Since his Wimbledon victory in 1985 Boris Becker has lived a life of extremes – with many ups and downs. But he has found his luck off the big stages.
It’s a spring evening in silky soft air in the sophisticated aviation club of Dubai. Boris Becker is sitting at the table, he is still the coach of Novak Djokovic, the world’s number one tennis player at that time. Becker has a glass of red wine in front of him, every now and then he sticks a cigarillo on himself.
It’s supposed to be about Djokovic, this coaching job, but on this very relaxed evening in the Arabian Gulf it’s about much more. It’s about his whole life, the ups and downs he’s been through. It is about the breaks, the transformations, it is also about a Becker who has always been on the run. On the run to be committed. To be taken in.
Becker was never a single Becker. It’s a lot of Beckers. He was very early and very determined also the one who rebelled against the all too intimate public embrace. And who later crossed the line with Germany, with all those who thought they had to give him advice every day.
Becker’s face reddens that night when he talks about this topic, one of his favourite subjects:”I don’t owe anyone anything. I live my life as I please,”he says. And of course, this phrase that he has repeatedly said in recent years also falls:”In Germany, many still believe that I am the 17-year-old boy who won Wimbledon”.
In fact, Becker is the one who won Wimbledon in this blood-young age. But he’s the man who’s got his 50th birthday now. He has four children of three different mothers, he is the boss of a colorful patchwork family, he has been living in London for a long time, quite consciously away from this difficult Germany, which he has fascinated as a rousing tennis soloist. And that he was always a little suspiciously looked at him in the many years after his professional career, in which he often seemed like a hasardur “I am thankful that I found a home in London. With people who let me live well here,”says Becker,”right next to a place that means so much to me.”
Which is a monstrous understatement: Becker means with this place Wimbledon, the mythically wreathed tennis court, whose Centre Court he can see from the top floor of his house. If you like, Becker and Wimbledon have always kept a close eye on each other. What does Wimbledon mean to him today?”It’s the place of my second birth,”says Becker,”another life began there.”
Almost everything that happened in his life has to do with Wimbledon. With this 7. In July 1985 he turned the match point against South African Kevin Curren and became the youngest tournament winner in history. From one second to the next he was “hurled into another universe”, says Becker that night in Dubai,”I always wanted to be a great winner, of course. But I didn’t know what it means to be Wimbledon champion.”
A life without precedent began, a life marked above all by the fact that Becker swam against the tide. Against expectations. Against the German wishful thinking of how he should be an idol. This anger still resonates when Becker now, half a hundred years ago, says in an interview:”I was never your Boris. And I am not your Boris”, and what he now reminds us coolly, namely to be Mr. Becker, he demanded of reporters who ducked him in the buddy tone as a matter of course.
The crazy thing about Becker is also this: In all the excitement, in all the turbulence and confusion of his life, he has remained true to himself – as someone who doesn’t want to be grabbed and who doesn’t want to be grabbed either.”With me you never know what’s coming,”says Becker very dryly,”I don’t even know it myself”.
This was the case even in those years when he jetted over the continents and through the time zones. And it was precisely that literal incomprehensibility that made up his magic: the fluctuation between extremes, sometimes in a game, sometimes for years. Becker could turn games that seemed lost. And lose games that he had already won.
He captivated the whole nation in front of the television, he was a phenomenon, in his time the most captivating tennis player, one of the most moving individual sportsmen. Everything he did became an affair of state. Written by writers like Martin Walser (“Tennis is a religion. And Becker is their god”) as well as commented by one like President Richard von Weizsäcker. Behind Becker’s dramas even appearances of the national football team disappeared. The rebel’s attitude, which he sometimes cultivated, was also a national topic of conversation, for example when he sided with squatters in Hamburg’s Hafenstrasse. How does he look back on that time?”It was a life, always on the limit. A crazy life. I had already experienced more at 20 than others at 100 years of age,”says Becker.
However, it was also the case that Becker could not live without illuminating the headlight. He was always associated with what he himself called “publicity” by a love-hate relationship. He enjoyed his fame, his popularity. And he cursed her the next moment. And that hasn’t changed much in all the years up to his 50th now – Becker and the topic Becker was never a lack.
Not even because there was a second decisive moment in his life – once again in the surroundings of Wimbledon – at his very last tennis tournament, the evening after his final match against the Australian Pat Rafter. Becker was already a father of the family in July 1999, he had a son, Noah, with his wife Barbara, and the couple was in good expectation of the second child.
And then there’s this: After Becker had a good chat with German journalists about the last Wimbledon and the new life – in the end there are dozens of Becks bottles on the table of the Deutsches Haus in Wimbledon – he lets himself be chauffeured to the City of London. Later that evening he witnesses a daughter with the chance or not so coincidental acquaintance Angela Ermakova. Three months later, a lawyer’s office of Beckers sends a fax to the table announcing Mrs. Ermakova’s pregnancy. And identified as father Boris Becker.
Page 1: Wimbledon as a holy place and the hype about a tennis player
Page 2: Private cares and life afterward