At the age of 17, Boris Becker captivated the entire German sporting world. But this did not only have positive effects on the tennis icon. Becker recounts how he survived difficult times.
Boris Becker (57) does not look back on his first Wimbledon triumph 40 years ago with only joy. As a 17-year-old at the time, he did not always cope well with the huge euphoria and enormous expectations. “The whole country embraced me. I’m sure it was meant well, but it almost crushed me and took my breath away,” the tennis icon said in an interview with Stern magazine: “I’ve always been a freedom-loving person, and suddenly that freedom was gone.”
Becker won the first of his three titles at the classic Wimbledon grass court tournament in July 1985, triggering a tennis boom in Germany and huge hype surrounding him. “People suddenly looked at me differently, even my parents,” recalled the Leimen native: “Boy, what have you done? That was their attitude. My parents had known me for seventeen and a half years, but they didn’t know I had this strength in me.“
Becker and ‘survival’
This inner strength helped him during his professional career and also later in difficult times. ”I survived as a child prodigy. I survived the 17-year-old Boris Becker and everything that came after. I have this character trait: I survive,“ he said. ”You can drop me in the jungle of Vietnam, and I’ll find a way to survive. You can put me in prison, and I’ll find a way to survive.”
With this attitude, he also survived his prison sentence in a London jail, which he had to serve for making false statements in bankruptcy proceedings. During this time, he learned who he could really rely on. “As they say, in a serious crisis, you’re all alone. Yes, that’s
how it was for me.”
However, his current wife Lilian De Carvalho Monteiro, with whom he now lives in Milan, remained by his side. “That’s remarkable, because she could only be interested in me as a person because I had nothing else to offer,” said Becker: “I had never met a woman like that before.”