Aidan Smith meets Mats Wilander
Despite being branded ‘dull’ in his playing pomp, the seven-times grand slam champ has led a colourful life and still loves ‘the greatest game in the world’
There’s some great old footage of four Swedish tennis kids standing in a circle bouncing a ball to each other off the edge of their racquets – truly they are the sons of Borg. In one sense it’s a pity that Mats Wilander, a member of the precocious blond quartet, didn’t introduce the trick into his match demeanour between points, circa 1988.
This might have helped get him a better press. The first report I can find mentioning him that year comes from the Australian Open. “Possibly the world’s most conservative player,” it says, before going on to describe his deliveries as “pedestrian”, so much so that spectators were queueing to leave, and concluding that his opening-round victory had been “tedious and uninspiring”.
In another sense, though: ya boo sucks. Who needs warm reviews when you’ve seized the trophy, which Wilander did after what he admits was a “lucky” victory over the local hero, Pat Cash?
Next stop, Paris, but still the write-ups were decidedly un-rave. “Dull Mats” went one headline. “Horribly boring to watch … a terrible uncharismatic tennis star.” But before we forget: he won the French in ’88 as well.
Next up Wimbledon, which Wilander didn’t win, the prize going to his fellow Swede, juniors rival and another member of the ball-juggling foursome, Stefan Edberg – and then it was on to Flushing Meadows for the US Open where our man overcame Ivan Lendl to become surely the most under-appreciated three-outof-four guy there has ever been in grand slam tennis.
By then, Wilander was getting his retaliation in first. “I had a good joke for the press-room,” the man who’s now Eurosport’s expert eyes on the game tells me. “If a Swedish tennis player and a Czech tennis player were dropped off the top of the Empire State Building at the same time, which one would hit the ground first?
“My answer was: ‘Who cares?’ When Ivan and I played, on any surface at any time, people were not that interested in either of us. I think we both couldn’t have been any less bothered about that but in tennis in the 1980s there was Jimmy Connors and there was John Mcenroe, both very original in game style and behaviour and more entertaining for sure, and crowds wanted to see them rather than two guys who seemed to have been made in a factory.”
We’re talking in the lead-up to Wimbledon and if Wilander, now 52, ever really was a baselining Borgite robot, clanking off a production line on the outskirts of Stockholm with a doublefisted backhand set to stun, then very soon he was nothing like that at all.
This is a man who’s dabbled in poetry. “It was more just thoughts that were put down on paper,” he says. “I wrote in airports and on planes. I was a teenager. I was young and inexperienced but also unafraid.” Still, I don’t think Pete Sampras ever scribbled verse. Wilander has more than dabbled in rock music, going as far as releasing an album with a friend, Christopher Seldon, and touring his homeland –and unfortunately our half-hour together isn’t nearly long enough to explore his deep love for Bob Dylan. Suffice to say, though, that when I ask him for his favourite Dylan tracks he chooses Neighbourhood Bully and the equally unobvious Buckets of Rain.
“As someone who’s travelled seven months of every year since he was 15, I admire Dylan for his Neverending Tour. Sure I’ve seen him perform loads of times and always he’s been great. He can be a grumpy old man and he can f*** up and I probably like these shows the best. I don’t expect him to entertain the crowd but to sing and play from the heart.”
From the heart. It’s one of Wilander’s favourite phrases. “I’m interested in life” is another. If he sounds like a hippie that’s probably because he is. For three months of every year, he leaves behind his wife – South African-born ex-model Sonya – and four kids in their Idaho home and chugs round America in his travelling tennis roadshow. At nights the “Wilander on Wheels” RV gets parked in campgrounds and round the fire he might whip out his acoustic guitar.
“I love the freedom of the road,” he says. “I like to camp and to not have to check in to airports and hotels and I love to just drive, man. Do you know that’s how I saw Scotland for the first time? Two years ago straight after Wimbledon I hired a motorhome for a golfing holiday. My golf is one day good, the next shit. But in beautiful Scotland who cares?”
And this is a man who not only quotes Dylan but John Cleese as well. “His show [Fawlty Towers] is the one I’ve watched more than any other.” Me too, and I’d love to discuss with a fellow obsessive how the gags always came in threes (“What did you expect to see out of a Torquay hotel window … Sydney Opera House? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically … ?”) but we really should talk tennis.
I’m interested in speaking to Wilander because the Swede at the conclusion of his stupendous 1988 and Andy Murray at the end of last year seemed to chime. Both climbed to the summit of the men’s game, No 1 in the world, but the sheer effort of getting there appeared to shatter them. In Wilander’s case he would tumble down the mountain to No 41 within two years, complaining that he’d lost his edge and tennis was no longer fun.
“Our stories are slightly different,” he says. “Andy was much older than me when he got to No 1 and I’d already won six majors, the seventh doing it for me, but in my case I’d never been driven or motivated to be the No 1. The fun was still there a bit at the start of the following year but what wasn’t fun was always having to try and beat the guy on the other side of the net and keep doing that always.
“When you’ve won as much as Andy has and I did then at some point you have this thought and want to shout