Word is Bjorn

History was made. 

"Borg let his racket do the talking"

—Lars Skarke

Borg is deep in the baseline, listening to his demise, the thud of ball to tarp. John McEnroe has just smoked a forehand past the Swede's left Fila sock. A wisp, but a hush, rules over the crowd. A fresh cylinder of balls is decompressed, hissing secrets unvoiced. This sound is mistaken for soda vapor and confused as a tickle, breeze to bug. Speech is transmitted under breath until abducted by a collective gasp that hunts down every point. Reverse the circuit and every last murmur in Louis Armstrong Stadium vanishes back into a twenty-four-ounce vacuum of Wilson 3's. A satisfying voop!

Last one in is a hot dog burp.

Suck it up, Borg.

Sponsored by a sewing machine but named after a bear, the Swede is two sets and one stomachache down to a man from Queens who is high on grape soda and cheeseburgers. At this rate, the 1980 U.S. Open Men's Final in Flushing Meadow could be reflux by nightfall. 

I watched this match when I was eleven, my face meshed into a tennis racket. Sitting in the family den, I imagined each crooked little catgut-framed box, 230 give or take, were its own screen. 230 Borgs grinding out 230 comebacks. This must be how dragonflies watch tennis.

I played with a signature Bancroft Bjorn Borg, with a shadow of a B, burned into its catgut matrix. You may have seen it floating down a sewer creek in Pineville, North Carolina, chucked out to sea after another meltdown on clay. I was a lousy player, spending the best of my court time either feeding lobs to outer space or attempting to pick my teeth with the strings. When standing at the net, my impulse was to screen face and make weird noises, as if the grid twang of vibrating chords, could alter my voice. Vibrations caused by the ball's impact could transform the B into an outboard lip-flapping blur. Bbbbbb. Not unlike the plosive stutters of Buck Rogers' three-foot robot, Twiki.

Back on TV, where tennis racquets were actually used for tennis, the match failed to hold my attention. I turned to our record player, a Zenith portable suitcase that sat under a poster of an escaped circus gorilla that had just punched out a Gwangi. I was looking for Aerosmith, "Sweet Emotion," the first ten seconds at least, that moaning sink drain. I substituted Joe Walsh and transformed my Borg into a guitar. An axe, a handle, a nickname. A noise. Apparently, McEnroe plays guitar, badly. I saw that picture of him and Eddie Van Halen. The extent of Borg's musical talent could be found in a pre-match ritual in which fifty racquets are lined up on his hotel room floor, tuned tighter than cat nuts, arranged by pitch and string tension. Those who generate the most melodic pings make it to center court.

Back in Flushing, it's the graphite Donnay, stenciled in D, that gets the gig but squirts out of Borg's hand in the third and smashes in half on the acrylic DecoTurf.

CBS breaks to a commercial.

An IBM farmer tells me his cows are about to enter the Computer Age. Nordic warriors row through fog searching for a six-pack of Tuborg Gold. A cartoon phone booth is pleased with BellSouth's long distance rates. 

Back in Queens, McEnroe is in a dispute over eyesight and boundary. Sulking away from the net, his arms suddenly blurt out above his head, a child swiping at horseflies, more tic than tantrum, almost as impressive as the Zombie Walk he performed earlier, at the judge's expense.

"Umm, I don't know what that was," says Tony Trabert from the CBS booth. Neither does Pat Summerall, one headset over, a chin-tuck minimalist who is letting the game breathe in a sport that always seems to be holding its breath. You can hear them shift haunches in the booth, between wallop and echo. A courtside Henry Kissinger has a finger up under his glasses, extinguishing a gnat. A few rows over, Illie "Nasty" Nastase is resplendent in emerald-green acrylic by Adidas. Trabert snarks about how Nasty has acquired enough conduct fines to offset his earnings. Summerall responds in mumbled football scores. I wonder how I'd look in a Tuborg Gold tracksuit.

Borg startles the net with another fault, and almost frowns. His wife sneaks a nervous cigarette. You don't have to be a bearskin rug in a beer hall to know you're getting stomped.

I check my own Borg. Alongside the racquet's laminated neck read the myth: "Used By Bjorn Borg in Championship Play." Giving up on the Swedish Iceberg, I put on "Rocky Mountain Way," a piece of truck-stop stoner rock rumored to have been inspired by a runaway lawnmower. If the lore had its way, Joe Walsh looked up at the sky, thought of baseball and went no hands. Said it doesn't matter.

Couldn't get much higher. There's been plenty of speculation about that line. Especially from my brother, who would skip school and spend afternoons high as gas on the back row at Mecklenburg County Civil Court. Once, WROQ's own J.B. was on docket contesting a DUI. Afterwards, my brother tried to blackmail him into playing Black Sabbath's "Hand of Doom," a song mastered by his air band, Get Them Guts Outta My Yard.

A regular at WROQ, "Rocky Mountain Way" sold itself on a croaky Talk Box solo. The Talk Box is a small purple square connected to Joe Walsh's amp, transporting riffs through a narrow beer-bong tube up into Joe's mouth, which returns the favor in drool and roadhouse breath. The Talk Box essentially replaced Joe's voice with Joe's guitar. On brassier days, it sounds like someone punched a cat in the stomach. With "Rocky Mountain Way," it's a chain-smoking walrus pulling a double at a diner. Woe is it. And it went something like "bow-wow-wow-woah-wah-wow-woahowah." 

Could this have been what Rusty Kershaw was talking about when he wrote about a giant boa constrictor swallowing Neil Young—and Neil Young's mic stand—in the liner notes for On The Beach? Though my Borg racquet was an obvious stooge for the guitar, the Talk Box solo required technological innovation to convince the effect. I couldn't just pop jaw with thin air, as when lip-synching the verses.

I check back with the television. Holy computer cow shit. Borg won the third-set tie-breaker and is now up in the fourth. I again catch him staring at his strings, half-expecting the stenciled D to morph into Borg's face and pass wisdom in a Talk Box croak. Advice from the "Master of Grass" himself. I could stick my face in the racket and trace the giant B with my mouth, enunciating along the curve, the bow-whoa itself. The seasick warp on my Joe Walsh LP helped exaggerate the assonance. I'd already accidentally restrung Joe's lyrics anyway, thinking he said, "Blind goes the story mad" instead of "Cryin' ’cause the story's sad."

I checked my mother's tennis racquet leaning against the wall, the Jack Kramer Autograph with dinked maple veneer. Two sets ago, McEnroe had nearly ploughed through Jack Kramer himself while chasing a Swedish backhand past the rose bed into the front row.

My mom called her racquet a bat. She kept it locked in a wooden trapezoid press frame to prevent warping.

The press is a strange sight for sure, headgear designed by a medieval orthodontist. I had a thing for its wingnut screws, those tiny silver Mouseketeer hats that kept Jack Kramer in a headlock. The anti-warp press could also make a fine space helmet, whether facing an automated ball cannon, or just facing the reality that one must've been dropped on their head to believe this contraption would fly as a Talk Box.

I fit my head into the press, squeaking the silver wingnuts. Bbbbb the ball, Twiki. I looked the fool but felt the robot. Trapezoids, please report to my head. 

Locked in for the woah, I don't even notice the Swede finally succumbing to McEnroe, 6-4 in the fifth, a final point that ended with a susurrant boom, followed by a cupped roar that was dragged out of Louis Armstrong stadium by LaGuardia air traffic and smeared across a sunset, all watermelon on fire.

Nor did I notice my mother entering the room. When I asked if she remembered, she said, "If I'd known you were running around with my warp press on your head, I would've sent you to the psychiatrist." Blind goes the story mad.

CBS breaks to a commercial.

Sperry, inventor of the Ball Turret Gunner, is concerned with our listening habits. A classroom full of kids is not paying attention. A girl with thick glasses traces her hand. Another one, pigtailed, follows a fly buzzing around the room. The fact is, whether it be in battle, government or industry, not knowing how to listen has always been one of man's greatest problems.

Word is Borg.

This was the original scrapped introduction to the book How To Wreck A Nice Beach:The Vocoder From World War II To Hip-Hop. It was inspired by a dream concerning a talking can of compressed tennis balls. Melville House/StopSmiling will be publishing the expanded paperback edition this fall, once again without Bjorn Borg.