“I felt terribly embarrassed.” Swedish Björn Borg, a tennis legend in the 1970s, spoke for the first time about his cocaine addiction and revealed a prostate cancer diagnosis in an autobiography published on Thursday (18).
In the book, entitled “Beats of the Heart: Memories”, the 69-year-old former tennis player talks about the fight against addiction and his “demons.”
“The first time I tried cocaine, I felt a wave as strong as the tennis had already provided me,” Borg wrote about his first drug experience in the early 1980s at the iconic New York Boate Studio 54.
The years of greatest dependence occurred in Milan, at the time when she was married to the Italian singer Loredana Bertè.
“We had bad company, and the drug and the pills were within our reach. There, I was immersed in the deepest darkness,” he said.
In 1996, Borg passed out in the middle of the abstinence crisis under a bridge in the Netherlands, where he was about to play a veteran game. When he woke up in a hospital, his father was standing in front of him.
“He said nothing, it was so embarrassing,” he said in an interview with the Swedish public channel SVT.
Borg also reveals in his book that he had prostate cancer diagnosed in September 2023.
“The risk of returning still exists, and is something I will have to live with for a while, with the anxiety of not knowing if the cancer was detected in time,” he explained.
During the TV interview, the former tennis player said he lives well today and play sports every day. However, he acknowledged that he has not played tennis for six years.
Borg was a huge tennis figure, five times Wimbledon champion and six times from Roland Garros, before retiring in 1983, just 26 years old.
