Wimbledon champion, Olympic champion, Davis Cup winner – and still only number two: former tennis star Michael Stich will turn 50 on Thursday.
At the height of their rivalry, Boris Becker no longer wanted to hide his deeply felt dislike. For Germany’s darling, his antagonist from the north was only “the player’s stab” – one tennis professional among many. The Tall One from Elmshorn was much more than that: Wimbledon champion, Olympic champion, Davis Cup winner, ATP world champion, number two in the world. Michael Stich contributed more to the German tennis boom than Becker had long been fond of.
The respect of the tennis world was certain, the great Pete Sampras even claimed: “If everyone plays their best tennis, Michael Stich is the best”. The fact that he nevertheless remained the eternal number two behind Becker in his homeland was annoying to Stich, but he could change little about the circumstances. Even when he beat Becker in the 1991 Wimbledon final, referee John Bryson spoke into the microphone: “Game, Set, Match Becker!”
A mistake that is symbolic of Stitch’s career. He was regarded as unapproachable and hypothermic, Becker, on the other hand, as rousing and hot-blooded. Stich was quite capable of great emotions. During the drama in Moscow in 1995, when he missed nine match points in the Davis Cup against Andrei Tschesnokow from Russia and thus entered the dream final against the USA, Stich sat on the bench for minutes and howled into a towel that Becker, of all people, had put over his head with almost care.
“Michael has two sides. He looks cool on the outside, but he’s also sensitive. This was particularly evident in the team,” his long-time companion Carl-Uwe Steeb told the SID: “He often reacted emotionally on the court. But Stich never freed himself from Becker’s long shadow. Also because the triumph at Wimbledon remained his only major title.
“Of course, I would have liked to have won more Grand Slam tournaments. But then I would have had to focus even more on tennis alone and would probably not have become the person I am today,” Stich once said. He didn’t want to talk publicly about his 50th birthday on Thursday, Stich enjoys the peace and quiet in his home city of Hamburg – after all, there has been enough excitement about him in 2018.
On the one hand there was the admission to the Hall of Fame, the award for his sporting life’s work, which moved Stich to tears in summer. A little later he said goodbye with wet eyes and a brittle voice to his home tournament at Rothenbaum, which he won in 1993 as the last German to do so and for which he last worked as tournament director for ten years. He would have liked to continue, but the German Tennis Federation (DTB) decided to make a new start. “I’ve accepted the decision and checked it out,” Stich said.
He has enough tasks, even if his life is not as public as that of his former opponent Becker. His foundation, which supports children infected with HIV or suffering from AIDS and their families, is a large part of his life. Thanks to her, Stich bears the Federal Cross of Merit. He also sits on the supervisory board of the Rückenzentrum am Michel in Hamburg, which he co-founded, and is a frequent investor. Stich himself calls himself a “business angel”.
He shuns big risks, a player was always a trick, but only rarely a gambler. Here, too, he differs fundamentally from Becker. Only once did the Hasardeur pass through him. At the time, Stich invested 250,000 D-Mark in a company looking for gold treasures in shipwrecks. “Someone would have had more of it if I had thrown a few gold coins into the sea,” he admitted later. However, the player Stich was able to cope well with the loss.