A year after he shocked the world of tennis with his retirement Bjorn Borg went back to the courts where it all began.
At the SALK tennis club in Stockholm a 13-year-old Johan Mjallby took his place in the queue of young prospects waiting to hit a few balls with the club’s most illustrious member.
He still regrets the failure to secure a picture with one of the most enigmatic champions of all time, but did snaffle the great man’s autograph. These days he has no idea where he put it.
“Back then tennis was my number one love,’ says the Celtic icon. “ That was the sport I wanted to make my name in when I was young.
“I didn’t really have footballing heroes. Bjorn Borg was the only hero I had at the time.
“I was in awe of the guys who played in AIK Stockholm’s first team, but when the chance came to hit a few balls with Borg when I was 13? Well, that was something else.”
Bigger than Abba, the ice Borg had monopolised Wimbledon in the five years between 1976 and 1980 before walking away from the game at the age of 26. In contrast, Mjallby was all fire and brimstone. An intense, impatient self conscious teenager wrapped up in his own angst and testosterone.
“Bjorn was never seen at the club when he was winning all these trophies. But when he gave up he came back and we got 15 minutes with him on our own to hit some balls.”
Four decades later, two of the heavyweights of Swedish sport are preparing to go head to head once more. This time their joust will take place on the shelves of the nation’s biggest bookshops in the push for Christmas sales.
Borg’s new autobiography ‘Heartbeats’ details his spiral into divorce and drug addiction after he hung up his distinctive wooden racket at the height of his powers. While Mjallby owns up to being fined by Martin O’Neill for relieving himself in a glass after a win over Rangers, his own book contains no tales of glamour models or hedonistic excess. Instead, he details his complex relationship with his father Per-Gunnar, a tennis-mad sports journalist who wrote for the Dagens Nyheter newspaper.
Torn between playing football for his boyhood idols AIK Stockholm or swinging a racket around, human biology had the final say. A small and nimble player, a growth spurt of six inches in six months affected his mobility and movement on the court. When he lost games he took his anger out on his poor father, watching calmly from the side of the court.
“I didn’t think about much else other than winning and aggression took over a wee bit,’ he reflects now.
“During tennis matches when dad was there and I was losing I would take my frustration out on him.”
In interviews back home in Sweden, Mjallby confessed to behaving like ‘a pig’ towards his father. “Even when I was still winning and not playing well I would have these ridiculous outbursts.
“You see that in professional tennis players, even the young Borg. But I didn’t have Bjorn’s talent, I wasn’t even in the top five in Sweden. I was ranked 10th or something and I was becoming really angry with myself all the time.”
Mjallby had flitted between AIK and the courts of SALK before accepting that his gangling 14-year-old frame was better suited to chasing a size five around a football pitch than it was to chasing a yellow ball around a tennis court. Two Allsvenskan titles, two Swedish Cups, four Scottish Premier League titles, three League Cups, two Scottish Cups, a UEFA Cup runner-up medal and 49 caps for Sweden suggest he made a wise choice.
“Giving up tennis was the hardest decision of my life.
“It was – and is – an expensive sport and my father had backed me and driven me around Sweden playing tournaments.
“He was disappointed when I told him, ‘this is it, tennis doesn’t suit me.’
“But I had to go back to team sports where I could get my frustration and anger and physicality out a wee bit.
“I don’t really know where my aggression came from because my dad was a very low-key guy.
“He was one of the nicest men you could ever meet. So he said, ‘okay, I’ll call AIK and ask them if they will take you back.’”
He realised, shortly after, that his father was quietly drinking himself into an early grave. A workaholic who slept no more than three to four hours a night, the lifestyle finally took its toll when Per-Gunnar Mjallby’s liver packed in and he passed away at the age of 56 in October 1996. His son was just 25.
“Luckily for me, I had a chance to tell dad how sorry I was about my behaviour before the end.
“He passed away before he ever saw me play for Sweden or for Celtic. I was just relieved that I had that opportunity to tell him how sorry I was for my behaviour because for me he was my hero, apart from Borg. And he was a fantastic dad.”
As yet, his new book ‘Jag Gav Allt Jag Hade’ is only available in Swedish, depriving Celtic fans of a chance to read the story of a Parkhead goliath. Translated into English the title – ‘I Gave Everything I Had’ – is an apt summary of a career where his mental and physical strength made amends for the fact that he was no Henrik Larsson.
“You know, I wish I had had Henrik’s ability,” he laughs. “We all wanted to be like Henrik or Zlatan Ibrahimovic. But there are very few who have that ability, so you have to find other ways to reach your targets and fit in to the team.
“When I was a player it was all about winning. You just had to find ways to win and if the tactics didn’t work or we had a bad day at the office or it was raining sideways we still had to find ways to win the game.
“I played with my heart and gave everything even when I knew where I sat in the hierarchy.
“I knew I wasn’t the star. I knew I had to just give 100 per cent in games and training to have a chance to show the gaffer Martin O’Neill what I had.”
O’Neill wasn’t always overly impressed by his contribution. In 2001 Mjallby and goalkeeping colleague Jonathan Gould attended a player of the year do in Glasgow with team-mates and came to the conclusion, after a few drinks, that the toilet was too far to walk. Gould relieved himself in a plant pot, Mjallby in a glass and a blameless Chris Sutton was thrown out as well.
When they appeared on the front page of a tabloid the Swede was hauled over the coals and fined two weeks wages. At the age of 54 he can laugh about it now, admitting: “It was the most expensive trip to the bathroom in my life.”
Around the same time Kevin Keegan tried to take him to Manchester City. Not yet the City of Abu Dhabi excess the move would still have doubled his basic salary. Happy at Celtic a JCB digger couldn’t have moved him.
“Money was never my driving force. I was all about winning.
“That’s easy to say when you’re earning a few quid I guess. And it wasn’t like I wasn’t earning money at Celtic. I wasn’t interested because I just loved Glasgow. And my family loved Glasgow.
“I knew where I was, I knew I had the chance to play European games and that was better for me than struggling for survival in another league. Memories and medals were more important than money for me.”
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In a football tale as old as the Scottish Cup, the good times stopped when his body succumbed to years of wear and tear. Plagued by a cruciate ligament problem early in his career, he knew something was wrong after Celtic lost to Basel in a Champions League qualifier in the summer of 2002.
“The specialist was shocked when he saw that my knee was in such a bad state.
“He warned me that I could only play at the same level for probably another 12 months.”
Around November he had some ‘so-called cartilage’ inserted in his knee. Returning to the team in time for the quarter-finals against Liverpool, the knee doc’s prediction wasn’t far off.
“After Seville, I had a really hard time moving. And if you slip below 80 per cent of your maximum then you are going to struggle at a club like Celtic.”
Gambling on the warm weather of Spain dulling the pain – “I was a bit naive” – he agreed to join Levante in 2004. Worried about passing a medical, Swedish team doctor Magnus Forssblad administered an injection of hyaluronic acid usually prescribed to patients with minor osteoarthritis. Fine with running in straight lines on a treadmill, the Spanish doctors would have reached a different conclusion if they’d asked him to twist or turn.
“I should have stopped after Celtic and said, ‘nah, my body can’t do this anymore.’ But I just couldn’t accept that. That was really stupid of me.”
When Levante refused to foot the bill for an operation in America Mjallby returned to Spain to ask the sporting director to terminate his contract. The move cost him £800,000 in wages.
He was forced to endure total knee replacement surgery in his fifties. Flat on his back for a year, he’s now back on his feet and flew to London to provide analysis for TNT of Celtic’s Europa League clash with Red Star Belgrade in midweek.
“The Champions League was such a missed opportunity. I was so disappointed with the Kairat result. I know there are not many easy games out there but Celtic should still have been strong enough to qualify.
“The squad is starting to look a wee bit better now. It’s just a shame that it’s a wee bit late when it comes to the Champions League. Maybe they’ve not hit the fifth gear yet. When I watched them they looked as if they were were still in third.”
He approves of the decision to spend £5 million on Sebastian Tounekti from Swedish team Hammaby, but warns that the winger can blow a bit ‘hot and cold.’
In sport that’s how it goes. The boyhood trauma he felt when Bjorn Borg called it quits months after he lost his Wimbledon title and the US Open final to John McEnroe is still there. Even heroes have their off days.
