ATP-Challenger: Heilbronn winner Rudi Molleker: Important tips from Mentor Becker

Youngster Rudi Molleker triumphed sensationally at the Neckar Cup in Heilbronn last weekend – possibly also thanks to a meeting with Boris Becker.

Rudi Molleker recently had two exciting experiences at the Munich ATP tournament. At the beginning of the tennis festivities Alexander Zverev invited the young man from Oranienburg to a sparring programme, a good hour was “hard and strenuous”, says Molleker. But another spectacular highlight followed: A certain Boris Becker joined the training course for the best German juniors. Becker told him about some technical tricks, Molleker said, but the most important thing was the exchange with the legendary champion about the “mental side”: “It was an absolutely great experience,” says Molleker, “when he talks, you forget everything around you”.

Molleker is 17 years and six months old, just a little younger than Becker when he stormed to his historic triumph in Wimbledon, almost 33 years ago now. But the days of these youthful strikers are over in world tennis, careers today have a completely different time horizon, some top players are happy when they win a Grand Slam title around thirty. Molleker, the daring teenager, therefore still has plenty of time to develop his talents to the full.

But Molleker is ambitious, hungry, greedy for success. He does not want to wait excessively long, and that he is already in an exceptional position at his age and at this stage of his career, he showed in an excellent way at the weekend at the Neckar Cup, an exceptionally well-filled Challenger tournament in Heilbronn: The organizers gave the hopeful guy a wildcard, a free ticket to take part in a competition of this category for the first time. And what did Molleker do? He strung victory after victory, and in the final he finally beat the Czech Jiri Vesely in an ingenious Top 100-Crack. “This is all unreal,” Molleker later said, “this is the best moment of my career so far.” And then Molleker sent a thank-you to the man he feels is a protege, Boris Becker: “It helped me a lot to talk to him. I was stronger in this victory than ever before in the critical moments.

That, in fact, was Molleker’s previous malus – if you want to look at the development of a junior player from a beckmesser point of view so early on: Molleker had and still has all the blows it takes to march ahead in tennis. But he brought this potential to the pitch in a very capricious way, he swayed between first-class and then mediocre performances. Much of it also had to do with the pressure of expectations from outside, but also from Molleker himself, after all the young guy from Brandenburg has been regarded as the “next big thing” in international tennis for many years. A film that the RBB made about Molleker some time ago was entitled “Von Oranienburg nach Wimbledon”, of course Molleker couldn’t do anything for the title, but he suffered a little from the background noise that expressed itself in it. Motto: Molleker, the man who will one day have a say in Wimbledon, even as Boris Becker’s heir.

Together with Nicola Kuhn, Molleker won the 2014 U14 World Championship, Kuhn is also highly regarded, but he now plays for the Spanish federation. Molleker is now the player on whom the German hopes for the generation after Alexander Zverev rest, a crazy thought somehow, since Zverev is also just getting started. But the industry, fast moving as it is, always needs new faces, new projections for the future. Molleker’s development did not progress at all during his junior years, he was often, too often injured. He also couldn’t get along with every coach, even with Davis Cup boss Michael Kohlmann, who temporarily supervised him, the chemistry was not right. That is why Molleker quickly left the DTB base in Oberhaching. Now he trains with the association coach Jan Velthuis in the performance centre in Hanover, it seems to work much better.

Molleker has often played Future tournaments recently in order to get used to rough adult tennis on this third level. Now he even won a competition on the so-called Challenger level, in which you have to be very assertive against older warhorses and young rivals. But in Paris, at the French Open, the 17-year-old will be competing in the juniors’ competition, perhaps even with the first junior title at a Grand Slam.