Becker on first Wimbledon title: 'Suddenly this freedom was gone'

Yahoo

3 days ago

Former German tennis player Boris Becker attends the Men's singles final tennis match of the Terra Wortmann Open between Kazakhstan's Alexander Bublik and Russian Daniil Medvedev. David Inderlied/dpa
Boris Becker has said that his maiden Wimbledon title in 1985 as a 17-year-old not only resulted in positives, and that his inner strength helped him throughout his tennis career and life.
Becker became a German and global sensation with his triumph 40 years ago. He went on to win two more Wimbledons and a total six grand slams, and was world number one.
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Looking back ahead of Monday's start of the latest Wimbledon, he told Stern magazine that "the whole country embraced me" after the 1985 success.
"It was certainly meant kindly, but they almost crushed me and took away my air to breathe. I was always a freedom-loving person, and suddenly this freedom was gone," Becker said.
"People suddenly looked at me with different eyes, even my parents. Boy, what were you doing there? That was their attitude. My parents had known me for 17 and a half years up until then, but they didn't realise that I had this strength in me."
Becker said this strength helped him throughout life on and off the court.
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"I survived as a prodigy. I survived the 17-year-old Boris Becker and everything that came after that," he said.
I have this character trait: I survive. You can put me in the jungles of Vietnam - I'll find a way to survive. You can put me in prison - and I'll find a way to survive."
This also helped him get through a prison term in Britain after being convicted for for withholding assets in a bankruptcy case.
"As they say: in a serious crisis, you're all alone. Yes, that's how
it was with me," he said.
However, he highlighted that his current wife, Lilian De Carvalho Monteiro, with whom he now lives in Milan, remained by his side.
'That is remarkable, because she could only be interested in me as a person because I had nothing else to offer. I had never met a woman like her before," he said.