Boris Becker is devoted to tennis and to his family. While one is threatened by age and injury, the other is threatened by racism and hate. Stephen Bierley reports
THERE is a thin stream of fear that constantly trickles through the minds of all the world’s top sportsmen and women. Pressure, stress, anxiety, apprehension, loss of form, the occasional unexplained defeat – phooey to the lot of them. The greatest dread of all is injury.
For three months last year, when Boris Becker could not even hold a racket let alone unleash it at the gentlest of marshmallow returns, those tightly suppressed terrors of a premature end to an illustrious career emerged from the deep recesses and began to waltz and whirl around his head in a seemingly uncontrollable dance.
“Look, I’ve proved I can handle pressure on the courts and off, but this is relatively insignificant compared with physical problems. I wondered if I would play tennis again.” Worse still, he worried that he should even be having such negative thoughts. It was a vicious circle: “What really matters for an athlete is that his body comes along all the time.” The right wrist that Becker injured at Wimbledon eventually mended, so efficiently that by the end of the tennis year, at the Grand Slam Cup in Munich, he thrashed Goran Ivanisevic in the final in straight sets and announced he was “playing the best tennis of my whole career”. The year had turned full circle.
Last January, after a gap of five years, Becker had won his sixth Grand Slam title with a 6-2, 6-4, 2-6, 6-2 victory over Michael Chang in Melbourne. His wife Barbara, whom he had married in December 1993, was at last able to share, however vicariously, his full joy on such a momentous occasion. All appeared set for a year good enough to rival 1989, when Becker took the Wimbledon and US Open titles.
Since his marriage, and the birth of his son Noah, Becker has shed much of his introspection and gained a fresh appetite for the game.
Yet just when he wanted to succeed and reproduce his previous towering dominance, illness and then injury conspired in a pincer movement to thwart his plans.
“People forget that before I injured my thigh, which put me out of the French Open, and then my wrist during Wimbledon, I had a very severe infection when I lost kilos and kilos and could not practise. I started last April at square one.”
Such frailty hardly becomes the German. The late Arthur Ashe recalled seeing the 17- year-old Becker in 1985, the year he won Wimbledon for the first time, and marvelling at his strength: “I had never seen such a tennis prodigy built like Becker; he reminded me of some overgrown high school basketball superstar suddenly thrown in with the top professionals, making some mistakes but dazzling his elders all the same.”
Ashe, who had won the Wimbledon title 10 years earlier, died from Aids in 1993, the year Becker married Barbara, herself black. Ashe fought long and hard to raise the status of black sportspeople in America and to confront racism in all parts of the world.
No doubt he would have had some wise words for Becker and his wife over their current problems in Germany. In a television interview just before Christmas, Becker revealed that he intended emigrating before his son reaches school age in a couple of years’ time.
Becker, who lives in Munich, said his family was under 24-hour protection because of telephone threats and racial abuse, and reiterated last week that he did not wish to bring up his son in Germany, where “he will be confronted with problems which are not his own but those of his parents”.
Becker was also angered by clandestine raids on his home and his parents’ house by German tax officials towards the end of last year, while he and his son were holidaying in Florida. “They had plenty of opportunity to search my house in my presence but there was no request or letter,” Becker said. “This was a cloak-and-dagger operation during which my parents were treated like criminal accomplices.”
He returned from tax exile in Monaco in 1994 and remains hugely popular in his home country. The ATP finals and the Grand Slam Cup are played in Hanover and Munich respectively, principally because of Becker’s charismatic influence, and as the 29-year-old world No 6 nears inevitable retirement, the majority of his business deals will be tied up in Germany.
However, many of the country’s other favourite sporting sons – including Michael Schumacher, Franz Beckenbauer and Michael Stich – live in other parts of Europe without any detrimental effect on their popularity or business interests.
Becker, having won this year’s Grand Slam Cup and lost a momentous five-set ATP final to Pete Sampras, is in a position of considerable influence and his recent criticisms may be no more than an attempt to underline several political and personal points to the widest possible home audience.
Whether he will elicit any sympathy is another matter. With European monetary union in the offing just about everybody in Germany is having to pay more taxes, while the question of overt racism is still regularly ignored.
Becker has always had an affection for England and London in particular – this despite an airing of just about every war analogy in the Fleet Street book of cliches when he won Wimbledon for the first time. Little changes, as the Daily Mirror proved last year before the England-Germany semi- final at Euro 96. Some joke.
With Sampras in the mental and physical doldrums last year, the road seemed open for Becker’s fourth Wimbledon title, adding to those of 1985, 1986 and 1989. Then came that tendon injury in the first set of his third- round match against the South African qualifier Neville Godwin. If he had stayed fit, Becker would surely have won the title – even John McEnroe recently expressed his regret that he was not playing last year, so restricted was the competition.
Becker believes he can last another three years at the top, with a clear and stated aim of again winning Wimbledon, his favourite tournament, and claiming the No 1 ranking on the ATP Tour, of which he was a founder member.
Sampras ended last year as No 1 for the fourth consecutive time. “Pete has proven himself but I’m not far behind,” said Becker. “I’ve managed to beat him a few times and those currently ahead of me. But being ranked No 2 or No 3 is not really important. It’s only the No 1 spot that really matters.” In order to achieve this aim he knows he will have to stay fit and be consistently successful, particularly on clay, his least favourite surface.
Perhaps, significantly, the aspect of his late-season form that pleased him the most was the power and accuracy of his ground- strokes from the back of the court, essential for success on clay.
In Germany, in particular, but on the world tennis circuit in general, Boris Becker is good for business. There have been times in his 12-year professional career that he has had trouble coping with fame and fortune, times when he has handled pressure, by his own admission, badly.
“But, you know, it always comes down to what I really like, and that is playing tennis. And if there is pressure on my shoulders, I often play that little bit better.’