Boris Becker was the poster-boy of 1980s tennis, the 17-year-old upstart who turned Wimbledon on its head. He possessed a howitzer serve, a gambler’s swagger and a habit – at once exhilarating and alarming – of diving full-length in pursuit of seemingly irretrievable balls. No match was complete without the sight of Becker crashing to the ground like a cold-cocked prizefighter. Most times, he bounced straight back to his feet.
In 2018, the Oscar-winning film-maker Alex Gibney – a keen player himself – began preparing a documentary on Becker’s colourful life and times. He envisaged the film as a celebration, a rollicking portrait of a sporting giant. But events intruded, the law intervened and his picture took a more dramatic route. “You never know what you’re going to find when you start to make a film,” Gibney says. “With a documentary, you write the script at the end not the beginning, based on what you discover along the way.”
Above the doors to Centre Court sits the famous Kipling quote: “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.” Fittingly, Gibney’s finished film, Boom! Boom! The World vs Boris Becker, arrives in two parts. The first, Triumph, spotlights Becker’s tennis heroics, charting his career-defining rivalries with the likes of Andre Agassi, Stefan Edberg and Ivan Lendl. But the second, Disaster, unfolds as grisly low comedy. It tackles his divorces, his paternity battles and the financial sharp practice that would finally land him in jail. This wasn’t the documentary that Gibney expected to make. I’m guessing it wasn’t the one Becker wanted either.
“To be candid,” says the director, “there is stuff in the film that Boris and I disagree about. He thinks I’ve portrayed an unnecessarily downbeat picture of his financial history and business forays. And obviously I don’t think I have. But that would be the one area of dispute. I think that, in the main, he believes it’s fair and truthful.”
Certainly, it makes for a more interesting ride, but then some of the best documentaries are the result of left-turns: Capturing the Friedmans began life as a tale of party entertainers; The Thin Blue Line as a portrait of a prosecution psychiatrist. Now we get Boom! Boom!, which frames the ignoble afterlife of a sporting immortal. On court in his prime, Becker was all but unplayable. Off it, he is revealed as a heedless man-child, his retirement awash with bad investments, tax evasion and insolvency. Last April, he was convicted of hiding assets valued at £2.5m and sentenced to 30 months in a British prison. “I’ve hit my bottom,” he tells Gibney through the tears. “I don’t know what to make of it all.”
Gibney won an Oscar in 2007 for Taxi to the Dark Side, about the killing of a terrorist suspect at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. His other work has covered political scandal (Client 9), Scientology (Going Clear) and sexual abuse within the Catholic Church (Mea Maxima Culpa). But the film that Boom! Boom!’ most resembles is The Armstrong Lie, his 2013 portrait of the cyclist Lance Armstrong, who was hailed for rebounding from testicular cancer only to be caught doping and subsequently stripped of his titles. Both films feature a charismatic, articulate athlete whose story doesn’t entirely add up.
“Yes, but I think this is different from,” Gibney cautions. “Lance Armstrong prosecuted a lie in order to make himself more money. And that’s not really what Boris is doing. It’s more that he’s exaggerating the good parts while diminishing the parts of himself that are less flattering, just as we all do.” In the course of the film, Becker claims to have quit sleeping pills in 1990 when his own memoir states otherwise. He says he promptly acknowledged the daughter he fathered with a waitress at a London restaurant whereas, at the time, he speculated that his sperm had been stolen by the Russian mafia. His story keeps changing; he’s weaving a self-serving myth. But Gibney sensed that, in the moment, Becker believed every word that he said.
Maybe every sporting success is, by its nature, a tale of self-actualisation. Muhammad Ali was calling himself “the greatest” years before anybody else did, building a legend he would later inhabit and enhance. It’s a confidence trick that athletes play on themselves – and if they play it well, the sky’s the limit. “The stories that you have to tell yourself can then inspire you to great heights,” Gibney says. “But those kinds of stories aren’t so useful when dealing with personal or financial matters.” Becker’s current girlfriend, Lilian de Carvalho Monteiro, puts it more bluntly: “In order to be a champion, you have to believe you’re invincible. That probably brings you to a level where you think you’re untouchable in real life.”
Gibney interviewed Becker at length back in 2019. He spoke with him again in April 2022, two days before he was sentenced. Poignantly, the film cross-cuts footage of the German star’s youthful dash to a trio of Wimbledon titles with shots of him padding around the scene of past glories. He looks corroded and defeated, a latter-day Henry VIII. It’s as though we are looking at two different men, but of course they are related and the film joins the dots. Triumph and Disaster aren’t isolated impostors. The one points to the other as sure as night follows day.
“Match point at Wimbledon,” he says at one point with a sigh. “I can’t imagine such a high again.” And therein lies the problem. It was Becker’s fate to burn too brightly too soon; to be pitched towards obsolescence at the age of 31. Experience had taught him that whatever he touched turned to gold. So he blundered into ill-conceived business ventures and kept spending the millions he was no longer earning on court.
The film shows his unseemly slide from the summit. His Mallorcan finca is overrun by hippie squatters. His diplomatic passport (which was meant to safeguard him against bankruptcy proceedings) turns out to be fake. He is befuddled and exhausted; the passport is the final straw. “I said, ‘God, why me?’” he complains to the director. “Why me again?”
In the event, Becker served eight months of his sentence. He is now out of jail and rebuilding his life. Gibney thinks prison time has given him some much-needed perspective. But the jury is still out and old stories die hard.
Whatever his issues with the film, Becker duly showed up for its premiere in Berlin. Speaking at the press conference, he admitted he had made some mistakes in his life. He then went on to suggest that great men break the rules. “Look, it’s very difficult to win Wimbledon at 17,” he explained. “You have to be a little bit crazy, borderline crossing the line, doing things nobody has ever done before in order to achieve what nobody has ever achieved before. You expect world champions to be like everybody else? Well, we are different.” It was a gallant defence. It was also baloney. Becker sounded as if he were making a case for moral exceptionalism, somehow equating historic tax fraud with an audacious dive volley.
“Yeah,” Gibney says, grimacing, “but I’m not sure he’d be aware of that. He wasn’t saying that consciously. He’s just saying that people like him behave differently. And I agree with him, insofar as what made him great as a tennis player didn’t serve him well in real life. Sometimes people find a way to channel what others might see as a vice, in a manner that’s extraordinarily valuable to themselves and society. Boris has an enormous appetite for risk. So how do you reckon with that? How do you balance all that with who you have to be off the court? To win at that level you have to be monomaniacal and brutal. You have to be extraordinarily bold and take enormous gambles. Boris is a particular case in that he went to prison, but those are the traits shared by many other great athletes. You have to be a little bit crazy to do what they do.”
One of Becker’s most famous victories came at the 1988 New York Masters. The final pitted him against Lendl, the five-time reigning champ, with the title decided in a tense fifth-set tiebreak. On match point, both men duked it out from the baseline, dragging each other through the longest rally of the contest until Becker gambled on a backhand that clipped the net and dropped dead. It was a shot of fine margins, an outrageous crowning winner; another piece of the legend slotting into place. The luck was with him that day. Afterwards not so much.
• Boom! Boom! The World vs Boris Becker premieres globally on 7 April on Apple TV+
