Mats Wilander

Mats Wilander: The Man Who Got Everything He Wanted

On 11 September 1988 Mats Wilander beat Ivan Lendl in the final of the US Open after four hours and fifty-four minutes, the longest final the tournament had then seen. The win gave him his third major of the year and the world No. 1 ranking he had been chasing since he was a teenager. He would hold that ranking for twenty weeks in total, and he has spent the rest of his life explaining, with unusual candour, what happened next: he had arrived at the summit and discovered he no longer wanted to be there. It is one of sport's great cautionary tales, and it is attached to one of the most intelligent players who ever held a racket.

Växjö, and a Seventeen-Year-Old at Roland Garros

He was born in Växjö, in southern Sweden, on 22 August 1964, into the generation that grew up watching Björn Borg and picked up rackets because of him. In 1982 Wilander arrived at the French Open unseeded and seventeen years old, and beat, among others, Ivan Lendl and Guillermo Vilas on his way to the title. He became the youngest men's Grand Slam champion in history to that point. He had not yet won a professional tournament of any kind.

The Point He Gave Back

The most quoted moment of that fortnight was not a shot. In the semi-final against José Luis Clerc, on match point, a line call went Wilander's way and he did not believe it. He asked the umpire to replay the point rather than win the match on a call he thought was wrong. He won anyway, and later received the Pierre de Coubertin World Fair Play Trophy for it. At seventeen, in the biggest match of his life, he had calculated that the result was worth less than the accuracy of the result — which tells you something about the temperament that would later let him grind out five-hour finals without visible emotion.

Grinding Through the Eighties

What followed was six years of relentless accumulation. He took the Australian Open in 1983 and 1984, the French Open again in 1985, and built a career total of 33 singles titles and seven in doubles, along with eight Grand Prix Super Series championships between 1983 and 1988. His Wimbledon major came in doubles, in 1986, which made him one of only seven men to have won major titles on grass, clay and hard courts.

He was also, by some distance, the most valuable Davis Cup player of the era. Across seven finals between 1983 and 1989 he compiled a 36–16 singles record and led Sweden to the trophy in 1984, 1985 and 1987 — three titles, against the single Davis Cup that Borg, for all his aura, ever won.

1988

Then came the season that defines him. Wilander played fifteen tournaments in 1988, went 53–11, earned $1,726,731, and won the Australian Open, the French Open and the US Open. Only Wimbledon escaped him. The US Open final against Lendl was the summit and also the tell: a match won not by shot-making but by refusing to lose it, nearly five hours of attrition in which the Swede simply proved harder to break down than the world No. 1.

The Fall Off a Cliff

The decline after 1988 was among the steepest ever recorded by a player at his peak, and Wilander has never dressed it up. The goal had been the ranking; the ranking had been achieved; the desire went. In 1995, during a comeback attempt that had taken him back to around No. 45 in the world, he tested positive for cocaine at the French Open, and received a three-month suspension when the case concluded in 1997. He retired in 1996.

The Second Life

He reappeared as a captain of Sweden's Davis Cup team, as a coach — among his charges were Tatiana Golovin and Paul-Henri Mathieu — and, most durably, as a television analyst for Eurosport, where the same tactical mind that dismantled opponents now dismantles matches in front of a camera. The International Tennis Hall of Fame inducted him in 2002. He lives in Hailey, Idaho, with his wife Sonya, whom he married in 1987, and their four children.

Why Mats Is Called a Genius

This is a claim about tactical intelligence and physical craft, not about intellect, and it deserves to be stated in those terms. Wilander's specific quality was problem-solving inside a match and, more unusually, inside a career. He began as a pure top-spinning, grind-it-out baseliner with a two-fisted backhand — a Borg imitator, essentially, built to outlast people on clay. Almost no player who succeeds with that method ever changes it, because it works and because rebuilding a technique at the top of the game is close to professional suicide. Wilander rebuilt anyway, adding attacking patterns and a serviceable volley, and the result was a man who could win the Australian Open on grass and then on hard court, the French on clay, the US Open on cement, and a Wimbledon title in doubles. That is not one skill applied everywhere; it is four different games learned in sequence.

The in-match version of the same faculty is what opponents found unbearable. He read patterns, changed the shape of a rally rather than the power of it, and was willing to play for five hours to make a small tactical advantage decisive. The 1988 US Open final is the proof: he beat the best player in the world by out-thinking him for nearly five hours.

The counter-case is substantial and he would not dispute much of it. Twenty weeks at No. 1 is a modest reign; seven singles majors put him well behind the greats of his own century; he never won Wimbledon in singles, the one title that would have settled the argument. His style was widely found monotonous — a war of attrition rather than an exhibition of talent — and much of what looks like genius is really an extraordinary tolerance for boredom and pain. Above all, the collapse after 1988 suggests that what carried him was ambition rather than obsession: once the goal was met, the machinery stopped. A cocaine positive in 1995 closed the playing career on the least dignified note available. Genius, here, means a rare tactical mind housed in a body disciplined enough to execute what the mind saw — for about seven years.

Legacy

He is the answer to a question most people get wrong: the Swede with more Davis Cups than Borg, more majors on more surfaces, and the only man of his era to win three of the four in a single season without ever being thought of as a natural. His 1982 Roland Garros title, won unseeded at seventeen, stood as the benchmark for teenage precocity in the men's game for years. And the replayed match point against Clerc is still taught as the cleanest example of sportsmanship the sport possesses — a boy who declined to become a Grand Slam finalist on a bad call, and became one anyway two points later.

Achievements

• International Tennis Hall of Fame — 2002
• Worked as tennis player, tennis coach and television presenter