'I was lost. I had no plan and that's a difficult life'

Bjorn Borg conquered tennis and walked away aged 26. His new memoir opens up on his cancer battle and reveals a long struggle with hidden addiction

- Lawrence Ostlere

It is not so unusual for superstars to quit their sport, though they are normally drawn back in soon enough. Michael Jordan left the NBA at the peak of his powers and returned a year later after an unsuccessful attempt to reinvent himself as a baseball player. Johan Cruyff retired from football aged only 31 but quickly returned after losing a lot of money investing in pig farming.

What was unique about Bjorn Borg was that he conquered his sport, retired aged 26 and never returned, or at least not while still a competent tennis player. He reappeared 10 years later but lost every match he played.

We now know why: for nearly two decades after he walked away from the game, his life spiralled into drug addiction. He nearly died twice, first in Milan in 1989 when his wife found him unconscious and he was rushed to hospital to have a lethal cocktail of drugs and alcohol pumped from his body. Then, in the mid-1990s when he suffered a heart attack on a bridge in the Netherlands. His heart stopped, and only the quick reactions of passersby saved him.

The revelations are told in his new memoir Heartbeats, a book which opens up on his recent battle with cancer and at the same time melts away all we thought we knew about the “Ice Man”, laying bare a hidden truth decades later. “The Nineties feel like one long stretch of wasted time,” he writes of that period in his life when drugs took hold.

Behind his cool on-court persona was a man wrestling with his newfound rockstar status and without anyone to give him advice or guide him through the whirlwind. He felt hounded by fans, the media and photographers following his every move, and he left the sport to escape. But it left a void in his life, and, within a year, cocaine had replaced the dopamine hit of baseline winners and title triumphs.