most people, Bjorn Borg was a great champion and a fine gentleman, and it was ridiculous to force him to qualify.
Ridiculous it may have been, but it was also a box-office bonanza. The tournament in Monte Carlo was quick to realize this, and it announced that the event would officially begin on April 1. The qualies attracted two hundred journalists and several dozen photographers. General admission was $5 for the first three days and $10 for the finals on Sunday—the finals of the qualies, that is.
That week several mass-circulation magazines carried features on Bjorn and Mariana Borg. Paris Match ran a cover photo of the young couple embracing, and a cloying article praised their love match. The Borgs were said to be planning a family—presumably long-range planning, since Mariana and Borg hadn’t been living together lately. Still, Mariana held out the fervent hope that children would arrive within a few years.
My own family had arrived more promptly from Rome. A friend had lent us his apartment outside of Cannes, and I became a commuter. Each morning my wife drove me down to the tiny station in La Bocca, where I boarded a train for Monte Carlo, thirty miles up the coast. On one side of the track the Mediterranean spread like a cerulean platter toward a horizon lost in a haze. On the other side the purple hills of Provence, flecked with yellow mimosa and dark-green cypresses, rose toward the Maritime Alps, whose peaks were still snow-capped.
Most of the passengers appeared to be tourists and day-trippers. But there was also a colorful contingent of blacks who hustled fake ivory carvings, glass beads, fly whisks, snakeskin wallets, and leather bush hats. I imagined a vast factory in Marseilles mass-producing African kitsch and sending out these poor souls to sell it. I never saw anybody buy a thing.
The train passed through Cannes, curved along the beach at Golfe Juan, cut through Juan les Pins and came to Antibes. Then it was on to Nice and the breath-catching bay at Villefranche and the tiny town of Beaulieu, which, viewed through a fringe of palm fronds, lived up to its name, Beautiful Place. And finally, just before Monaco, there was the modest village of Cap d’Ail, the garlic cape, home of those humble workers who swept the streets, serviced the condos, and drove the limos of the tax-free enclave next door.
It should have been a pleasant trip. But I had just had an umpire tell me enough about
professional tennis to fill me with despair. I wasn’t on my way to the Monte Carlo Country Club to watch Bjorn Borg make his comeback. I was on my way there to try to find out whether he had rigged a match with John McEnroe.
Like everybody on the circuit that winter, I had talked and thought incessantly about Bjorn Borg. Despite all that had been said and written about him, I decided that nobody had taken a comprehensive look at the man and attempted to piece together the incongruent shards of his character. This, of course, presumed that he had a character, that he wasn’t simply a billboard, a blank page on which advertisers could scrawl their messages.
Borg seemed to me to have struck a Faustian bargain at some point in his young life and agreed to transform himself into an automaton in return for being made into the best tennis player in the world. Now a model of lobotomized decorum on court and off, he was praised as much for his tunnel vision and his remorseless one-dimensionality as for his metronomical ground strokes. With the tacit approval of the public and the cooperation of the press, he had suppressed every other aspect of his personality and ordered his existence to a single limited purpose. Each known fact about his life reinforced the notion that he was a sort of extraterrestrial being, alien yet friendly, and a fine example for kids.
He was said to have a pulse rate of thirty-five beats a minute, half that of the average human. He was said to sleep twelve hours a day. He was said to read Donald Duck comics and watch television during his spare time. A high-school