The life of one of Germany's most famous sports icons hit a new low thisweek, as he was found guilty of tax evasion by a German court. With a broken marriage and an acrimonious custody battle behind him, just where did it all go wrong for Boris Becker, asks Derek Scally.
Boris Becker is no stranger to rackets, but when he emerged from a Munich court €3 million poorer on Thursday, he must have been cursing the day he swapped his tennis racket for his tax-evasion racket.
Three years after retiring from professional tennis, the trial proved that Becker is still big news: his name has simply moved from the back page to the front page. Like his famous power-serve, the scandals keep coming with predictable regularity and at high speed: the love-child, the messy divorce and the bitter custody battle.
The burden of fame always weighed heavy on Becker. Like fellow German sports stars Michael Schumacher and Steffi Graf, Becker is more than just a national hero in Germany. As a sports idol, he provides a safe outlet for the feelings of an entire nation afraid to express national pride.
The role was pre-ordained from the moment he exploded onto the professional tennis scene in 1985, as a 17-year-old unseeded redhead, who became the youngest-ever Wimbledon male singles champion. Before he turned 22, he had won four Grand Slams - one victory at the US Open and two further titles at Wimbledon, whose centre court he liked to refer to as "my living room".
The road to this week's conviction began in the autumn of 1991, when Becker met the German model and aspiring actress Barbara Feltus. The daughter of an African-American serviceman and a white German woman, Becker said that the woman who would become his wife was "the complete opposite" of him.
"I was moody, didn't know whether I should continue tennis, and she brought sunshine into my life," he said at the time. But the sunny days clouded over when the couple went public with their romance. They received death threats and, at tennis matches, Barbara was accused of being a gold-digger and a "black witch". One tabloid newspaper even asked why Boris Becker, with his classic Germanic looks, was in love with a black woman. "Why, Boris? Why not one of us?" Becker threatened to leave Germany if the racist taunts continued.
Surprisingly, after the couple married in 1993, the taunts largely stopped and the Beckers became regulars on the German society pages, poster parents for a new liberal Germany.
Two children followed, providing a new centre for Becker's life as his tennis career dwindled. "I am a family man and I love my children above everything else in the world, even tennis," he said this week.
However, the end of his tennis career would also prove to be the beginning of the end of his marriage. After he crashed out of Wimbledon for the last time in June 1999 he went on an all-night drinking session in London, ending up at the upmarket London restaurant, Nobu. According to Angela Ermakova, a Russian waitress-model in the restaurant that night, Becker fell into a broom cupboard with her for what he would later describe as "the most expensive five seconds of my life".
In January 2001, Ermakova presented to the world the child she claimed was Boris Becker's daughter. Becker denied it, but photos of a red-haired, blue-eyed baby Anna, and subsequent DNA tests, proved the contrary. He agreed to pay a £2 million lump sum and £25,000-a-month in maintenance.
"I take responsibility," he said in a press statement. "Children are the most innocent people in our world." Becker and his wife had already separated months earlier, saying in a statement that after seven years of marriage they had "drifted apart".
But any pretence of an amicable separation vanished after what became known as the "Cupboard of Love" story. Barbara fled with the two children, Noah and Elias, to the couple's €3 million holiday home off Miami. Becker accused her of kidnapping his sons and filed for divorce.
The subsequent divorce and custody fight, dubbed the "War of the Roses" in Germany, was broadcast live from a Florida courtroom.
The couple eventually agreed to share custody of the children, and reached an out-of-court settlement reportedly worth €14 million.
"We fought long and hard to save our marriage . . . \ time passes and leaves its marks. On all of us. And now we're paying the price," said Becker afterwards, mixing his metaphors like all great sportsmen.
Although he had retired from professional tennis aged 31, Becker had a string of well-paid product endorsement contracts, for everything from luxury watches to a leading Internet company. But several private business ventures floundered, as did his attempts to rebuild his life with a string of girlfriends, each eerily similar in appearance to his ex-wife Barbara.
His early days with Barbara returned to haunt him earlier this year, when German investigators concluded a six-year probe into Becker's tax affairs. Investigators' interest focused on a period from 1991 to 1993, when Becker, on paper, lived in tax exile in Monaco. In reality, however, he spent all his free time away from the tennis court living in a small loft above his sister's apartment in Munich.
He refused to admit his guilt until days before the trial, when he handed more than €2 million to the tax authorities. But the trial went ahead anyway, andBecker, sporting a new blond dye-job, appeared in court on Thursday to hear the Bavarian state prosecutor demand a three-year prison sentence.
"I thought my life was over. I thought I would be led out of court in handcuffs," he said on German television on Thursday evening.
A leading German newspaper columnist criticised Becker for not coming clean in court. "Why didn't you tell the judge that you were drawn back to Munich from Monte Carlo because you were crazy for Barbara? Completely love-sick," said Franz Josef Wagner, in Bild, Germany's most popular newspaper. He said Becker didn't deserve a prison sentence after spending years as a prisoner of love and "a prisoner of another high-security prison . . . the tennis court".
Perhaps wisely, Becker's lawyers ignored the "prisoner of the tennis court" defence and he walked out of court on Thursday with a two-year suspended sentence, a hefty fine and protestations of innocence.
Becker says he concentrated on "tennis and girls" while advisers made the unwise decisions that would cost him later. "I trusted the wrong people and listened to them when I should have just listened to myself," he said on Thursday night. "But I still don't understand why they persecuted me like a serious criminal. There are bigger problems in this country.
"Am I happy? I am a free man, and I am trying to work my way back to happiness," saidBecker on German television on Thursday evening.
If his losing streak continues, he should take comfort from the words of Hildegard Knef, the German actress and torch singer once hailed as the new Marlene Dietrich, who died penniless earlier this year.
"Success and failure are both overrated," she remarked once in her trademark smoky voice. "But at least with failure you have more to talk about."