Oucha, now Boris Becker is 50 years old, but he won Wimbledon only yesterday, 17 years old and with pink cheeks. Much time has passed, SPOX editor Oliver Wittenburg has to admit.
But the magic of summer 1985 has remained.
Ivan Lendl.
The beginning may seem strange. He is, but that’s the way it was.
Lendl inspired me for tennis, and the crime scene was not called Church Road, London, but Roland Garros, Paris. I had come to football at the age of ten and tennis at the age of twelve. On the 10th. June 1984 I wished for nothing more than that Lendl would win against the impudently overpowering and impertinently arrogant John McEnroe.
For two sentences, bigmouth McEnroe had pulled his opponent through the arena at the nose ring, then the game tilted miraculously and after more than four hours Lendl, laughing for a long time, triumphed in the stadium after more than four hours under the cheers of the predominantly French fans, and mine in front of the home television.
13 months later I was sitting in front of the box. My mother, who unlike me did not really worship “this Boris Becker”, and my little brother, who sat and watched because I was watching – and because everyone was watching what we didn’t know but suspected.
I held a tennis racket in my hand. Not a real one, because nobody played tennis at the time. At least not a human being in the place where I grew up. Those who didn’t play football, and football actually played all of them, were in the rifle club and/or brass band.
My tennis racket was black and made of plastic, sold in a pack of two and with yellow foam balls.
The balls in Wimbledon were white. In theory, Becker’s clothes were also white, but he threw himself into the mud that few tennis players did, and then chased a little disheveled, but with an inimitable obsession and passion over the court.
Becker fascinated me, took me in. I felt close to him. He was 17, I was 13. That’s not much of a difference. No comparison with his gnarly opponent. Kevin Curren, 27 years old, from South Africa. He could have come from the moon. I was just looking at Becker. My brother looked at me. My mother made some conversation. With whom, actually? There was only Boris. Wimbledon. The last serve.
That was over 30 years ago and when I think of Boris Becker, I always think back to that summer in 1985 first and with very warm feelings. The beginning of the boom, of total madness, which I could not escape, but which irritated and alienated me. I was interested in tennis player Becker. Or more precisely: the tennis player Boris Becker. And how he played…
A month after Wimbledon, I watched him and his American prodigy Aaron Krickstein at Hamburg’s Rothenbaum. From left to right, from right to left, at will. I shouldn’t have been in Krickstein’s shoes.
And a few weeks later I waited electrified, like the rest of the world, longingly waiting for the game of all games: Becker against McEnroe. That would have been the name of the quarter-finals at the US Open back then, but it didn’t happen.
Becker lost a round earlier against a bland, semmel-blond Swede named Joakim Nyström, who drove him mad with a kind of tennis catenaccio.
Becker played scary, grimaced horribly, cursed, spat, wished himself to hell.
It was fascinating. No less fascinating than his miracle of Wimbledon, no less impressive than his fabulous match in Hamburg against America’s greatest tennis talent.
I think of that when I think of Boris Becker today. To a boy playing tennis with an almost rapturous devotion, who completely captivated me. On the pitch, Becker was indestructible at one moment, the most dominant player of all time, destroying his opponents – and shortly afterwards a vulnerable, self-pitying and unbridled rage at his own imperfection, a little boy bursting with his own imperfection.
He was 17, I was 13 this summer. I understood him. What I didn’t understand was all the fuss around him, away from the tennis court. Was it really important? He felt the same way, I think. He didn’t want to be what everyone saw in him. How could he have? He didn’t want to play along, he wasn’t good at it. It never was. He just wanted to play.
After the award ceremony I couldn’t go fast enough to take out the box and get out into the yard. Hit a few balls. Play a little Becker.