Once the Prince of Tennis and a prisoner, Boris Becker starts over

There’s something about athletes reaching a level of greatness as teenagers that makes it particularly shocking to watch them progress into middle age.

The toll of life replaces the exuberance of youth. Belly overtakes ever chiseled physique. In the most unfortunate cases, bad decisions from the triumphant years, the years after, or both, lead to an existence that seemed unimaginable when life brought the glory of championship after championship and the glamor that came with it.

Here’s what comes to mind when Boris Becker — a Wimbledon singles champion at 17, an inmate in a British prison at 54 and now a free man at 55 — appears on a laptop screen in his first interview with The New York Times since he had been released from prison late last year. Becker served eight months of a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence for concealing and transferring money and assets during bankruptcy proceedings. He was previously convicted of tax evasion in Germany in 2002.

Now, he hopes, all is behind him, and he can begin to reclaim the better parts of his pre-incarceration life, doing what retired tennis greats of a certain age typically do: commentate on television and pick up work as finished and then a coach. and advisor for younger players. Becker, a six-time Grand Slam champion, has an unfortunately unique but valuable perspective on the dangers and pitfalls of life as a modern tennis star.

“I now have a little bit of wisdom about what to do and certainly what not to do,” he said.

The prison uniform is gone, replaced by a neatly tailored blue suit. Sitting in front of a camera in Dubai, where he had traveled for business meetings and interviews, Becker was noticeably thinner than before his incarceration, though his blue eyes were bright and hopeful again, compared to his limp, heavy eyelid behavior of a year past.

Becker’s rise and fall are portrayed in a new two-part documentary, “Boom! Boom! The World vs. Boris Becker,” by Alex Gibney and John Battsek. Becker participated in and promotes the series, which premieres Friday on Apple TV+, but unlike many celebrity documentaries these days, “Boom Boom” is not a vanity project in which the nationals or members of their management teams serve as executive producers, create the story and profit from its financial success.

That’s not how Gibney (“Enron,” “The Armstrong Lie,” “Going Clear”) and Battsek (“Searching for Sugar Man,” “One Day in September”) work. Nor is it what Becker, who has always gone his own way, both on and off the tennis court, with occasionally disastrous results, was interested.

“When you’re a co-producer, you’re going to cut corners, you’re not going to show yourself the way the outside world might see you,” said Becker. “It shows you in a much better light than you really are. And for me, you know, honesty was always important.

The result is a naked portrait of a player who, as a teenager, rose to the pinnacle of his sport and achieved fame in Germany, his home country. His seemingly perfect marriage to Barbara Feltus, a black woman, served as a turning point for race relations in Germany (the marriage ended in divorce after eight years).

But when he retired, Becker’s life spiraled into a sordid tale of flirting, failed business ventures, bankruptcies, tabloid scandals, and jail time. Along the way there was also a nearly three-year period where he coached world No. 1 Novak Djokovic during one of the most successful periods of his career.

Gibney, the writer and director who describes himself as a “tennis freak,” said he was drawn to footage from a 1991 documentary in which Becker said he enjoyed falling a set or two behind in matches. That would concentrate his mind, Becker said, and then he roared back.

“Not a great plan in real life, and not a great plan for tennis either,” Gibney said.

Battsek, the producer, said he initially approached Becker about making a documentary in 2018, before Becker’s bankruptcy resulted in a criminal conviction. Gibney interviewed him extensively in 2019, and again last year after his sentencing and just days before his sentencing, when an overweight and frightened Becker tried to have his say on what he expected could be the last time in years.

“His biggest mistake was to mistakenly think that the swagger that got him through everything would get him through some tricky terrain when it came to his finances,” Battsek said of Becker. “You have to be smart enough to know, ‘I can’t get through this.'”

Becker was released early from prison under an accelerated deportation program for foreigners, but not before what he described as eight challenging months in two prisons.

“Very difficult, especially with the life I came from,” he said.

During his first weeks of incarceration, the man who had once ruled the hallowed Center Court at Wimbledon was locked in his cell for 22 hours a day, released only for lunch and dinner, a shower and short spells away from home.

In his early twenties, when Becker nearly quit playing tennis several times, he spent hours at night in his hotel room writing in his diaries. Likewise, the isolation in prison gave him plenty of time to reflect on where his life had gone wrong, he said. He remembered plenty of bad choices – trusting managers and advisers too much, getting a woman pregnant in the back room of a Nobu restaurant in London, making a series of bad investments. However, he also thought about the good times, the great moments of his career and all the luxuries his success brought him.

He said he feared for his safety in prison, but kept his ego in check and joined a group that protected him. He declined to give details.

“There’s a code of honor that you don’t talk about prison on the outside,” he said. “I have too much respect for the prisoners.”

He knows his life didn’t have to be like this and that during his playing days he should have spent more time cooped up in an office, familiarizing himself with all those documents he signed, instead of on a beach or a tennis court.

He also wasn’t mentally prepared when he retired, he said, for the shock of being called old at 35 and having to start a second career from scratch.

But now it’s starting again. Eurosport hired him to commentate at the Australian Open. He hopes that some of his other partners and employers will also return. For the first time, he keeps his goals small.

“I’m kind of in the late summer, fall, of my life, so I really want to work on the next 25 years,” he said. “You look back at your life in prison, you look back at your professional life as a player, as a coach, as a commentator. You want to learn from the experience, you want to improve on some of the things you started with. And that is my goal.”