CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Foreword
The Man on the Moon
What Is the Sense in it All?
The Weeks of Cold Silence
Secure and Sterile
Elvira Becker: He Is My Son
Just Because!
Condemned to Freedom
The Man Who Was My Mother
The Burden of Fame
And Everything Finally Dissolves Itself in Sleep . . .
In Monte Carlo with Two Romanians
Ion Tiriac: A Bitter Aftertaste
Never Change a Winning Shirt
Every Mother-in-Law’s Dream
Greetings from the Beetle
Has Everyone Here Gone Mad?
No Street Battles in Bed
Welcome, Herr Hartel
Why?
Becker versus Becker
Pigeon-holing
Stiffer than a Starched Collar
Love at First Step
Serve: Germany
Blood under the Toenail
Doped Up Yet?
Old Lions Still Bite
My Dear Fellow Players
News at the Fifth Hole
Ali, Open Your Eyes
John McEnroe: Magical and Beautiful
An End and a Beginning
Epilogue
Notes
Index
About the Author
Copyright
In memory of Franz, my grandfather,
and Karl-Heinz, my father.
I hope to carry on their legacy and
protect my family as they did.
PROLOGUE
It’s dark. I can hear the low voice of a television commentator coming from the kitchen, where Noah is watching basketball. Elias is cuddled up in my right arm, his blond curly head leaning against my shoulder, his big blue eyes wide open. The heavy children’s Bible is almost slipping from my hands but Elias demands I read some more. ‘ “And Moses raised his staff and looked up to the sky. All at once a wind appeared that became a storm, and the sea began to part.” ’ The door opens and Juey, our dog, comes in. Soundlessly the golden retriever lies down on the bedspread and pushes his nose under my left knee. ‘ “To right and left, walls of water arose. Moses guided his people slowly through the opening in the sea.” ’ The door opens again. It seems the basketball match has finished. Noah lies down on my left, his head very close to mine, his brown curls tickling my ear, and I carry on reading. ‘ “The Egyptian army hesitates, but the Pharaoh calls for the attack. And as the Egyptians reach the centre of the sea, the storm ceases and the water swallows them up . . .” ’
It is utterly silent in the room. I can’t move an inch. I’m like Gulliver in Lilliput, except that my captors, Elias, Noah and Juey, are all asleep. I feel such sadness and happiness at the same time that I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. They say that in the moment between life and death you see your life passing before you like a film. I have this feeling now. What’s happening to me?
FOREWORD
I complained on the tennis courts. I cried, spat, bled and winced in pain. I talked to myself, and millions heard me. I protested, and annoyed everyone, from my fellow competitors and my coaches to the spectators and my parents. I was an adolescent under constant scrutiny, trying to grow up under the unrelenting gaze of people who really wanted me to stay just the way I’d been when I first won Wimbledon. The boy from Leimen, forever seventeen, permanently frozen in the dreams of a tennis nation, brought back to life once a year for Wimbledon fortnight.
The pressure was often unbearable. ‘Boris seems to be there for everyone,’ wrote the German daily Stuttgarter Zeitung in 1986. ‘Nearly everyone identifies with him, whether as the enfant terrible or the cool victor. How nice it is that this multi-talented player from Baden is beginning to fulfil the many and varied expectations people have of him.’ 1 But I didn’t know how to meet those expectations. I was only allowed to let go and be myself after it was announced, ‘Game, set, match, Becker.’ Getting thrown out in the first round was not what I was supposed to do. Let that happen and the papers would declare at once: ‘Boris is finished.’
I’ve written this book above all for my children: Noah, Elias and Anna. It’s for them that I want to set down the truth – the seconds before the serve that made me the youngest Wimbledon winner of all time, as well as the minutes after being sentenced as a tax evader. I would like to explain to them about my personal losses, and take responsibility for my separation and subsequent divorce. And I would like to explain to Anna why she does not have the surname Becker.
I want to talk about the things that happened behind the baseline, both during and after my career. How it was when John McEnroe, a man I regard highly today, called me an arsehole during a change of sides, and why the end of my tennis life also meant the end of my marriage. How it is that rumours of affairs appear in the press, so inaccurate they can’t even get the hair colour right, while my true passions remain largely undiscovered. And how someone like me, the small-town boy from Leimen, took to sleeping pills and, when this didn’t work any more, to alcohol.
I have faced considerable challenges and heartache since 1999: the death of my father, my divorce, the tax proceedings, my illegitimate daughter. I am still trying to make sense of it all. The more I ask myself, the less I know.
This book describes my reality. It records the stress I had to endure and to overcome, my doubts and fears, but also my guilt, and the pain I caused to others. Quite a few will disagree with me. They’ll be upset, and declare that sportspeople are supposed to run, sweat, suffer – and shut up. A few decades ago, in the time of our great footballer Uwe Seeler, for example, this may well have been the case: overhead kick, header, and then under the cold shower. Some chanting in the changing room and a word or two about the missed penalty, and that was it.
However, in the media age, anyone who wants to be a star, or is one already, has to learn to communicate, just as I had to. Top-level sport has become popular entertainment, and in Germany I was the pioneer. Eighty-nine per cent of West Germans knew my name after my first Wimbledon victory, according to a survey done at the time. Volkswagen was probably the only German product that was better known than I was. ‘Becker’, as the US television station CBS declared in their news programme 60 Minutes, was ‘the first German national hero since the defeat of the German army in the Second World War’.2 Today, every German over the age of eighteen knows who I am.
I had become a ‘living legend’, wrote the Hamburg journalist Claus Jacobi back then – against my will and at ‘twice the speed of sound’.3 But I never saw myself as a legend. I never saw myself as a Michael Jordan or a Muhammad Ali or a Max Schmeling. I knew what legends went through, especially the film stars – I’d read the books. Marlene Dietrich alone in a small room on the avenue Montaigne in Paris; Marilyn Monroe, sensitive and addictive, possibly murdered, certainly abused as a ‘femme fatale’; Marlon Brando, still alive then but living under the overwhelming shadow cast by his own fame; James Dean, dead and buried before the film that made him a cult reached the cinemas.
I was supposed to be both wunderkind and fairy-tale prince. But it wasn’t like that. Instead of joy there was frustration, the heavy pressure of high expectations, the headlines, revelations and inventions by the media, the experience of racism and the burden of fame. During my fifteen years as a professional player, there was light and shade every day, and later on there was a period of real darkness.
In December 1985, the Swiss-German newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung wrote about me: ‘The media have branded him Superman, the showpiece of the nation. The fuss around him is like that before the Christmas presents are handed out, and it seems to swallow Becker up.’4
Well, I survived. Today it’s neither money nor power that keeps me going, but the challenge as a divorced man to be a good father to my children.
Sportspeople often experience great emptiness at the end of their career. Overnight, it’s finished. No more applause, ovations, fans who want to touch you. John McEnroe once told me that his emotions after his final wins at the US Open and Wimbledon were as strong as at the birth of his children. He survived, but many don’t. Football players who drown themselves in alcohol or try to escape reality with the help of drugs. Boxers who throw their wives from a balcony or shoot at them through a closed bathroom door. Sports celebrities who fill in their lottery tickets at the newsagent’s round the corner instead of signing autographs.
I haven’t shot anyone or used cocaine. But I was dizzy and directionless, tumbling towards the edge of the cliff. Yet whenever things looked hopeless, my survival instinct kicked in. And here I am. Just thirty-five years old, at the end and the beginning at the same time. Back in the qualifying rounds, just as at Wimbledon in 1984. And the tournament is called Life.
THE MAN ON THE MOON
I’M SERVING FOR the championship. Five steps to the baseline. My arm is getting heavy, wobbly. I look at my feet and almost stumble. My body starts to shake violently. I feel I could lose all control. I’m standing at the same baseline from where I served to 1–0 in the first set. 5–4; the end is getting nearer. I have to find a way to get these four points home.
My opponent, Kevin Curren, piles on the pressure. 0–15. 15 all. 30–15. 40–15. I want, want, want victory. I look only at my feet, at my racket. I don’t hear a thing. I’m trying to keep control. Breathe in. Serve. Like a parachute jump. Double fault. 40–30. How on earth can I place the ball in that shrinking box over there on the other side of the net? I focus on throwing the ball and then I hit it.
The serve was almost out of this world, or at least its results were. This victory was my own personal moon landing. 1969 Apollo 11, 1985 Wimbledon 1. Back then, Neil Armstrong jumped from the ladder of the space capsule Eagle into the moondust and transmitted his historic words to the people of the world: ‘That’s one small step for man, one great leap for mankind.’ But I couldn’t muster words to meet the occasion. I could only think, boy oh boy, this can’t be true.
The tension disappeared instantly and I felt slightly shaky. My heart was beating fast. I left crying to the others, though: my coach Günther Bosch, my father and my mother. ‘With the passion of a Friedrich Nietzsche or Ludwig van Beethoven,’ wrote Time in its next issue, ‘this unseeded boy from Leimen turned the tennis establishment of Wimbledon on its head.’1
Although my Swedish colleague Björn Borg was only seventeen when he entered the Wimbledon arena, he didn’t win until three years later. John McEnroe started at eighteen but didn’t hold the trophy until he was twenty-two. Jimmy Connors was twenty-one; Rod Laver, one of the greatest of our time, twenty-two. I was just seventeen years and 227 days old; I couldn’t legally drive in Germany. I cut my own hair, and my mother sent me toothpaste because she was worried about my teeth. ‘Boy King,’ lauded the British newspapers. ‘King Boris the First.’ Meanwhile, King Boris was in the bath enjoying a hot soak. Back then, a physiotherapist was beyond my means.
From that day on, nothing in my life remained the same. Boris from Leimen died at Wimbledon in 1985 and a new Boris emerged, who was taken at once into public ownership.
Goodbye, freedom. Hands reaching out to you, tearing the buttons from your jacket; fingernails raking over your skin as if they wanted a piece of your flesh. A photograph, a signature – no, two, three, more . . . Love letters, begging letters, blackmail. Bodyguards on the golf course and on the terraces at Bayern Munich. Security cameras in the trees of our home, paparazzi underneath the table or in the toilets. Exclusive – see Becker peeing.
And everything I did had consequences. One word of protest would lead to a headline. An innocent kiss would appear on the front page. A defeat and Bild would cry for the nation. A victory and the black, red and gold of the German flag was everywhere. Our Boris.
The experts would write that it was my willpower and the ‘boom boom’ of my serve that got me through. But it isn’t explained away so easily. On that day of my first victory at Wimbledon, forces were involved that went beyond mere willpower. Instinct made me do the right thing in the decisive moment, even if I didn’t know I was going to do it. My heart was big, my spirit was strong, my instincts were sharp – only my flesh was sometimes weak. And no one can get out of their own skin.
In 1986 Ion Tiriac, my manager, arranged an audience with the Pope. Ion is a devout man, and when he asked me if I wanted to see the Pope, I thought, sure, why not? I took my racket with me to get it blessed. At the time this was treated as crass commercialism, some kind of PR campaign for Puma, my racket-maker. How innocent I was then. I was only on the lookout for a little luck. But in the end, neither the man on the moon nor the one on the holy chair brought me victory. It was the indescribable, the unexplainable, the unheard-of, that got hold of me and sent me into a different orbit.
And all I had to do was keep winning, again and again.
WHAT IS THE SENSE IN IT ALL?
ON THE EVE of the finals we are eating at Ponte Vecchio, an Italian restaurant on the Old Brompton Road, a few hundred metres from the players’ hotel, the Gloucester. The same ritual as always. Spaghetti for me; spaghetti for all of us. ‘If they didn’t know us,’ said Ion, ‘they’d think we were all gay.’
I wasn’t nervous, but euphoric. The final on Centre Court, and me a protagonist on the world stage for the first time. I had a quiet night, though I dreamt about the final. The images flashed before me just like a television broadcast, right up to the awards ceremony. I was holding the trophy, and then – the alarm goes off. Half past nine. The reality.
It’s a forty-five-minute drive from Kensington, where our hotel is, to Wimbledon. Sometimes I watch the street scenes as we pass. A lot of antiques shops on the New King’s Road, pubs, low buildings from which the paint is peeling. In front of us a red double-decker bus, behind us black cabs. We are slowly making our way across the iron Wandsworth Bridge. Constant traffic jams. Ion Tiriac, who’s driving our black Mercedes, is trying to calm me down with words he’ll repeat to me on many occasions to come: ‘You have a right to lose. If you always have to find a thousand excuses, then eventually you’ll give up the right to lose. You’ll make yourself mentally ill.’ And: ‘Be true to yourself. Play your game. You will succeed.’
Since I’d beaten Pat Cash 6–4, 6–4 in the Wimbledon warm-up tournament at Queens, Tiriac had been convinced that I could win. He was in Argentina with Guillermo Vilas while I was playing against Cash, but he returned quickly, warning my parents that they’d better come over. We were in the process of making tennis history, although I didn’t know this yet.
Günther Bosch, who is sitting in the back, says a few words in Romanian to Tiriac. Are they talking about me? No. Bosch is only suggesting a short cut. That much Romanian I understand.
My thoughts are rushing ahead. Changing room, locker 7 as always, from which I hadn’t even cleared the dirty clothes from the day before. If my mother only knew! Some reserve shirts and socks are in there too. When we get to Wandsworth, the houses become greyer, the betting shops and pubs more frequent. The area becomes hillier, the traffic is stop-start. Then we’re there. I can see a street sign – Church Road. People are queuing, thousands of them, like a garland stretching out across the grass. These are the true fans – no tickets, just hoping to get in. Each fan hoping for a ticket-holder to vacate a place in the stands, even if it means waiting four hours, even if it means not getting in until six in the evening. And there’s the gate for the players: my entry to the stage.
Later, my opponent Kevin Curren is in the changing room sitting on one of the benches. ‘Hi,’ I say to him, but not a word more; neither to him nor to any of my later finals opponents. Ivan Lendl was unbearable. He talked and talked in order to shake off his nervousness, and told jokes that only he found funny. But I am wearing blinkers and sitting there like a zombie. That is my way of coping with the pressure, of concentrating. Nothing else interests me. I have to get myself into this trance, this total isolation, as if I’m in a tunnel. I made one exception – for Michael Stich, my fellow countryman. We know the result. I was talking, and he won. Today, on this day in July 1985, Stich is sitting in front of the television back in Germany. He has yet to sit his Abitur, the German equivalent of A levels, and to decide whether to become a professional. My Wimbledon final will encourage him to emulate me. In a small Californian town, Pete Sampras, one of the big talents of the USA, is playing a youth tournament. He too is following the final on the television. My victory, he would later say, spurred him on.
I’m eyeing my opponent in the mirrors on the walls. Is he showing any sign of nerves? Two hours ago I was practising with Pavel Slozil. I look at the huge clock. The BBC is showing portraits of the two finalists, but I’m not watching. I know this Becker guy. The physiotherapist is taping my ankles, something that became necessary before every match after I tore a ligament in 1984. Another look at the clock. I can feel a few butterflies in my stomach. I nibble at a sandwich. The tingling is getting stronger.
Thank God, so far I haven’t had much time to dwell on all this. Thanks to the rain on Friday, I had to finish the semi-final against Anders Järryd on Saturday. After that victory, I was both happy and shattered. What should have been a rest day for me therefore wasn’t, and that’s how I retained my concentration and energy. The locker-room steward, a stocky man in a white coat, takes my bag, which is almost bigger than him. It contains seven Puma rackets wrapped in plastic, string tension 29–27, 30–28; sweatbands, shirts, but no bananas. These would come in later tournaments. And no talisman either.
I wouldn’t call myself superstitious, but I used to have my rituals, which I believed in and which gave me confidence. Before the start of a match, I practised certain breathing, stretching and yoga exercises, to build up my ability to focus once I was out on the court. Or take my shoes. So much has been made of my untied shoelaces. ‘Becker demonstrating cool.’ Actually, at that first match Becker simply forgot to tie his shoelaces. After that it developed into a ritual which certainly looked like a superstition, but for me it was a means to an end. I had to get a mental and physical sense of the court, the stands, the spectators – to become one with the atmosphere and to breathe in the space. And so I would go on to the court with untied shoes, so that by doing them up on the bench I won a few seconds to take it all in.
We are waiting beneath the royal box for the signal to start. To enter the court we will pass under a board on which is famously written a couple of lines from Rudyard Kipling’s poem If. ‘If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same’.
The steward advises us that the royals are present, and please not to forget to bow when entering the court. The first steps on to Centre Court can be decisive. On this day, I instinctively entered with self-confidence, though in later years I would have to remind myself: You have to be first on Centre Court, head held high, chest out.
I feel no fear. I feel like a racehorse at the starting gate. My mind is so occupied with the match that hasn’t even begun yet that I don’t look behind or in front of me. Just one glance towards the coach, whose presence I find soothing. There would come a time when I would receive a warning over getting coaching from my advisers during a match: it’s a code violation. I have no idea why. The controversy about coaching is strange. Sure, there are attempts to make a sign here or there, but in the heat of the match how could any player pick them up? The spectators now disappear from my line of vision, although I can still feel the atmosphere. The names of the finalists are announced.
Who will the audience applaud most? That is an important barometer, especially for my self-confidence, like the first applause for an actor on stage. What the opening lines are to the actor, the initial serves are to us. Umpire David Howie notes in clear letters on the scorecard: ‘Warm up: 2.04. Play: 2.09.’ The sun shines over Centre Court, which was designed in such a way that during summer no shade reaches it before seven p.m. The temperature has risen to 28°C. I’m touching the line with my racket – one of my rituals.
Kevin Curren, the man on the other side, is twenty-seven, South African born. He has thrown John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors out of this tournament, seeds one and three. Curren seems to be more nervous than me. My serves are coming on well, my people on the stands are nodding contentedly. After thirty-five minutes, the score is 6–3 to me. It is the first of a possible five sets. The first stage to the Everest that is Wimbledon. In the tie-break of the second set I’m leading 4–2, but then Curren wins 7–4. A punch in the solar plexus. All of a sudden I become uncertain. The heat is bothering me. Curren is getting stronger. I have difficulties with my serve. Advantage Curren. I’m getting angry, starting to scream and throw the racket – exactly what I shouldn’t be doing. I’m talking to myself, yelling abuse at myself. ‘Why are you letting this happen, Dummkopf, you stupid idiot!’ But it helps. The anger is releasing new energies.
BBC commentator John Barrett will report (today I sit next to him in the BBC’s commentary box; in 2002 I commentated on the finals together with him) that Becker had a serve like thunder and lightning. I’ve got the third set: 7–6. For the first time, I’m feeling secure. The end is in sight. In the royal box sits a field marshal, along with Juan Antonio Samaranch, president of the International Olympic Committee. When the Duke and Duchess of Kent clap in the first row, others in the royal box follow their lead. Fred Perry is seated, as protocol demands, in the fifth row. He won Wimbledon for the first time in 1934, and in 1936 he beat Gottfried von Cramm in what was the shortest final in history: forty minutes. I see neither Perry nor duke or duchess. I’m in the last set and a short way from victory. Championship point Becker.
The 13,118 spectators emit a collective scream. The first championship point is lost. My father puts his little camera away again. My mother closes her eyes, just as she will do in front of the television at home during many of my future games. I can’t hear anything any more. At least, I hear sounds, but not words, not even those voices shouting from above: ‘Boris!’ Serve. Practised ten thousand times. It’s in. The serve that will change my world. ‘End: 5.26,’ writes Howie on his scorecard.
The summit has been reached. I’m like Edmund Hillary on Everest. ‘He’s incredibly talented,’ says Curren of me to the reporters, disgruntled, ‘but not nearly as good as McEnroe.’ Hillary, in the last metres of the ascent of Everest in 1953, must have realized what a burden he was about to take on. In his autobiography, View from the Summit, he wrote, ‘What is the sense in it all? A man was a fool to put up with this!’1 I too was to experience what it meant to be at the top. But the initial problems, at least, were easy to bear.
At the champions’ dinner that evening the winners would be required to do the dance of honour, which would of course be a waltz. Boris Becker to Martina Navratilova: ‘May I have this dance?’ Now that really made me nervous. The day before, my forward-looking mother had, with Ion’s help, taught me a few waltz steps. Ion had lent me his dinner jacket. At that point I hadn’t even completed my semi-final against Anders Järryd, number six in the world rankings, but they were optimists, my mother and Ion, and they were proved right.
I’d felt a protective hand over me several times during this Wimbledon tournament. I’d played on one of the outer courts against the American Tim Mayotte. A dense crowd. Noise. I twist over on my ankle – it hurts. I hesitate. Shall I give up, or risk further damage? I’m walking towards the net, prepared to stretch out my hand. Where’s Mayotte? He’s still ten metres away. A handshake between us would have been enough to finish the match. Winner Mayotte. Having reached the fourth round, I would still have been a success, but I wouldn’t have become the youngest Wimbledon winner of all time. Ion Tiriac told me later how he urged Günther Bosch: ‘Bosch, do something! Say something! He should take three minutes out. Ask for a doctor.’ Bosch warns me in a low voice: ‘Boris, Boris.’ As if I could hear among five thousand spectators! So Tiriac jumps to his feet and yells: ‘Boris! Three minutes! Three!’ I turn my back on the net and ask the chair-umpire for the doctor. The doctor makes his way slowly through the crowds. Three minutes, then the umpire tells me, ‘Time’s up.’ I protest. The doctor didn’t reach me in time but surely I’m entitled to be treated. It’s now the referee’s decision. He decides in my favour. After treatment from the doctor, I carry on playing. Twenty minutes later the match is over. In the changing room, I tell Tiriac I’m grateful: ‘You won this match for me.’
Or earlier on. In the third round, I play Joakim Nyström. He has three match points against me on his own serve. I take huge risks with each return. Tiriac yells in Bosch’s ear: ‘He’s mad! How can he play like this? Taking such risks!’ Nyström is standing at the net. Match point, like a penalty kick. He misses. Two points for Nyström and the Becker legend would probably never have happened. I turn the match around: 3–6, 7–6, 6–1, 4–6, 9–7. Tiriac is puzzled: ‘There are times in your life when everything happens either in your favour or against you.’ Eighteen years later, during his speech at my nomination to the International Tennis Hall of Fame as its second-youngest member (Borg was the youngest), Ion was to remind the audience of this phenomenon which he encountered again and again, particularly with me.
At such times you can only act from the gut, and I usually instinctively do the right thing. If Friday’s thunderstorm had not led to the interruption of our match, Järryd would have swept me off the court. Just one day later, he was so nervous that my grandmother could have beaten him.
Anyway, the champions’ dinner scared me more than the final. I plagued then Wimbledon boss Reginald ‘Buzzer’ Hadingham: ‘When will I have to dance? Do I really have to?’ The thought of it was enough to finish me off. But then came my reprieve. There wouldn’t be a waltz with Martina. This ‘dance of honour’ had been eliminated years before. Back at the Gloucester, I watched television. On all channels the announcement: Becker, Becker, the German wunderkind. First I had to take on board that they meant me. ‘Boris Becker’, the Daily Express wrote, ‘stood tall and straight as a Prussian guardsman, the gold All-England Challenge Cup balanced on his head like a glittering helmet. Kaiser Boris I, teenage King of Wimbledon, was being well and truly crowned . . . now everyone asks how long will he reign.’2
The morning after, Tiriac took charge. ‘We can now add a zero to the figure on each sponsorship contract,’ he rejoiced. I don’t know how many photographers followed us to the airport: scores of them. Bild came to see me in Monte Carlo. Ghostwriters wrote a column in my name (‘My Victories, My Dreams’), which I seldom read. Tiriac assured me they were paying a fortune for it. That was enough for me. I didn’t protest. The branding of Becker had begun, but I didn’t realize then what a marketing treadmill I was stepping on to. Perhaps he was ‘too young to know’ that he was too young to win Wimbledon, commented the Washington Post: ‘The promise is there, but it’s way too soon to keep . . . Even if you are going to be the new Mozart, you still have to play one note at a time.’3
THE WEEKS OF COLD SILENCE
I CAN ONLY be really good when I feel a certain excitement inside me, when I sense that a relationship is developing between the actor on stage and the people watching. I once described my contact with the audience as erotic, and I compared my appearance in New York in front of 20,000 spectators to love-making. They not only want to see you, they want to have you; but they can just as easily hate you as well. They want to feel your power and your lust. They want your body and your soul.
When I hit the ball well, I raise my fist or do a little dance. The audience reacts, they come with me, and I feel their response, whether it’s disapproval or approval. The hotter the game gets, the more fine-tuned this feeling becomes. I don’t reflect any more. I simply let myself go, right up to the dive roll to the net at the end. I don’t hear the umpire. I don’t even look at the scoreboard – I keep count of the score myself.
When I reach the climax of this trance-like stage, the ‘zone’, the only thing I’m aware of is the onlookers. I don’t actually care if they’re for me or against me. That’s not something you can guarantee. The spark catches or it doesn’t, but either way I need the contact with them. Playing on a lesser court, Court Four at Wimbledon, for example, is a tragedy for me. I need Centre Court as the stage for my fight, man to man like modern-day gladiators. ‘The mountains of a tennis life’, wrote journalist Doris Henkel, ‘are far apart, and the path into the valley is often more difficult than the ridge to the summit. And you only realize much later on where those eight-thousand-metre peaks really were, and those were the days when everything from A to Z, from the serve to the dream volley, fell into place.’1 This is well observed. I have seen many valleys, but none of them as deep as the one from which I climbed my personal Everest in 1985.
The pressure that built up after my first great triumph was inhuman. Only the game counted. Tiriac and Bosch seemed even more obsessed than me. They saw me as a machine. After my first success at Wimbledon, Ion became my shadow. I felt captive, monitored, and I played very badly. This came to a head shortly before Wimbledon 1986. The warm-up tournament at Queens was the fourth in a row where I lost in the quarter-finals, after Paris, Rome and Forest Hills. I couldn’t explain this to myself, and Bosch and Tiriac couldn’t understand it either. I was discouraged and exhausted. I announced that I was going to spend the weekend relaxing in Monaco, and that the Wimbledon preparation would have to wait. ‘No way!’ fumed Tiriac. ‘Goodbye,’ I replied. I needed distance. I wanted to concentrate on what had made me strong in the first place: myself.
I returned as promised on Monday morning. Tiriac and Bosch were waiting for me on the practice courts. Nothing was said. I’d hardly slept the night before, and they tortured me mercilessly on the court. I put up with it, as I do, grinding my teeth. This went on for two or three days. A few words about the exercises I had to do, then silence. Eventually I lost my patience. ‘This can’t go on, Ion. I’ve had enough of this show. You can drive me to the court, and then that’s it. And you, Günzi, you can pick up the balls, but otherwise you let me practise the way I want to.’
The atmosphere stayed frosty for the first week of Wimbledon. Ice-cold silence. Then, in the fourth round, I played a match against the Swede Mikael Pernfors, to whom I’d lost a few weeks earlier at the quarter-finals in the French Open. I finished him off in ninety minutes: 6–3, 7–6, 6–2. Tiriac found his tongue again. ‘Great. Respect,’ he said, and he even showed some emotion – he patted my shoulder. Perhaps this was the breakthrough in our relationship.
We were staying at the Londonderry Hotel, which had a few more stars than the players’ hotel of the year before, the Gloucester. The night before the final we ate in the San Lorenzo, the Italian in Beauchamp Place – even today my favourite restaurant in London – table 29, hidden behind the stairs, screened from the fans. Bosch, Tiriac, my sister Sabine, my parents – the usual entourage, and the usual dishes: salad, spaghetti with tomato sauce, and lemon sorbet.
Before my first Wimbledon final I felt like a child in a toyshop; everything was possible and I had it all before me. Every round I survived had been a triumph. Since then everything had changed. The training was more concentrated and less relaxed, and felt more like a state of emergency than anything else. The endgame against Ivan Lendl would finally answer the questions everyone was asking. Was Becker 1985 a fluke, or is he really a mega talent? It felt like a matter of life or death. At this stage, I defined myself solely through tennis and any defeat meant the complete loss of my self-confidence. Only victory could rescue me. In 1985 I was happy when the match began. In 1986 I was happy when it was over. It was the most pressure I’d ever been under. The wunderkind had to prove himself. Even I couldn’t be sure how good I really was.
Lendl had never won Wimbledon, and he’d almost lost the semi-final against my friend Bobo Zivojinovic. It was only because Bobo was undone by the umpire in the fifth set that Lendl won. I preferred to have Lendl as my opponent. I knew Bobo too well, because we often practised together, and he could break my serve, but I couldn’t break his. Lendl was already sitting in the changing room, and we didn’t speak a word. Not his usual jokes, not even a comment, just silence. He was number one in the world. I was number six. He was twenty-six and wanted to win Wimbledon at last. I was eighteen, and had to win at least one more time. I was convinced I’d win. It sounds strange, but the previous night I’d dreamt of victory, just like the year before. Lendl, on the other hand, seemed frightened, almost transfixed.
I take the first two sets 6–4, 6–3 – a stress-free hour. In the third set he leads 4–1, a small crisis for me. Soon he’s leading 5–4, and I’m serving. I go down to love–40. My attitude is, OK, let him win the third set, but I’ll come back in the fourth. Then three second serves, three reflex return volleys . . . Somehow I turn it around and win the game. Five all. I realize he’s falling. Lendl serves – I break to 6–5. I’m serving for my second Wimbledon success. It’s 40–30. When the match ends I’m on the same side of the court as in 1985. Lendl is devastated. ‘Well played,’ he says. I’m up in the clouds, immensely relieved.
I felt I’d been transformed from a boy to an adult. I’d opened the gate to the future and now I could have faith in myself. The victory in 1986 was the most important of my career. In 1985 I’d hardly known what I’d done; one year later I knew all too well. The reaction in Germany was overwhelming, but it left me strangely cold. After all, only a month before they’d written me off.
SECURE AND STERILE
NEITHER CASTLE NOR mountain towers above my hometown of Leimen, only the cement works. Weimar has Goethe, Bonn can boast Beethoven, yet we in Leimen have to content ourselves with nearby Heidelberg castle – tram to Bismarckplatz, then change to the bus to get to the funicular railway. The town hall of this place of 24,000 souls is picture-postcard pretty, and so too are the half-timbered houses, but foreign tourists rarely find their way into Leimen’s inns.
Leimen is a small town, where the butcher calls his customers by name, and the baker went to the same school as the man behind the post-office counter, who is married to the sister of the painter and decorator, who plays football in the same team as the baker. On Sundays the congregation gathers for mass at the Church of the Sacred Heart. My father was born in Leimen. My grandfather, Franz, worked as a fitter on the trams, and was, in contrast to his no-nonsense wife Helene, someone I could confide in. After all, I bear his name: Boris Franz Becker. He died while I was playing at Wimbledon in 1985, and nobody told me. They didn’t want me to lose concentration.
My birthplace is therefore German provincial: clean, smug, a little sterile, but also pretty secure. Silence and order after ten o’clock at night, like in any bourgeois little town anywhere. My parents were hard-working. I took the tram to the Helmholtz school, I rode on my bike to my practice sessions, and my sister Sabine prepared my Nutella sandwiches. We lived in a picturesque house a kilometre from the tennis courts. Had it been ten kilo-metres, who knows? Maybe I’d never have touched a tennis racket but have played football instead. My father earned a decent amount. The family car was a BMW, then later a Mercedes; we had summer and winter holidays – we were doing OK, though we weren’t millionaires. Punctuality and discipline were essential to my upbringing, as was observing rules and regulations. Church on Sundays and altar-boy duties were as much a part of my life as walks in the woods with my parents and sport on the television with Harry Valérien.
As a child I was bullied by my classmates because of my red hair. When I ran to my mother and complained she said, ‘Son, use your elbows.’ I took her advice too literally. Letters began to arrive from school because of the fights I’d got involved in. I didn’t hate school, but I didn’t love it either. My Latin teacher is one who will remain in my memory. When I had to miss his classes because I was taking part in a tennis tournament, he would test me in front of everyone, so on car journeys to and from tournaments I used to try to learn Latin, because I didn’t want to give the teacher the opportunity to expose me in front of my classmates as a brainless sporty type. Anyway, I rather liked him; he had a dry sense of humour.
Nevertheless, my eyes stay dry when I think of Leimen now. I spent a few pleasant years there, and those years helped form me, but when I return today to visit my mother, or to stand by my father’s grave, it’s clear to me that it’s only my parents who bring me back.
Leimen is not home for me. ‘Home’ is the people I trust: my children, my family and my friends. They tie me to Germany more than any passport could. I don’t just ask myself the fundamental question that everyone asks: Who am I? I also ask what Germany and my origins mean to me. I had the luxury of a comfortable upbringing. Instead of the chaos of Uganda or Kosovo, I was born into a stable country. Instead of being poor, we were well off. Instead of being an orphan, I’m the child of extraordinary parents. Instead of being a slave, I’m a free man. I’m a German, but my concern went beyond national borders very early on. This might have something to do with the biographies of my nearest and dearest.
My mother, Elvira, comes from what used to be known as Sudetenland. Her hometown was Ostrau, today Ostrava and part of the Czech Republic. She was driven from her home together with millions of her fellow countryfolk. Her parents, who owned a big farm, lost all they owned, escaping on a horse and cart to a refugee camp in Heidelberg. My mother never forgot that time. ‘We thanked God that we survived that,’ she has often said to me. Along with twenty other families from the same village she was settled in Leimen, where she met my father. My ex-wife Barbara was born in Heidelberg. Her father came from California and was African-American. His ancestors had been abducted from Africa. Barbara’s American grandmother had worked on the cottonfields of the southern States. My sons are Munich-born and now live with their mother in Miami. And my daughter has a Russian mother and lives in London.
I probably inherited my inner strength – occasionally referred to as stubbornness – from my mother: this drive to survive and to fight on, to overcome catastrophe and come out stronger than you went in. What often caused me trouble was my exaggerated sense of justice. Even as a child, injustice made me furious. Later in life, my anger on the courts was seldom directed at my opponents, but often at the umpires. I couldn’t bear misjudgements. These people didn’t want to acknowledge the perfection I was striving for.
I’ve picked up from somewhere the story of a Spanish mother who said to her son, ‘Should you become a soldier, you’ll be made a general. Should you become a monk, you’ll end up as Pope.’ The boy became a painter. His name was Pablo Picasso. My mother also had dreams for my future. I’d become an architect and build houses like my father, or an academic, or perhaps a gynaecologist or a lawyer. But a tennis player? My poor mother. She’d trade in my fame and fortune like a shot if she could. Nothing would please her more than to have me living next-door-but-one to her (with my sister Sabine and her family in between), with views over Leimen and Baden, and lunch at half past twelve on the dot.
Leimen is history to me, a symbol of my quiet childhood, but also a symbol of provincial self-righteousness and envy. Jealousy of the neighbour whose car is more expensive, or whose son made the headlines as a tennis player, who lived the life of a nomad and came home only because for a few days he wanted nothing more than to be a son.
ELVIRA BECKER: HE IS MY SON
My mother has never been a public person. It took a lot of persuading to get her to contribute to this book. Here she is: Elvira.
BORIS WAS AROUND fourteen when the first tennis agent started knocking at our door. My husband was half for it, half against it. I was totally against any plan for him to turn professional. I said to my husband, ‘Karl-Heinz, you know your son is very sensitive. So far he has always won. He doesn’t know what it’s like to lose. He hasn’t finished school yet, and he still has some growing up to do.’
Yes, if Boris had won Wimbledon at a later date, then he’d have had the chance to get his Abitur [A levels]. I’m still sorry that he couldn’t do that. He could have gone to university, but he missed the chance. Anyway, at some point we agreed: let’s go for this professional thing. If it doesn’t work out after a year, he can go back to school. We talked to Ion Tiriac, who was described to us as a rather scary-looking, shifty Romanian. I didn’t see him this way, though. He was honest enough to say he couldn’t guarantee anything. On 1 June 1984 we signed a contract in Monte Carlo with Tiriac: one A4 sheet of paper. Boris signed it too. It was difficult for me. Boris was so young and I felt sorry for him, I can’t deny it. In 1984, when he tore his ligament, I thought for a few seconds: Thank God. That’s the end of this professional nonsense. He won’t be able to do it any more.
He was no longer a child, but he was still a young person who needed his home. Luckily, there was Günther Bosch, who cared for him more like a mother than a father. Boris was in very good hands with him. I advised my son to go and see Bosch if he had any problems. If anything worried him, he should open up to Günther. Bosch kept in daily touch with us by telephone, wherever in the world the two of them were. Because Boris has one weakness: he rarely calls home. Later his physiotherapist, Waldemar Kliesing, took over this job.
If we saw on the television that Boris had lost, we’d send him a fax: ‘Don’t be sad, that’s just life.’ I know him so well. When I saw him whining on the court, I knew it was over for him – not always, but mostly. Because of time differences, we sometimes sat in front of the television into the early hours or right through the night. When I saw Boris lose his self-control, I cried. How often had I told him that self-control was an essential part of life? But when he felt that things weren’t going well, that defeat couldn’t be avoided, he went berserk. And he wouldn’t want to hear what I thought of it later. ‘Don’t talk about it!’ he’d say. Sometimes I wasn’t even sad when he lost. It gave him a chance to take a break.
I can’t describe how it felt to watch him on Centre Court at Wimbledon in 1985. Oh God, such a young boy! I knew that if he didn’t lose his nerve he’d make it. If he didn’t work himself up into that frenzy of his, he’d be all right. During the final I hardly talked to my husband. I cried after he won, and not just from joy. I asked myself what he’d have to cope with now. I always saw the downside.
Our business was completely disrupted after that win. We got sackloads of post, presents, even yogurt and fruit juice by the crate. I sent those on to the kindergarten. The fans addressed their letters to ‘Boris Becker, Leimen’, or even just ‘Boris Becker, Germany’. And they arrived. He’s a good boy, my Boris. Some kids forget about their parents when they get older. Not him. He’s loyal.
On many occasions I did without an evening meal because I had to wash or pack his things. All that travelling caused quite a muddle. One day, not long after Wimbledon, he couldn’t find his passport. We searched high and low for it until three in the morning. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ll just travel with my Monte Carlo papers; they’ll let me in without a passport.’ And so they did. Ion Tiriac, who was on holiday in Capri and had borrowed a bag from Boris, called us two days later. He’d found Boris’s passport in the bag. Such things often happened. Once he left his Wimbledon cheque – I think it was from the victory in 1989 – in his tennis clothes and it ended up in the wash. After that it was of course pulp, and we had to ask them to reissue it.
I always imagined my Boris hanging around somewhere on his own – horrible. If he was really down he’d sometimes call. He did suffer. ‘Now I’m on my own again!’ Once, after he broke up with a girlfriend, Tiriac called me. ‘Could you come over? He’s not in good shape.’ We found an excuse and drove to Monte Carlo.
He has certainly not become happier with the years. More self-confident, of course, no question of that. He was always a bit of a loner. And he’s a cosmopolitan. He could live in Monte Carlo, London, New York. But in a way he has also remained a bit of a Leimener. He sees the things that tumble down and explode in this world, and he has experienced them for himself. From a young age, he led a tough life. It changed him and made him mature very early. He was old for his years. Occasional stubbornness is part of his personality. Even I find it hard to tell him the truth sometimes, and need to have several goes at it. But he is the way he is. He is my son.
JUST BECAUSE!
I STOOD THERE beside him, but he didn’t exist any more. My father. The man laid out in front of me. On this day in April 1999 he seemed like a stranger to me. The right leg of his suit had slipped up above his ankle and on his skin I could read the word ‘Becker’, written with a blue felt-tip pen.
I pulled his trouser leg down over his ankle and kissed his forehead. For the first time in my life I’d experienced the death of someone I loved completely. I wondered if there was an afterlife – not that that would have given me any comfort then. This was goodbye. I couldn’t cry any more, or talk any more. My father had only been sixty-four. I’d never again be able to argue with him until my mother intervened as peacemaker: ‘Karl-Heinz, leave the boy alone!’
I was three or four years old when I first hefted my father’s tennis racket out of the boot of the car and