Sweden (1 Viewer)

No you’re thinking of The Borg
Bjorn Borg was an excellent tennis player who had epic battles with McEnroe, connors, and Lendl (who actually did seem like a machine)
Sorry you missed the joke. Bjorn Borg really was like a machine. Just TRY to fool him with ball placement. Good luck. I played a lot of tennis, and nothing was more frustrating than hitting an "ungettable" shot only to have it returned somewhere where I had no chance of returning it. You're right about Lendl, though. He was like a moving backboard.
 
Don't worry, Sweden put out what I believe may have been one of the greatest tennis players of the post WWII generation, Bjorn Borg. Any tennis fan or any sports fan who has maybe a little more then a cursory interest in tennis Pro Major championships over the age of 50 knows just how great and dominant Borg was from the mid-late 70's---early 80's. Their also keenly aware that Borg was one half of some of the greatest, most intense, physically exhausting matches in history---his epic series of championship matches between John McEnroe, particularly the 1980 Wimbledon Men's Finals.

That match was the sort of contest where a whole generation of future tennis pros could point to and say "This was the match that made me want to pick up a tennis racket and make a career out of this sport". The high-stakes, nervous frenzied, energy shown from both players, the loud, visceral reaction from the crowd at Wimbledon knowing they were watching something epic unfold in front of them. Borg/McEnroe had many epic great matches, but this was their best and they were pro tennis version of Ali/Frazier and we, as fans, were the ultimate beneficiaries.

Bjorn Borg went on record in an interview back in the late 90's and said that grueling match was probably the first time in his entire career, up to that point, he felt he might lose because McEnroe was like a caged animal who wouldn't go down and kept pounding, scratching and gnawing at the steel cage so much it almost cost Borg the match.

Until Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer entered the picture and redefined just how we view and assess legendary, long epic championship tennis, this was the match and contest that when I found about it later out about it, gave me a firm appreciation of just how physically exhausting, mentally and psychologically tacking and how the tension affects individual players to rise to that unknown higher level and win, or just fall apart and descend back into a kind of mediocrity, being seen as a very good tennis player by your peers, media critics, and fans, but not capable of reaching that proverbial MT. Rushmore "immortal status".



Sweden and Switzerland do share an important 20th century historical connection: neither country was militarily involved in either World War I and World War II, although Sweden's contributions, in a humanitarian sense, was that in 1943, over the course of one night, Danish resistance fighters, covert anti-Nazi Danish civilians organized, assembled all of their country's Jews, from cities, towns,.etc. and smuggled them on to fishing boats, barges, small and medium-sized passenger ships and ferried them to safety to neutral Sweden with the covert assistance and aid of Swedish border guards and civil servants.

This action prevented the Gestapo, SD, SS, and Danish Nazi collaborators from mass arresting, documenting, then herding most of Denmark's Jews into depot camps which were then sent to death camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sorbibor, Chelmno, and Balzac in Poland.



Great post!

1 - I started playing tennis, a lot thanks to Bjorn Borg! And I ended up in the U.S. after receiving a tennis scholarship to a D-1 school! 20+ years later and we are still here, wearing Saints clothes as often as we can!

2 - My grandparents became great friends with a family(a Jewish family from Austria) they helped escape from WW-2 I can’t recall the entire story, but they stayed with my grandfather’s family for an extended period of time. We even went to visit them a few times as kids in the late 80s - early 90s. Probably didn’t realize at the time how significant it really was.
 
Nolaswede, there's an ancient, Old Norse temple called Uppsala, in what's now the university/cultural town of Uppsala? If there was an Old Norse equivalent to ancient Greeks Oracle of Delphi or the first and second Jewish temples in Jerusalem, it would be Uppsala. Many historians are unsure if Viking Age Uppsala was an open-air sort of religious Temple(many pagan Celtic and Germanic tribes worshipped their deities or conducted rituals out-in-open in groves, forest clearings, river beds or bogs in England or Ireland) or it was a combination of the two. We know that human sacrifice was practiced at Uppsala due to the various Old Norse indigenous tribes meeting their every 9 years and sacrificing 9 out of every animal species, including humans.

I just like to ask if you've ever been there and if its not nosy, how much of the contemporary historical descriptions of the religious rituals done and performed there were accurate or just fanciful exaggerations or distortions by disapproving, hostile Christian writers, historians or authors expounding upon these tales centuries after the Viking Age ended?




Good question! Growing up, I don’t recall us reading all that much about Uppsala when it came to the Vikings. I have been there a few times, only grew up 1.5 hour away, but didn’t know much about the town’s history.


The city of “Birka” is what I associated the Vikings with and I think it’s the country’s oldest town! I don’t know if I can answer your question about the cruel rituals by the Vikings. But I’m sure it was a lot more than some Offensive Pass Interference!!!

 
No you’re thinking of The Borg
Bjorn Borg was an excellent tennis player who had epic battles with McEnroe, connors, and Lendl (who actually did seem like a machine)
yet wouldn't play in the australian open. what a douche.
 

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