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.”
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