Former tennis stars Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe have taken on each other once again as skippers at the new Laver Cup in Prague, but also as critics of a new movie about their on-court rivalry.
Starring Swedish actor Sverrir Gudnason as Borg and Transformers star Shia LaBeouf as McEnroe, ‘Borg McEnroe’ was released this month.
“It’s not very good,” McEnroe said at the new tournament pitting his Team World of players including Sam Querrey and John Isner against Borg’s Team Europe with the likes of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.
“I don’t want to get into it, I’ve had nothing to do with it. To me it’s inaccurate and I just don’t think it’s very good,” added the 58-year-old seven-time Grand Slam winner.
Borg, who is 61 and who has won 11 Grand Slam titles, said he quite liked the film, rated at 7.3 stars out of 10 on the Internet Movie Database website.
It lags behind ‘Rush,’ a 2013 movie in a similar vein about the rivalry between Formula One drivers Niki Lauda and James Hunt, with 8.1 stars.
But it is doing much better than another recently released tennis movie, the 5.5-star ‘Battle of the Sexes,’ about the 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.
“I saw it a couple of weeks ago in Stockholm and I thought it’s OK, but it’s still a fiction movie,” Borg said about ‘Borg McEnroe’.
“We were not involved from the beginning. It would be more fun if we were involved, because then we could give more details to the movie on what happened or not happened, but I thought it was OK.”
“If you see some things in the movie, then everything is not true, they create things to make it more exciting. It’s not a documentary or a true story, it’s fiction. But I thought it was good anyway,” Borg added.
The actors were one aspect of the film that Borg and McEnroe agreed on.
“It’s great actors in the movie, Shia LaBeouf and then you have this Swedish famous actor and they’re doing a really good job,” said Borg.
“The actor (LaBeouf) did a pretty good job. That wouldn’t be the main problem, but I think that he was not given enough of the whole picture,” said McEnroe.
“But I thought he did a pretty good job faking my tennis.”