Borg Wins in Senior Tour Return

Bjorn Borg showed that he had lost none of the fitness, talent and fighting spirit that took him to eleven Grand Slam titles, when he made a successful return to the BlackRock Tour of Champions in the Algarve, Portugal on Tuesday.

The 51-year-old Swede came from a set down to defeat fellow former French Open winner Andres Gomez, 6-7(4), 6-3, 10-8 (on a Champions’ Tie-Break) and win his opening round-robin contest. It was the first match Borg had played on the BlackRock Tour of Champions for five years.

“I’m really pleased,” he said, afterwards.
 
“I came back first of all because I wanted to play matches against these guys again, but when you walk on the court the thing you want to do the most, even now, is to win. That’s why you are there really. It’s not the end of the world if you lose any more but I still don’t like to lose. To win my first match back on the BlackRock Tour is a big satisfaction.”

It took a while for Borg to find his range in front of a large crowd, and he admitted that he had had a few doubts beforehand.
 
“I was a little bit unsure how I would play because, even after all these years of playing tennis, it’s a long time since I played with an umpire, ball-kids and a crowd, and it takes a while to get used to it. Around the middle of the first set I started to feel more confident,” he said.
 
He pushed Gomez to a first set Tie-Break, but lost it 7-4.
 
In the second set there were flashes of vintage Borg. He regularly used the pace of the Gomez ground strokes to counter-attack with pinpoint accuracy from the baseline.
 
The better he got, the more the crowd willed him on, and after levelling at one set all, he squeezed through 10-8 in the deciding set Champions’ Tie-Break.
 
He will now meet another former French Open champion – Thomas Muster – in his second group match on Wednesday. Muster suffered a surprise 6-3, 6-4 loss against BlackRock debutant, Fernando Meligeni.
 
Muster is more than ten years younger than Borg, but the Swede is looking forward to the challenge of facing the Austrian, who he has never played before.
 
“He’s like a junior compared to me,” joked Borg. “But I’m looking forward to playing him. He’s a great player.”