Great post. I happen to find Novak's technical perfection a marvel but I can see how he could be seen to lack flair like Federer or brutality like Nadal. Personality wise, I wonder how much of it is cultural and how much is him personally. I do know what you mean about being born charismatic, but he seems pretty charismatic in interview.
It's all about perception. Did Borg play so terribly differently from Novak?
No. He was the backboard. He was the guy who learned to come in, to win Wimbledon. His demeanor on court made Novak seem like an extreme extrovert by comparison.
Some people, even other tennis players, hated him because he was not by nature a S/V guy. He wore people down. You could not say he had a cool personality, because no one knew him.
But because of his looks - all the blond hair and attention from young girls - he had the same kind of rock star thing that Nadal has - and still has. People screamed and carried on. It was really nuts.
It was his looks.
People are shallow as hell. They react to how people LOOK. It's a huge part of everything.
Novak has the short hair. He has a long, serious face. He even looks like an intellectual. Women are not falling over themselves to get near him. So that's a lot of it.
(For me Fed is an anomaly. Off court he is like Clark Kent with a rather big nose. He is in no way handsome. But aura while playing appeals to people, the movement, the look of his strokes.)
So with Borg you had a guy who just "looked right", and maybe he was mysterious because he almost never spoke. So he was a perfect match-up for JMac and Connors. (He did have so much class that JMac was almost polite when he played Borg and admired Borg, so there is that.)
But mostly it just that people as a whole are so incredibly shallow and fickle that they will worship people who have some kind of star power - whatever that is - and actually hate others who do not.
It's really quite a sad thing.