The Tennis Player As Hot Babe

Maria Sharapova, Anna Kournikova. Ultimate tennis Hot Babes. Rafael Nadal. Hot Boy Babe. Yes, boys are babes too in this sport that flashes a goodly amount of sun-tanned shapely limbs. I never quite realized this looking at television until I chanced to visit the US Open in 2001 and was amazed by how gorgeous all the players look in their shorts. And we’re talking not even shorter shorts here in the men’s case, just those baggy things. Even so. No one told me this before. Their physicality is quite stunning. I am convinced this is the best kept secret in all of tennis, for some reason.

The tennis player as Hot Babe is not a recent concept. It all goes back to that first Hot Babe in the game, Bjorn Borg, Mr. Iceman Cometh himself. The first time I ever saw Bjorn Borg was around 1972, and he was nowhere near a tennis court. He probably wished he were at the time, it might have offered him some protection. The photo that appeared in the San Francisco newspaper showed the rising young Swedish star lying on the ground, near Wimbledon, being pawed and otherwise manhandled by hordes of screaming British girls, eager to snag some part of him or his clothes as a memento. It looked rough. When did tennis turn into a rugby scrum, I wondered. It was too hard to tell if the kid even looked like he was worth mauling. But I trusted the hormones of those schoolgirls. They were clearly on to something.

His arrival would certainly change the game of tennis and the way it was played. Suddenly everyone discovered topspin, as if we’d never heard the term before. Strong aggressive shots from the baseline became the new order of things. But Mr. Borg brought along a hefty dose of sex appeal too, and this was new.

Not long after his first Wimbledon, Tennis Magazine did a story on Bjorn Borg. Complete with a pin-up photo. Yes, you heard right, it must have been the first full page pin-up photo ever of a tennis player. Bjorn was lying on his side on the grass, he only had shorts on. His grin was a little sheepish, but the effect was charming. Mentally we women were already taking trips to Sweden to see if there were more at home like him.

His physical beauty seemed heightened almost by the fact he was such a cool customer on court. When John McEnroe first saw Borg, at Wimbledon, he recalls thinking, there must be something wrong with the guy. Nothing seemed to faze him on the court. Is he crazy or what? Not only did players have to contend with a powerful forehand shot and a two-handed backhand up the line that became arguably the best backhand shot ever in men’s tennis, they had to face this wall of attitude that no one could budge. Borg was completely imperturbable. Behind those ever so cool blue eyes, he could be planning his next shot, or your death and destruction. It was disarming because you never knew how to go about getting under Borg’s skin.

It seems great tennis players invariably evolve their own personal auras; McEnroe gave us a lot of you’ll-never-know-what-to-expect from him on the court; Federer has this kind of calm happiness about him as he tends to business. Part of their greatness is that each can carve out this kind of mental space around himself and his game. Borg really was all about aura.

This carried over into the style of the man and the way he went about his life. He seemed not to care about the money, preferring to spend his new-found money on a modest Saab instead of a sportier car. “It goes forward,” Borg said, and that was what mattered. It did what it was supposed to do without muss or fuss. In this time of overextended tennis schedules on the tour, Borg was a bit of an anomaly, a man who cherished his winter break from tennis and stretched it often up to four months long. And on one occasion he used the time to build up his upper body by playing ice hockey.

His oddly checkered love life has ebbed and flowed over the years. Your love life of course is the number one thing that goes into defining you as a Tennis Babe. Borg’s first marriage in 1980 to former tennis pro Mariana Simionescu was held on an island in the Baltic. It was probably the wedding of the year, and ended up in the pages of People Magazine. A divorce followed later, then other women came and went. His second marriage was to the Italian singer, Loredana Berte, a woman a good ten years older. This continued a long and noble tradition of Swedes and Italians boffing each other, but the differences were harder than geographical boundaries to transcend. The tabloids recounted the ending of that relationship with Borg in the hospital having his stomach pumped in what sounded like a suicide attempt.

The dust has settled in recent years, the Iceman has found a healthy dose of happiness with his marriage to a fellow Swede and the birth of a daughter.

And as we all know, once the stork visits, your babe days are over. Now you have to mind the real ones.

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