Boris Becker: I was hounded by the press just like Princess Diana

Times

3 days ago

The former tennis star Boris Becker has compared himself to Princess Diana and said that the British judge who sentenced him to prison for bankruptcy offences had condemned his 'entire family' to suffer.
Becker, 57, was once one of postwar Germany's most celebrated and successful sporting celebrities, winning Wimbledon at the age of 17 and rising to world No 1.
In 2022, however, he was jailed by Southwark crown court for concealing several valuable assets and loans from his creditors after declaring himself bankrupt.
Since his early release eight months after the verdict, Becker has moved to Milan and re-established himself as a tennis commentator and brand ambassador for various lines of sports clothing.
In an interview alongside his third wife, Lilian de Carvalho Monteiro, Becker said he had now turned his private life into a 'little fortress' after finding himself 'suffocated' by the obsessive interest of the German public and betrayed by figures he had previously mistaken for friends.
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Asked which world events in his lifetime had been most indelibly seared into his memory, he cited the death of Princess Diana in 1997.
'I knew Diana; we ran into each other a few times,' Becker told Stern, a German magazine. 'I knew that she was constantly on the run from the paparazzi and that nothing was taboo to these people … I could put myself in her shoes to some extent. Life as a public figure who is pursued at every turn: that is part of my story, too.'
Like Diana, Becker said, he had been haunted by his early status as a wunderkind, a young prodigy. 'Life in the fast lane is dangerous,' he said. 'Wunderkinds don't live to an especially old age because their lives move at such great speed.
'You can't come down from that high. I can't say: I don't want to be a wunderkind any more, I don't want this whole circus. That freedom of choice doesn't exist for someone like me.'
Addressing his spell in Wandsworth and Huntercombe prisons, Becker acknowledged that he had made 'mistakes, even double faults' in his life: 'I don't want to pin the blame on anyone else. They were my mistakes, and I atoned for them.'
He admitted that he had struggled psychologically with his imprisonment. 'What the judge didn't realise, and no one else on the outside [did either]: when you condemn someone, you condemn their entire family,' Becker said. 'In my case that was my children, my sister, my mother, and of course my wife.
'In that situation you ask yourself very quickly: how are you even going to cope with it yourself?'