HOW BOOM-BOOM BORIS WENT BUST
Over the years he netted £100m. Next week, instead of commentating at Wimbledon, he’s due in a bankruptcy court. So where did it all go wrong for tennis’s wunderkind?
For the past three summers, there has been a notable absence among the BBC commentary team at Wimbledon. Having won the hearts of tennis fans with his witticisms and dandyish outfits, Boris Becker briefly abandoned punditry to coach Novak Djokovic.
Next week, however, the endearingly eccentric ‘Boom Boom’ — a nickname he earned for his thundering serves and volleys during the Eighties, when he became Wimbledon’s youngest champion at 17, will be back in the commentary box, swapping banter with Sue Barker, John McEnroe and company.
BBC bosses joyously hailed his return to their ‘stellar’ panel of experts. But that was before Becker’s humiliation in a rather different court — the Bankruptcies and Companies Court. one wonders whether they felt quite so enamoured when they heard that Boom Boom had gone bust.
He was declared bankrupt for failing to repay a £3,090,000 loan made to him two years ago by the private bank Arbuthnot Latham. ‘one has the impression of a man rather burying his head in the sand,’ remarked the registrar Christine Derrett, rejecting a plea from Becker’s lawyer that she should allow him 28 days to settle the debt by remortgaging his villa in Majorca.
Becker was clearly incensed to have been chastised in this manner.
‘It seems inappropriate when a woman who doesn’t know me, who did not talk to me, and who does not know how I’m living, would say something like that,’ he complained to a Stuttgart newspaper. But a source close to the case says Becker’s ostrich-like attitude has continued since the registrar handed down the bankruptcy order ten days ago.
on Wednesday, at 10 am, he ought to have appeared at the Insolvency Service’s offices in Westminster to provide a schedule of his creditors and assets to the official receiver, Tony Hannon, whose dogged investigative style is legendary among colleagues. After this session, Mr Hannon would have decided which debts should take precedence (given Becker’s past tardiness in paying bills it seems reasonable to assume there might be others) and how they should be repaid.
Becker would have had his bank accounts frozen, and perhaps been ordered to raise the required funds by offloading some luxuries (his ruby red Porsche Cayenne GTS and a blue Maserati Ghibli S come to mind).
Heaven forbid that a frugal lifestyle might be required for a man who adores fine malts and Cuban cigars, dines extravagantly at San Lorenzo in Wimbledon, owns an Andy Warhol, and who, according to his biographer Christian Schommers, pays £30,000 a month to rent his mock-Georgian mansion within lobbing distance of the All England Club.
To
THE annoyance of officials, however, he failed to show up for this meeting. Instead, the 49- year- old German — a ruddy-faced, grey-whiskered shadow of the carrot-topped wunderkind who enthralled Centre Court — was seen furtively arriving at his lawyer’s office, elsewhere in London.
He has been given one final chance to see the official receiver. It will not please his BBC bosses to learn that his new appointment is next Wednesday, the third day of Wimbledon.
However, a source tells me he would be ‘well advised’ to miss a couple of sets. If he snubs the Insolvency Service a second time, the consequences could be dire. His discharge from bankruptcy — normally granted after a year — could be delayed for 15 years and he may even be arrested.
So how has Becker got into this mess? After all, even 18 years since his retirement from tennis, he remains among the top ten prizemoney earners in the sport’s history. With his business interests on top of his winnings, he was once estimated to be worth around £100 million.
The question comes as this enduringly fascinating sportsman, who has overcome a plethora of scandals — most famously fathering a daughter in a London restaurant with a russian-Algerian woman — is beset by personal crises that are surely pushing his spirits to the limit.
Not only has his reputation been tarnished, perhaps irreparably, by his bankruptcy but his eight-year second marriage to model Lilly Kerssenberg — mother of the two youngest of his five children — was this week reported to be on the rocks.
Then there is his sorry physical deterioration. While other past tennis greats will dust off their skills this coming fortnight to play seniors’ matches at Wimbledon, Becker will hobble around the hospitality marquees on two artificial hips and a damaged right ankle — his grim reward for years of hurling his 6ft 3in frame around the court.
Perhaps because he’s from small- town Germany and found wealth and fame at such an impressionable age, pocketing £130,000 for that first Wimbledon triumph in 1985, Becker has long savoured the ostentatious trappings of success. As much blingbling as boom-boom, we might say.
only a fortnight ago, with his case looming, he was spotted at the exclusive Soho Farmhouse club in oxfordshire. This is a favourite haunt, along with a members’ club in Kensington and Crown Aspinalls gaming club in Mayfair. (Becker is a serious poker player and a ‘ brand ambassador’ for a poker website.)
As Becker’s long-time friend and rival Pat Cash said when analysing his demise in The Times this week: ‘Boris has always felt a need to maintain an image linked with prosperity.’
It was no surprise, therefore, that when his playing days ended, Becker redirected his ferocious drive into making money. It’s said he wanted to emulate his mentor Ion Tiriac, the romanian former tennis player who had been his manager between the ages of 16 and 25, and later became a billionaire entrepreneur with interests in retail, insurance, banking, airlines and car dealerships.
It is no coincidence that Becker began his reincarnation by taking over three Mercedes franchises. He and Tiriac parted ways acrimoniously in 1993, whereupon Axel MeyerWolden, a businessman whose clients included Michael Jackson and the opera singer Placido Domingo, took charge of his affairs.
Those who have followed Becker closely say that had Meyer-Wolden still been guiding him, his affairs would not be in such a sorry state. It was after he died in 1997, followed two years later by Becker’s father Karlheinz, that trouble began.
‘To me, it looked like Boris wanted to show the world he is clever enough to be a successful businessman himself — which he obviously is not,’ one German tennis writer told me. His biographer, Schommers, agrees: ‘Let’s just say he’s much better at tennis.’
Becker’s barrister John Briggs told the bankruptcy court he was ‘not a sophisticated individual when it comes to business’.
Perhaps he would have been wiser to stick to tennis. Between 2013 and 2016, he coached Djokovic to six Grand Slam titles. The Serb says he will do all he can to help Becker out of his predicament, but he is hugely proud and unlikely to fall on charity.
Becker has Tweeted that he would have been in a position to repay the
loan ‘ within one month’ had the court allowed him the time. For sure, he has amassed a huge fortune over the years.
But he has admitted choosing business partners and advisers incautiously, and over the years the expensive failures and disputes have piled up.
When his organic online food company closed, the German courts made him pay €800,000 to his associate, with whom he fell out rancorously. His internet marketing portal, Sportgate, also failed.
Brand Becker was further sullied in 2002 when he received two years’ probation for tax evasion in Germany. Saying he had made ‘a mistake’, he repaid €3 million in back-tax and interest.
There have been various other public wrangles, ranging from a brush with Swiss tax officials, his alleged refusal to pay a priest for conducting his wedding to Lilly, to a protracted case involving his rural villa in northern Majorca.
Becker bought the huge property, set in 65 acres, in 1997 and spent millions turning it into a pleasure palace, only to see it seized — twice — by Spanish authorities after he allegedly failed to pay hundreds of thousands in building bills.
Becker’s barrister told the bankruptcy hearing he could pay off his £3 million bank loan by re-mortgaging the villa. Though it was once marketed at £11 million, its price has plummeted.
Given the state we found it in this week, this is hardly surprising. The pool was filled with brackish water, the bare rooms strewn with rubble, and the grounds overgrown with weeds. Meanwhile, our investigation into his more recent business dealings reveals involvement in a bewildering array of international projects — from co-founding an Asian professional tennis league, to opening a tennis academy bearing his name in China.
His current deals include endorsing Puma footwear in India, Slovenian mobile phones, the poker website, and a Chilean wine brand. Yet some ideas haven’t moved beyond the drawing board. Grand plans for a Boris Becker Business Tower in Dubai collapsed in 2011 when its backers went bust.
Five years ago, according to the Hindustan Times, he approached India’s largest oil and gas firm to suggest joining their explorations in Nigeria. A senior company official said Becker’s proposal had been turned down, adding tartly: ‘ Oil and gas is an altogether different ball game.’ In 2012, Becker set up a company called Becker Private Office LLP, registered to prestigious offices in London’s Berkeley Square. Companies House lists its current registered office at a rather less salubrious address in Elstree, Herts.
Disastrous commercial ventures alone don’t account for his diminishing fortunes.
His brief sexual encounter with a model, Angela Ermakova, hours after his final appearance at Wimbledon in 1999, has justifiably been described as ‘the most expensive quickie in history’. Even today he is counting the cost.
First, he was forced to pay more than £2 million for the upkeep of their daughter, Anna, now 17. Within a year, Becker’s first wife, Barbara, took him to the cleaners, winning a £10 million divorce settlement, their sumptuous condominium in Florida and custody of their sons Noah, 23, and Elias, 17.
If reports this week are true, and Lilly is tiring of him, another expensive pay-off could be in store. This week, she was still at their Wimbledon home and seemed content enough as she walked the dog on the nearby common in her gym clothes. But their marriage is said to have been in trouble even before the bankruptcy, and Mrs Becker, mother of their seven-year-old son, Amadeus, is apparently spending more time in Germany.
DurINGa German reality TV show screened on Thursday, for which she trekked around Namibia, Lilly seemed mortified that Becker had not sent a farewell message.
‘That really hurts,’ she said. ‘He could at least have done something — even if he was just pretending. That’s really mean. He’s been mean to me a long time.’
However, the couple are getting along rather better on Twitter, where Becker posted a loving birthday message to Lilly, and she has shown her support for him.
‘As they say, you’re in God’s hands once your in the middle of an ocean or in front of a judge. . .but life goes on [sic],’ he Tweeted. She responded: ‘And we are family so we are all in gods hands . . . #letsdothishoney.’
Can he bounce back? He insists so, claiming in his punchy interview with the Stuttgart newspaper this week that the bankruptcy case was ‘ more complex than it has been described’, and accusing the bank Arbuthnot Latham of charging excessive interest.
He said he had been trying to fix a refinancing deal with the bank for six months, and that the loan was ‘covered by a property which has significantly higher value than the debt’. He refused to say which property he meant.
Becker, who has vowed to pay off the debt and have the bankruptcy annulled, added: ‘It is up to me to prove that I am right. I accepted the challenge. And I am going to play to the last ball.’
From the man who would propel himself headlong across a tennis court if it meant saving a point, we would expect no less. But beating the bankruptcy court is a different challenge and unless this sadly diminished champion can serve one last ace — a cheque for £3 million — the Boris boom is over.