This was the second episode of this extravagantly named BBC mini-series of three hour-long documentaries on tennis legends (I wouldn't call them gods) of yesteryear.
This one focused on the rivalry between the brash temperamental New Yorker John McEnroe and the cool calm Swede Bjorn Borg.
The programme takes both players in turn, showing their respective rises through the ranks, culminating in their two titanic Wimbledon final clashes of 1980 and 1981.
It would have been nice to see them interviewed together, but nonetheless was still very interesting to see and hear them both in seeming good health reflecting on their illustrious pasts.
Borg pretty much exploded onto the scene in the early '70s as something of a teeny-bopper idol, his youthful good looks and calm demeanour attracting the adoration of countless young, mostly teenage girls. He had won the championship four times by the time McEnroe came along to challenge his domination and in their first final they played an absolute classic which included the famous 18-16 4th set tie-breaker which people often forget McEnroe actually won although it was Borg who prevailed in the final set to lift the famous trophy.
McEnroe however wasn't to be denied and came snarling back in more ways than one to beat Borg in four sets the next year to precipitate the dethroned Swede's almost immediate retirement from the sport at the age of only 26.
I found it interesting that while Borg and McEnroe both offered running-commentaries on the first final which Borg of course won, Bjorn's contribution was strangely absent for the subsequent one which he lost.
With lots of replayed well-remembered archive footage interspersed with the interviews, including contributions from some contemporaries (but no Jimmy Connors!) and some so-called expert sports journalists, this was a very enjoyable episode, which you suspect did well behind the scenes to get the Garbo-esque Borg to say as much as he did.
There will always be that mystery about his enigmatic retiral from the sport, where you wonder if he didn't suffer some kind of breakdown and indeed the point is well made that McEnroe for all his emotional outbursts, behaved far more normally and like the rest of us than the silent keep-it-all-in Swede.
There's no doubt however that theirs will go down as one of the great sporting rivalries, their names forever linked just like those of Ali and Frazier, Prost and Senna, and Coe and Ovett in other sports.
