What is it like to be the greatest tennis player of our time, perhaps of all time? Sport Writer B. J. Phillips, who did this week's cover story on Bjorn Borg, gained some surprising insights into the life of the Swedish superstar. Phillips spent two weeks with Borg at the French Open in Paris, watching him in action (he won the tournament handily), at practice and at rest. She talked with his fiancee, Mariana Simionescu, a tennis star in her own right, his parents and his coach. She had lengthy sessions with Borg himself, including a round-trip plane ride between Paris and Rome. To travel in the orbit of a superstar, reports Phillips, "is to be envied. All the tennis fans on the plane--including the pilot --came around for autographs, and many of them looked at me as though their idea of dying and going to heaven was to sit and talk to Bjorn Borg for two hours." Inside the phlegmatic Swede, Phillips found, there is a bright, charming young man. "He's not wildly controversial or colorful," she says. "But he has a dry, self-deprecating wit, and the patience and good will of a true gentleman. He will sign hundreds of autographs and never let on to people that they happen to be intruding on his time."

Reporter-Researcher Peter Ainslie, who wrote the accompanying story on Borg's financial empire, has watched Borg play many times and is impressed above all with his good manners. "I've seen him angry only once," he said. "He turned and asked the umpire, 'Are you sure about that call?' For Borg, that is a tantrum." Ainslie interviewed many of Borg's tennis colleagues, including players, officials and promoters. "Fellow pros like John McEnroe, Stan Smith and Harold Solomon see one facet of Borg, but I got some surprising insights from talking to tennis umpires," says Ainslie. "Some of them have been in the business for years. They can make valid comparisons with the great players of the past, whereas for today's players, that's more difficult. Borg was born the same year Lew Hoad won his first Wimbledon singles title."

Phillips came away from the assignment with a very personal souvenir: Borg's coach, Lennart Bergelin, undertook to massage away her chronic case of tennis elbow. "Borg calls him Dr. Black-and-Blue, and now I know why," says Phillips. "After the massage, my arm swelled up and turned a rainbow of colors. But three days later I was able to lift my arm over my head without pain for the first time in a year." And her hands to the typewriter, for a pleasing and unique look at the incredible tennis machine.

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