As a kid I would get ill with tonsilitis about once a year and be off school for a fortnight. There was no rhyme or reason for the timing, but my throat would want to suffocate me, I couldn’t swallow, and my tonsils looked like a pair of Frank Bruno’s boxing gloves.
Suffice to say that being off school in the 1980s wasn’t as great as it was cracked up to be. There were only four television channels and once you’d watched the schools and colleges programmes in the morning, temporarily buoyed by Lucozade and antibiotics, the boredom of Crown Court and The Sullivans beckoned. However, in the Summer of 1985 I was fortunate enough to be laid low at the same time as Wimbledon Championships.
Now, I was already a casual tennis fan, and I loved John McEnroe, Björn Borg, Jimmy Connors, Martina Navratilova, Chris Evert, and Steffi Graf, watching the highlights in the evening after school. But necessity is indeed the mother of invention, only in this case it was avoiding boredom that led me to become somewhat of an armchair expert in tennis. I watched and scrutinised every match, especially the matches of the young upstart, Boris Becker.
Boom! Boom! The World vs. Boris Becker often returns to 1985 and Becker’s greatest triumph, becoming the youngest ever Wimbledon Men’s Champion at 17, the young German throwing himself around centre court, thrusting his hands aloft, revisited in different angles by the director Alex Gibney. Becker at this point is the reincarnation of the legendary Germanic hero Siegfried, a dashingly handsome warrior slaying dragons, the champion Germany needed, as in one interview an eminent German psychologist refers to the Germans as a “battered people.”
In his moment of victory, Becker bathed in the dragon’s blood of sporting excellence and media adulation to make himself invincible. Remember, the following year Becker defeated the awesome Ivan Lendl in the 1986 Wimbledon Final. What Gibney’s excellent two-part psychanalysis of Becker argues is that, in that moment, the very attributes that made him a champion – power, mental toughness, the desire to win at all costs – also laid him low in the second chapter of his life once he finished playing tennis, ultimately leading to his incarceration in Wandsworth and Huntercombe Prisons for hiding £2.5 million worth of assets to avoid paying debts.
Titled Triumph and Disaster, both halves of the film relate to the quote from Kipling’s poem If, “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two imposters just the same” that is engraved above the player’s entrance to Centre Court, a maxim that rules Becker’s varied and turbulent life. Throughout, Becker exudes charm and charisma, seemingly taking full responsibility for his many mistakes and misdemeanours, including the infamous affair with Angela Ermakova, but also mitigating these by reminding us that there was no blueprint for a 17-year-old to win Wimbledon and deal with the superstardom that followed.
We are guided by the usual tennis stalwarts. McEnroe, always good value, who Becker courted as a possible coach; Borg, who walked away from tennis at the age of 25 and was idolised by Becker, who wanted to retire at the same age; and the taciturn Romanian billionaire Ion Tiriac who helped make Becker his early fortune, who felt that the 6-time Grand Slam Champion was nowhere close to realising his full potential. Perhaps the most revealing anecdote regarding Becker’s downfall as a player is from Andre Agassi’s coach, Brad Gilbert. After a humiliating defeat to Agassi, Becker asks Agassi how he read his serve so well. Gilbert recounts how Agassi told Becker that he could tell where he would place the ball just by looking at what Becker was doing with his tongue. Gilbert tells us that Becker was too shellshocked to respond.
But for all the glory and bitter rivalries on the tennis court with the likes of Stefan Edberg and Ivan Lendl, the real insight and drama lies with his first wife, Barbara Becker. It is easy to forget just how controversial and important their marriage was to race relations in Germany at the time. Boris explains that three things helped the circulation of the Bild newspaper in Germany, “Hitler, unification and Boris Becker.” Barbara is witheringly articulate about the racism she encountered at the time – “You smell it” – but for her five years on the ATP tour with Boris she radiates joy, cross-legged in her chair saying they were, “Running through the days, through the years, feeling rushed.”
About himself, Boris says in his beautifully accurate English, the soft German accent so precise, “I look very German, but my tastes are not” and self-deprecatingly that he was, “The most popular German in Britain.” In many ways Becker was the model for the modern European ideal: multilingual, multi-racial, and free from the constraints of the second world war. The irony that his demise coincided with Brexit and our rejection of modernity seems absurdly poignant.
Becker, like Brexit, should be yesterday’s news but the failures of both are too pathetic, too heart-breaking to cast away forever. Becker wants to write a climatic third chapter of his life where he bounces back from defeat and returns to London after a ban from the Home Office. Is it too much to ask that we re-join Europe and ask forgiveness too?
And in 1989, aged 17 I finally had my tonsils taken out just as Boris Becker was winning his third and final Wimbledon. He was just 22.