Former tennis champ Bjorn Borg has released his first memoir.
Heartbeats, which came out in September 2025, is a “candid memoir” which takes the reader behind the scenes of Bjorn’s meteoritic rise, abrupt resignation and the fallout that followed. In the book, Bjorn admits that he overdosed on drugs on two seperate ocassions and that he regrets the decision he made at 26.
Here are the 5 biggest bombshells from Heartbearts:
Bjorn reveals why he quit tennis
In the book, Bjorn admits that he abruptly quit professional tennis at 26 when he realised he didn’t care about losing anymore.
The former tennis champ decided to walk away from the sport after he lost the 1981 Wimbledon and US Open finals to his rival John McEnroe.
“All I could think was how miserable my life had become,” he writes in the book.
“I was not upset or sad when I lost the final. And that’s not me as a person. I hate to lose,” he told the AP in a recent interview.
“My head was spinning,” he continued, “and I knew I’m going to step away from tennis.”
He also admits that he now regrets making that decision
“I can admit and regret today,” he writes in the book.
In a follow up interview with The Times, Bjorn said he didn’t regret his decision at the time, but he does now.
“I didn’t regret it at the time because I had lost the enjoyment, I had lost the motivation, because everybody was after me. Photographers… I could not go to a restaurant. There were a lot of photographers in the lobbies of the hotels. In the end, I ate in hotel restaurants or room service. No life.
“In 1982, all my sponsors came to me. They said, ‘Why don’t you take three or four months off and then come back?’
“I said no. And that’s stupid,” he adds. “If I knew what was going to happen in the 80s, of course, I would have continued to play tennis even if I didn’t enjoy it that much.”
Bjorn admits he overdosed twice
Throughout the book, Bjorn writes about his struggle with drug and alcohol addiction.
“The first time I tried cocaine,” he writes in the book, “I got the same kind of rush I used to get from tennis.”
After he retired from the sport, Bjorn turned to drugs to continue to chase the rush and almost died twice from drug overdoses.
The first drug overdose happened in 1989 when he was in Milan. His then-wife, Loredana, found him unconscious and took him to a local hospital where his stomach was pumped.
“The fact that I’m still alive is thanks to her,” he writes.
A couple of years later, he collapsed on a bridge in the Netherlands from a heart attack.
The book, which was ghostwritten by his third wife Patricia, begins with him on that bridge.
“Before it goes black,” he writes of the near-death experience, “I have time to think: how did things end up like this?”
Bjorn Borg reveals he was diagnosed with prostrate cancer
In the final chapter of the memoir, Bjorn reveals he has been living with “extremely aggressive” prostate cancer.
The former tennis champ says the cancer is now in remission after he underwent life-saving surgery last year, explaining that “there never really was a choice because the cancer turned out to be extremely aggressive”.
“I spoke to the doctor and he said this is really, really bad,” he recently told BBC Breakfast. “He said you have these sleeping cancer cells [and] it’s going to be a fight in the future.
“Every six months I go and test myself. I did my last test two weeks ago. It’s a thing I have to live with.”
“There’s always a risk the cancer might spread, and that’s something I’ll have to live with for a while now. Every six months, I’ll go through the anxious wait to find out if we caught it in time,” he writes in Heartbeats.
“The fear comes and goes. But that’s life, isn’t it? You never really know what’s coming. You just have to make the most of each day.”
Bjorn name drops a bunch of celebrities
There’s plenty of celebrity gossip in the book, with Bjorn name-dropping his famous friends throughout the chapters.
He mentions his “old friend Hugh Hefner” and that ”Andy Warhol was someone easy to like” and shares anecdotes about Donald Trump, Tina Turner and Nelson Mandela, just to name a few.
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