Do we like Björn Borg?
Our score: 6 out of 10. No harmful words or court trouble turned up, but little verified good beyond the game itself keeps this mid-table.
Borg is the Swedish tennis great who walked away from the game at 25, after losing the 1981 Wimbledon and US Open finals to John McEnroe. In his 2025 memoir Heartbeats, released in the US on 23 September that year, he looks back on that exit and the years after it with unusual frankness.
Here's the thing about scandals: we went looking and came back near empty-handed. No court rulings against him turned up in the reporting we could open, and the memoir coverage we read carries no allegations against him. The book name-drops Donald Trump among many other famous names, but the article gives no context, so we're reading nothing into it.
On the harm check, there's nothing from Borg's own mouth against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet in what we found. His clothing brand ran a 2013 Moscow Times ad with a rainbow of underwear and the line “Björn Borg says da!”, in a country where homosexuality is criminal. That's the company's move, though, and the article carries no statement from Borg himself, so we're not handing him the credit.
The nearest thing to a hot take came in September 2025, when he told the BBC that players in his era “were using things they were not supposed to use”. He named no one, said it's important to keep tennis clean, and called Jannik Sinner's case “very strange”. That's an opinion about sport, not about people, and it sits fine with us.
The latest news is a quiet one. His planned visit to Pakistan in early May 2026 was postponed, and the federation said it “fully understands and respects his situation”. Nothing there reflects on his character either way.
So where does that leave us? A fairly clean slate, but honestly a thin one: we found no charity work or acts of standing up for others that we could verify, and that's the whole list. He passes both tests on what we could find, without the kind of record that earns a gold star.