Nightmare rally
A new documentary on German tennis great Boris Becker reveals how his prodigious self-belief became the catalyst for both his success and his spectacular unravelling.
As documentary grist, Boris Becker seems perfect. There’s rise and fall. Glory and shame. Devotion and unravelling. Armed with a prodigious serve, Becker in 1985 became the youngest player to win the Wimbledon men’s singles championship – a title he successfully defended the following year. And so, before his 19th birthday, the German kid had twice claimed one of his sport’s most prestigious trophies. It was an “insane” achievement, remarks one of Becker’s old rivals in the new documentary Boom! Boom! The World vs Boris Becker. It remains so today.
Becker was soon world famous, but interest in him was white-hot in Germany. His status there was similar to Michael Jordan’s, and at one point in the documentary, Becker shares that a German tabloid editor once told him that only three subjects would guarantee a spike in sales: Adolf Hitler, German reunification and him.
Becker was an unguardedly emotional player, in contrast to his great rival,
Ivan Lendl, who resembled Roger Federer in his coolness. Becker compares Lendl to a computer, where the player nicknamed “Boom Boom” was busy smashing racquets, baiting opponents and screaming at crowds. To disrupt opponents, Becker blew kisses to their wives and feigned coughing fits. One of his signatures was a wild willingness to literally throw himself at balls, regardless of the surface he was playing on. This was all part of his swagger, he explains, part of his intimidation of opponents. He was letting them know he was stronger, fitter, madder than they were. And he was often right.
Becker thought a lot about intimidation. Boom! Boom! opens with the ’85 Wimbledon final, when Becker is told that his opponent, the much older Kevin Curren, likes to sit first, and upon the nearest chair, when the players first emerge on court. And so, Becker makes sure that he plants himself down first, and in the South African’s preferred seat. Then, winning the toss, Becker chooses to serve first. First seat, first serve, first punch. “I can describe Boris very quickly,” Becker’s old coach, the late Nick Bollettieri, told Sports Illustrated 20 years ago. “He knew a lot; what he didn’t know, he thought he knew; and he would intimidate people into thinking that he knew it.”
Becker won his first trophy at six, turned professional at 16 and had two grand slam titles before 19. And so, even though he was just 31 when he retired from tennis in 1999, he felt much older. He finished his career with 49 singles titles, six grand slam singles wins
In the documentary, Becker talks about the arrested development of athletes who are swaddled and made unnaturally myopic by their fame and commitment. Becker had one job, and a constellation of people around him whose role was ensuring that he wasn’t distracted from it. He never understood business, he says, or money. He barely knew how large his bank account was. Money was like water. Natural, abundant, always flowing. And anyway, he says, he wasn’t in it for the money. He played to win titles. He played to make history.
In 2002, a Munich court found him guilty of tax evasion, fined him and gave him a suspended two-year sentence. Becker still believes the investigation was grossly intrusive and the conviction unjust. It was petty and vindictive, he says, the result of others’ envy.
But Becker’s opulent lifestyle continued, and in Boom! Boom! you see tableaus of conspicuous wealth: Champagne, private jets and the backdrop of Swiss mountains. In retirement, he published a memoir, coached Novak Djokovic and played in televised poker tournaments. There were lavish parties and harebrained endorsements, each shadowed by Becker’s impulsiveness and giddy sense of invincibility.
In 2017, a London court declared him bankrupt over a massive, unpaid loan to renovate his palatial villa in Spain. It seemed as if he’d long had his head in the sand, the court said, but the man himself thought that “a bunch of anonymous and unaccountable bankers and bureaucrats pushed me into a completely unnecessary declaration of bankruptcy”.
This wasn’t the end of it. Becker’s finances were an illegally concealed mess, and in 2022 he was convicted of serially disguising both assets and debts. The documentary’s director, Alex Gibney, makes use of two interviews he conducted with Becker: one in 2019 and another in 2022, just three days before the fallen star’s sentencing. “I’ve hit my bottom,” Becker tearfully says in the second interview. “I don’t know what to make of it all.”
He was sentenced to two years in prison. In her sentencing remarks, and referring to Becker’s 2002 conviction, Judge Deborah Taylor said: “You did not heed the warning you were given and the chance you were given by the suspended sentence, and that is a significant aggravating factor … You have sought to distance yourself from your offending and your bankruptcy … While I accept your humiliation as part of the proceedings, there has been no humility.”
He served eight months in jail. When he was released, in December last year, he was
Everyone, it seems, has a theory about
Boris Becker. For his former manager, the Romanian billionaire Ion Țiriac, who speaks in aphorisms and whose glow of self-possession rivals his old client’s, Becker was like a gifted child who loved playing with fire. His former coach, Günther Bosch, says Becker’s greatest rival on the court was always himself. Alex Gibney ponders whether Becker’s on-court tactic of painting himself into corners in order to “adrenalise” himself so that he could perform grand escapes had been catastrophically applied elsewhere in his life – he was a daredevil who needed to flirt with doom in order to inspire his success.
Perhaps the only person not to offer a unifying theory about the mind of Boris Becker is the man himself, who appears in this twopart film as supremely arrogant and endlessly dissembling. A practised raconteur and selfrationaliser, in Boom! Boom! Becker has not so much the aura of a sporting legend as an unrepentant con man. He’s always searching for that ingratiating note of contrition, but he rarely finds it sincerely.
His contradictions are many, and sometimes Gibney politely draws attention to them. The man who says his trophies themselves didn’t mean much to him tried to exempt them from the court-sanctioned fire sale of his assets. The man who speaks effusively of his ex-wife, and of how decorous he was during their divorce proceedings, ruthlessly applied his tricks of intimidation to them. The man who says he never played tennis for money is the same man who upheld a lifestyle of yachts and caviar with dubious deals and tacky endorsements.
One contradiction Gibney raises concerns Becker’s famous tryst in the back room of a London sushi restaurant in 1999. It was the night of Becker’s last professional match, when he lost in straight sets to
Pat Rafter at Wimbledon, and he wanted to mark the moment on the town. Becker wanted to cut loose, and he did. He drank with his team and then drank some more. Then he made eyes with a waitress and soon they were passionately engaged in a broom cupboard.
Eight months later, Becker received a fax. The woman was pregnant, their child was imminent. As Becker tells it to Gibney, he was a model of scrupulous acceptance. He was married at the time, and it was all very awkward, but he understood his responsibilities and promised to acquit them. His story seemed “compelling and straightforward” to Gibney, until it wasn’t.
At the time, Becker denied paternity. Then his story changed. Through his lawyers, wild stories were seeded to newspapers: Becker was the victim of a bizarre blackmail plot designed by Russian gangsters. They had paid the woman to seduce Becker into oral sex, who impregnated herself later with his semen. One headline: “BECKER: RUSSIAN MAFIA TRIED TO STEAL MY SPERM”.
Not long after retirement, Boris Becker had a new signature: tawdry farce. There was a perfect note when, during his bankruptcy hearings, Becker’s lawyers suggested their client had diplomatic immunity from prosecution. How? Becker claimed that the Central African Republic had made him a special emissary to the European
Union for culture and sport and that he had the diplomatic passport to prove it. “I’m immensely proud of my appointment as the sports and culture attaché for the Central African Republic,” Becker said in a 2018 statement. “Sport is incredibly important in Africa and is fast becoming a universal language, a form of social diplomacy.”
But the passport was a forgery and his diplomatic status the elaborate hoax of a grifter. Becker was duped – or at least his lawyers were. Turned out there were limitations to Becker’s bluffs and bravado, and those limitations were both tragic and comic.
Unfortunately, this documentary is as messy as the life of its subject. At four hours, it’s at least an hour too long – the tennis highlights and their spaghetti western scores become tedious – and Gibney struggles to illuminate the funky opacity of Becker’s finances. There also remains plenty of questions about the diplomatic passport. How was it that Becker, in need of a legal Hail Mary, suddenly found himself in possession of a “diplomatic passport”? It’s murky as hell.
Nor does Gibney get much from Becker himself, even as he fears the prospect of a cell. Much is said about Becker’s charm and gift for telling stories, but before Gibney’s camera he’s often glib, arrogant and suspiciously practiced. In Becker’s stories, the defining quality is not self-awareness but convenient self-mythologising.
Still, I think of the footage Gibney discovered of an obscure interview with Becker in 1991. Becker is asked whether he’s a genius and he pauses. He doesn’t dismiss the question with false modesty. He considers it, and then says that, yeah, maybe he is. And the evidence for his genius might be how often he surprises even himself by emerging triumphantly from the stickiest situations.
Becker enjoyed an intoxicating selfbelief. Gibney subtly suggests this was both his gift and curse – a useful delusion, until it wasn’t. I wonder if Djokovic is watching.
Boom! Boom! The World vs Boris Becker is now playing on Apple TV.