From Centre Court to the divorce court
As the tennis star splits from his second wife, Jim White tracks the very public turmoil of Boom Boom Becker
Boris Becker has spent the last 30 years living up to his nickname. Boom Boom Becker, as he was known in his teenage heyday; Baron Von Slam, they called him, as he hit a tennis ball with such singular intensity it was as if the bundle of yellow fluff had personally insulted him. Brash, bold, this was how he played his tennis: with a thwack. And apparently it is how he has lived his life, too.
Indeed this week it was announced that he and his second wife, Lilly Kerssenberg, are to separate. He married the Dutch model in 2009 – their son Amadeus, Becker’s fourth child, was born in 2010. At the time of their wedding, he declared that she was going to tame him: “When you’ve done the partying, done the models, everything else is a repeat,” he maintained.
There was a hint last year that things were not running smoothly when Kerssenberg revealed in an interview that they were receiving counselling; still, in Becker’s world, their nine years of marriage is a lifetime.
When he first exploded on to the scene, the son of a German provincial architect and tennis club owner, Becker arrived apparently fully formed from nowhere to win Wimbledon on his first attempt. A child star, he was just 17 when he picked up the golden trophy in 1985, his power, athleticism and youthful enthusiasm brushing aside all opposition. A courteous antidote to the anti-authority anger of the John Mcenroe, Ilie Nastase, Jimmy Connors era that had defined the previous decade of tennis, this magnificent, sandy-topped man child was reckoned a breath of fresh air as he dived around the pristine lawns of the All England Club. Boom Boom could do no wrong.
As if to prove he was no flash in the pan, he won the title again the following year, before adding a third victory in 1989. This was a man in a hurry; then just 22, he had already achieved more than any of his contemporaries. Yet his third was to be his last triumph in SW19, and the last of his six grand slam victories came in Australia in 1996, when he was still only 29.
By then, the enormous strain his howitzer serve put on his body was beginning to take its toll (he has subsequently had both his hips replaced). While Roger Federer is still winning titles at 36, before he was 30 Becker was, professionally, finished.
Not that he ever needed to work again. He had accumulated over £25million in prize money, but a man as driven as him needed purpose. The problem was, as he himself admitted, nobody has a route map for becoming a millionaire at 17.
Even as he embarked on a manic, haphazard portfolio career, encompassing everything from BBC commentator and racket manufacturer to coaching Novak Djokovic and playing professional poker, what most people he met seemed keen to do was to help him part with his money. As he became a fixture on the London social scene, this unashamed Anglophile never lacked for company. The problem was, when the bill came, the company invariably vanished.
His whirligig social life took its toll on his first marriage. His wife Barbara Feltus, who he married in 1993 and with whom he had two sons, left him in London and headed for Miami; their divorce settlement
‘When you’ve done the partying, done the models, every thing else is a repeat’
overshadowed even his most extravagant nights out. She was awarded more than £10 million, plus custody of the children.
Feltus had walked out on him after being contacted by Russian model Angela Ermakova, who claimed to be pregnant with his child. The pair had enjoyed the briefest of whirlwind meetings in the fashionable London restaurant, Nobu – the rumour was that it had occurred in a broom cupboard. He hardly calmed the hubbub when, in an attempt to put the record straight, he insisted it had been on the stairs.
Yet even as he became the butt of every gag writer in the country, Becker did not hide from his responsibilities. After initially refusing to accept paternity of the resulting child, he agreed to take a DNA test and, when it proved him wrong, became happily reconciled with his daughter Anna.
Indeed in 2007, he took on joint custody and enjoys a close relationship with the teenager, as he does with his sons from his first marriage. Noah, now a musician living in Berlin and 18-year-old model Elias were both guests of honour at his 50th birthday celebrations at the Ivy restaurant in London last November.
More private turmoil became apparent, however, when in 2017 he was declared bankrupt after a London private bank foreclosed on a loan said to be over £3million.
Quite why a man of his resources needed to borrow such sums seemed incomprehensible. Closer examination revealed it had been part of a complicated image rights deal that had not turned out favourably for him.
The news seemed, momentarily, to diminish his enormous reserves of self-confidence. He put on weight, looked jaded and deflated. His pride was badly dented: not for the first time when it came to his finances – he had been found guilty of tax evasion in Germany in 2002 for taking part in an elaborate investment scheme. It turned out he was not quite as clever as he thought.
One thing we can be sure of, though: a bad couple of years is unlikely to slow Becker down. He will be back on our screens this year at Wimbledon, full of twinkle as he analyses the tennis in his comically Germanic accent.
And doubtless he will bounce back like the balls he used to hammer round the courts of SW19.
Yet even as he became the butt of every gag writer in the country, Becker did not hide