He has previously described it as ”not an affair” and ”just poom-bah-boom”. But last night Boris Becker gave the most graphic account yet of how he became a father for the third time following his celebrated brief encounter with a waitress in the broom cupboard of a London restaurant.
In the first instalment of his new autobiography, Hold On, Stay a While, Becker revealed that he had sex with the waitress, Angela Ermakova, only hours after his pregnant then wife, Barbara, had gone into hospital with contractions. While Mrs Becker was being treated, the former Wimbledon tennis champion consoled himself with a couple of beers. He then repaired to the bar of the trendy Nobu restaurant in London.
It was then that Becker met Ms Ermakova. After five minutes of ”small talk” he followed her into the ”darkest corner” of the restaurant — which turned out to be the broom cupboard — and ”got down to business”.
”What drove me out into the night again I don’t know,” Boris writes. Afterwards, ”she went back to her friends”, and after another beer, Becker went back to his hotel.
”The following morning I drove to Barbara. We packed our 28 tennis bags and suitcases and left England.”
Becker, whose autobiography is published next week, claims that he thought nothing more of the encounter until a fax arrived eight months later at his office in Munich. The fax, from Ms Ermakova, bluntly announced that he was about to become a father.
”Naturally I remembered the evening. But for God’s sake this couldn’t be true!” he explains in his book, which is being serialised by the mass-selling German tabloid Bild.
The former tennis star revealed that he then hired private detectives to follow the waitress, but called them off and decided to accept paternity, long before a secret DNA test later confirmed that he was indeed the father of Anna, now three.
Mrs Becker, meanwhile, was ”surprised” but ”not hysterical” after learning of her husband’s infidelity. ”Certainly my straying hastened the split with Barbara. The tensions had been getting worse for months,” he says. The couple split up shortly afterwards.
Yesterday’s lurid revelations are likely to confirm the impression that Becker, who has two other children from his marriage, has only a scant understanding of the opposite sex. Asked why women seemed to find him attractive, Becker replied: ”No idea. I’m not especially rich, I’m not especially pretty, I’m no Adonis and my manhood isn’t over-enormous.”
He added philosophically: ”Sex is totally overvalued in our society … I was totally monogamous during my seven-year marriage. But I also think we men are not created to be monogamous for our whole lives.”
The book is Becker’s latest moneymaking venture following a series of disastrous investments and an embarrassing trial last year for tax evasion. Since the incident in the broom cupboard and his retirement as a player in 1999 most of his vast fortune has disappeared. Six weeks ago he announced that he was moving to Switzerland to escape Germany’s notoriously high levels of tax.
Yesterday the 35-year-old star said that he had now come to terms with his new daughter and visited her every two months. ”I will learn to love her,” he declared. – Guardian Unlimited Â