STOCKHOLM — When he was 10, Leo Borg sat his mother down and told her something that made her cry:

He wanted to be a tennis player.

Until then, Patricia Borg had quietly held out hope that the athletically gifted Leo might choose some other path. When he was a bit younger, coaches from a soccer club told her that he was one of the brightest talents they had scouted in a while. Patricia liked to remind Leo of that from time to time.

Tennis though? That was the realm of her husband, Bjorn Borg, who won 11 Grand Slam singles titles over a relatively brief career, claiming a place among the greatest players ever. To Patricia Borg, therefore, the idea that her son would take such a liking to the game, and that he would show such promise in it, seemed almost a cruel twist. His father’s shadow, she thought, would always be too long.

“And so I was crying,” she said. “We tried to get him into another sport, just so he wouldn’t be compared with his father. It would be so much easier.”

“I was scared,” she added.

Raising an aspiring athlete can be perilous for any parent. How do you provide encouragement without being overbearing? How do you balance precocity with just being a child? As sports figures like Michael Jordan and Joe Montana and Zinedine Zidane have learned, these questions are magnified and multiplied when you are one of the most famous athletes in the world.