Sex, Money, and Power: The Rise and Fall of Tennis Great Boris Becker
Directed by one of the world’s most prolific documentary filmmakers, Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief), and premiering on Apple TV+ April 7,Boom Boom!features two long sit-down interviews with Becker, who is now 55 — in 2019, as Becker was facing a bankruptcy auction following a series of financial missteps, and in 2022, days before Becker faced jail time in London for failing to repay his debts and tax evasion, concealing some of his finances. (He was ultimately sentenced to 30 months in jail, and released on Dec. 15, 2022, after serving eight months behind bars.)
Gibney’s film also contains interviews with those in and around Becker’s orbit, including Tiriac; his ex-wife Barbara; Novak Djokovic, who was coached by Becker from 2014-2016; and contemporary rivals John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg, the latter of whom Becker idolized growing up.
It’s an extraordinary story: Becker was born in Leimen, a relatively small town in West Germany. He won his first tennis tournament at the age of 6, started competing professionally with men at 14, became a pro at 16, and won Wimbledon in 1985 at the age of 17, becoming the youngest Major champion ever. It’s fascinating to watch footage of a teenage Becker, looking every bit the German schoolboy with his parted red hair and flush-red cheeks, dispatching tennis greats en route to hoisting the greatest trophy in pro tennis. It’s no surprise that Becker soon became a teen idol, attracting a number of brand-sponsorship deals and raking in millions, guided all the while by Tiriac, a protective manager and shrewd marketing mind.
“I was like a little boy in a toy shop,” Becker says of his Wimbledon run.
In the late-‘80s, Becker became addicted to sleeping pills — even claiming he was drowsy from sleeping pills during the 1990 Wimbledon Final, which he lost to Stefan Edberg in five sets. Part of Becker’s mystique was his tendency to put himself in bad situations on the court, falling down a set or two, and then fighting back to win in dramatic fashion. He would go on to win six Grand Slam titles, including Wimbledon in 1985, 1986, and 1989.
He was also an iconoclast. One of the most fascinating portions of Boom Boom! concerns his relationship with his ex-wife Barbara Becker, who is Black. Becker met the designer and model in 1992, and the two married in 1993, when she was eight months pregnant with their child. They famously posed nude together on the cover of Germany’s Stern magazine in 1993, and their relationship became tabloid fodder, with the German media targeting the pair with racist attacks. One German paper even ran the headline, “Go Back to the Bush” about his wife, and the couple was dogged by death threats and forced to travel with security guards. Their ugly media treatment calls to mind the predicament of another celebrity ginger and his Black partner: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
“He had that glow — that atmospheric energy of changing the room and making it lighter and brighter,” says his wife Barbara in the film, adding, “For the hero, the blond, blue-eyed German, to pick a Black woman as his wife was a big deal.”
Things really began to go south for Becker in 1999. After losing in straight sets in the fourth round at Wimbledon to Aussie Patrick Rafter, Becker, who’d recently lost his father, acknowledged that it was his last Wimbledon tourney. That night, Becker told Barbara — who was pregnant with their second child — that he wanted one last night to party hard as a professional tennis player before he hung it up. So, he went to Nobu with some pals and ran into Angela Ermakova, a Russian woman he’d encountered at the same trendy London restaurant a couple of weeks prior.
“Lots of things happened,” Becker says in the doc of the Nobu encounter. “I can tell you we went to the back room — no, it wasn’t the cupboard, the cupboard is way too small… we got together, we had sex. I had no number from Angela, I had no contact, and that was that. Went back to my team, my boys, paid the bill, and I went home.” The encounter is said to have lasted all of five seconds.
Eight months later, Angela emerged, heavily pregnant, and told Becker he’s the father.
“I said, well, I believe you — we had sex — but you have the baby, and we go to the doctor, and we make the DNA test, and if it’s my baby, I’m responsible for it, I will look after it. Period,” Becker maintains in the documentary.
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