Boris Becker wants you to know something. “I’ve changed, there is a new chapter starting.” So just forget that other thing you know about him, the one everybody always wants to talk about instead of his magnificent tennis career, OK? (What’s that, you don’t know? Well, 10 years ago Becker locked eyes with a woman in the Nobu Japanese restaurant in London, had very brief sex with her in some kind of cupboard and later a baby girl was born. Oh, and when the encounter happened, his wife was at the hospital. Pregnant. But really, forget it. At least for now ... )
His second wedding ceremony, at a Catholic church in St Moritz on Friday was not just a celebration of a joyous union. It was also a tightly managed event, intended as a message to all those who watched and worried over the years, as the youngest ever Wimbledon champion became a wild child, then a playboy. “There comes a time in every man’s life when he needs to settle down,” says Becker, intensely. Then he smiles. “In my case, again.”
We are talking before the wedding, sitting in the window of San Lorenzo, the Italian restaurant in Wimbledon that many players use as an unofficial canteen during the tennis tournament, which starts on Monday. Becker first came here as a boy, before winning the championship in 1985 at the still-astonishing age of 17. He went on to five more Grand Slam titles, an Olympic gold, a fortune in prize money and a tabloid life so intense it would have turned lesser mortals to dust.
“What I do does not go unnoticed,” says Becker dryly, but in truth he doesn’t exactly fight it. Offered a table at the back, for privacy, he has chosen to sit up front “for the view.” But he has turned his back to the street outside, so was it his view he was worried about, or that of the passersby?
a walk on the wild side
Becker is something to look at. Very sexy, I’m told, if you like your men cocky, fit and a bit wild. He still has the indefinable physical presence common to great athletes, which makes those around him (well, me) feel flabby and inferior. His clothes — a green tweed jacket, a blue shirt, deep indigo jeans and cowboy boots — look as expensive as you would expect from a man said to be worth US$100 million, but they are not flashy. His hair is not spiky as it is when he commentates for the BBC every Wimbledon, making Sue Barker blush with his quips, but cut shorter and swept back. Blond, too, rather than ginger. Becker is not that carrot-topped boy any more; there is silver in his stubble.
“I was really young when I first came on the scene,” he says. “I was bound to go through changes along the way, and they happened in front of a lot of people’s eyes.” Yes, but it probably didn’t help that he did things like pose naked on the cover of a magazine with his then wife, Barbara Feltus, whom he married in 1993. They were in love. Publicly. The sickening reaction from German racists, because of her African-American heritage, intensified the media obsession with him in his homeland. When they were divorced in 2001, the pre-trial hearing was televised. Feltus got a reported US$14 million and custody of their sons Elias and Noah, who are now nine and 15 and live in Miami.
As for Anna, the nine-year-old child of that brief liaison in Nobu, he denied being her father but was proved wrong by a DNA test, not to mention their undeniable resemblance. Anna is now at school in London, and Becker has news. “I have rented a place here,” he says, “since February. I live within walking distance of Center Court. It’s so much easier when you live in the same place, [as your child] to have more privacy. To do what is necessary, as a dad.”
His new wife is Sharlely “Lilly” Kerssenberg, a Dutch model. They announced their engagement live on a German game show in February, to great surprise. The host, his friend Thomas Gottschalk, exclaimed: “No, not again?” Only a few months earlier, Becker had been engaged to Alessandra Meyer-Woelden, the daughter of his former manager, but now he told viewers: “I lost my way.”
He hired his own crews to film and photograph the wedding, for his personal Internet site and syndication across the world. “I don’t want to hide in a tent,” says Becker, who has clearly learned the English art of understatement. “I’m very happy about my next move, and I want to share it with the world.”
We have to talk about the tennis as well, though. Every summer he takes time off from his sportswear business and car dealerships to rile his old rival John McEnroe in the commentary box. His employer, the BBC, has called him Britain’s Favorite German (not, it must be said, a crowded field). “I was honored. In Germany they don’t find me German enough sometimes. Humor plays an important part in my life, and that’s so not German.” He now proceeds to say nothing funny at all for the time it takes to eat an avocado and prawn salad, then steak and mash. Maybe his deadpan delivery obscures the side-splitters. He is glad, he says, that the British finally seem to have got over telling jokes about the war. “I think the World Cup in 2006 changed a lot of the stigmas and stereotypes you had. We like a good time as well. We are foreigner friendly. The sun even shines in Germany. We are a country that loves this multicultural, multiracial life.”
becker on murray
There’s nothing funny about our perennial obsession with whether a British player can win Wimbledon. “Yes,” says Becker, without hesitation. “I think he can.” Federer is the favorite. Nadal is “in a league of his own” although “he can’t possibly go on the way he is going, playing so many tournaments. He will break down eventually.” But Andy Murray has impressed Becker. “It’s his attitude. He isn’t satisfied with being the best British player. He is willing to do whatever it takes to become No. 1 in the world.” He’s tougher than Tim Henman, then? “Probably. There’s a big difference to most other players, not just the British ones.”
Becker knows what it takes. On the wall of our restaurant is a photograph of him as a youngster because this is where he came for dinner every night before that first triumph (and the subsequent ones). He was alone, apart from his coaches. “That was a good thing. These days most parents become the management team of their children, which I find horrendous. It’s very bad for the child to all of a sudden have your father on your payroll.”
His parents “had a different plan” after he was born in Leimen, West Germany, in 1967, the son of an architect. “I was supposed to be a lawyer, a doctor, something like that.” Instead their son was submerged into the fiercely competitive, indulged, insular world of professional tennis. He thrived. When his powers began to wane, Feltus was a help. Leaving though, when his time was up in 1999, was a greater challenge than any tournament. “It took me a couple of years to get adjusted to my after-tennis life. I made a couple of mistakes.”
Which brings us to the broom cupboard (although it was actually the staircase, apparently, despite the myth). It was the summer of 1999, and that afternoon he had played his last game at Wimbledon, against Pat Rafter. At his hotel that evening he got into a fierce argument with Feltus, who was seven months pregnant at the time. Suffering what she thought were labor pains, she went to hospital. He didn’t go with her. He went to Nobu, where Angela Ermakova smiled at him. A few minutes and nine months later, a child was born.
Obviously, he doesn’t want to talk about this. But then he does. “It’s upsetting, because there is so much more ... I have had an incredible 25 years of public life, and most of it was amazing, but of course [there are] some stories I am not proud of.”
Becker stops himself. He is proud of his children. All three of them, he says pointedly. “They’re great kids and they’re good at school and they’re great citizens. I would rather talk much more about this than what happened 10 years ago.”
Let’s, then. Becker has an apartment in Miami that he uses to visit the boys. He also has the long-term rent on his new place in Wimbledon, for Anna, but he adds: “My main residence is still Switzerland.” No doubt the taxman will be interested to hear that. Becker was convicted of tax evasion and fined US$500,000 in 2002, after admitting that he had lived in Germany while claiming to live in Monte Carlo. “For a foreigner [in tax terms] London is good also.”
His sons were instrumental in persuading him to marry again. “When you pass 25 and you’ve done what I’ve done, you’re more careful. You ask yourself, why? More than once. You don’t necessarily want to fall in love again ... but thank God we all have a heart and emotions and they take over.”
It is, he says, almost five years since he started dating Kerssenberg. “We had ups and downs and splits and half splits and all that, but my two boys met her and said: ‘Take no other women home, we won’t accept anybody but her.’ My eldest boy and her talk five times a week, to the point where I get jealous.”
Kerssenberg arrives, looking effortlessly gorgeous in ripped white jeans, a silver wraparound top and bug-eye dark glasses. As if to prove his point, her phone goes off and it is Noah. She listens. “Noah’s going to need a new car.” He’s on the way to passing his driving theory test, at 15. Becker shakes his head and smiles, realizing why Noah would rather talk to her about this. “We’ll find him a Mini.”
Afterwards, when he’s gone to the toilet, Kerssenberg tells me her plans. “Boris has children by other people. Not by me. I want to have twins, then maybe more. I want that feeling you get when you look in their eyes and say, ‘I created life.’”
Then he’s back. “Guess where we’re going this afternoon,” she says. He can’t. “You know that thing you said you loved only slightly less than you love me?”
He thinks. “Poker?” Wrong answer. He wasn’t kidding, though.
“No. The wedding ring, it’s ready to collect.” He gives me an exasperated look, but Kerssenberg knows her own mind and Becker gives every impression of loving it. Although perhaps only a little more than poker. He started playing the game seriously when a sponsor paid him to attend a tournament. “My first time, with the 1,000 best players in the world, I made the final table. That’s luck, maybe, but it’s impossible. It was an unbelievable adrenaline rush.” He’s good with numbers then? “Yes. That’s another stigma athletes have to overcome: you’re an athlete but you can’t count.”
He says, with endearing pride, “I made it onto ESPN Sports News because of poker, not because of tennis.” Have they got anything in common? “Discipline,” he says, nodding. “Concentration. Not the first cards wins but the last card. You study the body language of your opponent; you have to read him, when he plays, when he bluffs. Obviously you sit down all day, so you don’t have hurting muscles.”
Now he is on the circuit, playing for big money in Vegas and Monte Carlo. “The poker tour is like the tennis tour, traveling from city to city. Very competitive. It reminds me of being 20 again.”
As 42 approaches, he is willing to admit how much he struggled after retiring from his first beloved game. “Eight years later, I think I have arrived. I have poker, and businesses that go very well. The challenge was to be known not for a Wimbledon triumph 25 years ago, but for something you’ve done this year or last.”
What is left, then, besides the search for the perfect hand? “I want to work. I want to understand the life of my children. I am happy I have found a partner who shares most of my values,” he says. “I want to maintain that, grow and hopefully make more children in the future, and to learn.” And to put the world right, about how much he thinks he has changed. “I am sick and tired of hiring lawyers to clear my name of lies. I’d rather show myself.”
To that end he has set up Boris Becker TV online, with video diaries about the bits of his life that would otherwise be private, including the wedding. He can’t seem to stop sitting in the front window, metaphorically speaking. Who is going to watch?
“There is a good chance my name is more famous than Facebook or Twitter,” says Becker. Such awesome confidence is the gift only of champions. “Of course, I needed to ask myself, ‘Am I full of myself, do I think that I am more important than I am?’” Becker finishes his third glass of wine and stares, as if demanding a response. Does he really expect me to answer that question, to his face? Not without the umpire’s help. New balls, please ...
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