Where do you go after becoming Wimbledon’s wunderkind at 17? As he turns 45, Boris Becker reflects on the difficult transition from top athlete to serious entrepreneur, fatherhood and the values that make him proud.
“I was on the basketball court with some teenagers in Washington DC. Some of them were criminals. It’s quite something when they take the ball off you and you fight to get it back – you know they’ve got a gun in their bag.”
Boris Becker leans forward eagerly in his chair, his blue eyes sparkling. The veneer of a polite routine interview at his private members’ club office in Mayfair has suddenly cracked, and behind it appears Boris, the big boy with a sense of adventure – and a passion for doing something worthwhile.
“We established midnight basketball in Washington DC. Some of the players were gangsters. And instead of killing each other they played each other – starting at 10pm and finishing at five the next morning. The teenage crime rate in the neighbourhood went down remarkably because of it.”
Getting gang members off the streets of America is just one of the projects run by Laureus, an international charity that harnesses the power of sport to promote social change. Becker is one of its founding members and German Chair. And to him that means being hands-on wherever the charity runs its projects.
“In Calcutta we drove around with ‘the magic bus’, collecting children in the
poorest parts of the city. You haven’t seen poverty until you’ve seen the poorest parts of Calcutta. We’d take those children to a playing field with a football pitch and goals, and for six hours they’d forget that they were going back to nothing.”
The former teenage Wimbledon star with the shock of blond hair has matured. He says 45 is an important age for a man – a good age to take stock. “I started the process when I was 40 – thinking through where I’m coming from and where I want to go.”
These past five years have been a time of new beginnings and consolidation for him. His second marriage, to Dutch model Lilly Kerssenberg, the decision to settle in his beloved Wimbledon and the birth of his youngest son, Amadeus, all fell into this period. There is also a sense that he has matured as a businessman.
When he retired from active tennis in 1999 there was little practical need for him to reinvent himself. His career winnings and sponsorship earnings meant he could afford to give himself a couple of years off to party, sleep in and enjoy freedom from the stringent routine of being a top international athlete. “But after that you wake up and say: ‘Enough – let’s get serious again.’ The big question is, when I travel on a plane and have to fill in a landing
“ When I have to fill in a landing card, what do I want to write under ‘occupation’? Ex-tennis player?”