Peter Lundgren - Playing Career

Playing Career

Lundgren was one of the second generation of Swedish players along with Mats Wilander, Stefan Edberg, Joakim Nyström, Anders Järryd, Henrik Sundström, Hans Simonsson and Kent Carlsson that followed after the success of Björn Borg. He left Sundsvall as an 18 year old and moved to Stockholm, to further his tennis career.

In 1984 Lundgren finished the year ranked at 274. At the end of the 1985 season Lundgren jumped up 249 places on ranking list to finish at number 27. In the process he won his first title in Cologne as a qualifier defeating Wojtek Fibak, Goran Prpić, Jeremy Bates, Tim Wilkinson before defeating Ramesh Krishnan in the final. After the title win he was hailed as "the new Björn Borg", in reference to his talent and the long hair that bore resemblance to Borg and that he had trained with him as well. Lundgren's best ranking was 23rd in the world, but at the time he was the only 7th best Swede behind Mats Wilander, Stefan Edberg, Anders Järryd, Joakim Nyström, Henrik Sundström and Jan Gunnarsson.

This was the golden age of Swedish tennis in which Lundgren said "We had at most 14 players in the top 100. ( Don’t forget the size of the Swedish population, it makes it even better this achievement)". Lundgren while managing to have some big wins over Ivan Lendl, Mats Wilander, Michael Chang, Jim Courier, Thomas Muster and Pete Sampras, was not able to achieve consistency and he said himself that "I was a little up and down. Sometimes I could lose motivation and then suddenly get thrashed against lower ranked players." He played his last match on tour against Karol Kučera in Copenhagen and retired at 30 years of age and then went into coaching.