BERLIN, Feb 19 (Reuters) – The profession of Boris Beecker, whose thunderous supply earned him the nickname “Growth Growth” as a younger tennis participant, took him from the best heights of sporting achievement aged 17 to jail at 54, and he’s not sure if it might have gone some other method.
“It’s extremely troublesome to win Wimbledon at 17,” the German former tennis champion mentioned forward of the premiere on Sunday on the Berlin Movie Pageant of a documentary on his life.
“You need to be a bit loopy to cross the road and do issues no one else has ever achieved earlier than.”
One of many best tennis gamers in historical past who gained six Grand Slam titles, Becker’s on-court brilliance was matched by an lack of ability to handle his affairs off it, that noticed him pile up private disasters from sleeping tablet addictions to a jail sentence.
“You count on world champions in a sport to be like everybody else however we aren’t,” he advised a information convention. “To have that mindset … in actual life that is an issue.”
Newest Updates
View 2 extra tales
Alex Gibney’s “Growth! Growth! The World vs. Boris Becker” is the work of an unashamed fan, mixing court docket highlights with interviews with a stellar forged of tennis greats, together with present primary Novak Djokovic, Ion Tiriac, the Romanian who found him, and rivals John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg.
“What I appreciated about Boris is that not like many athletes he is a good storyteller,” Gibney mentioned. To convey that sense of drama he envisioned the movie as a “docu-western”, he mentioned, setting match factors to the music of Ennio Morricone.
The final interview was carried out two days earlier than a London court docket despatched him to jail final April for concealing belongings from his chapter proceedings. “I did not know what the remainder of my life would appear to be,” mentioned Becker, who served eight months of a two-year time period.
Becker, a self-described movie fan with a weak spot for bad-boy actors comparable to Sean Penn, Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando, might hardly cover his glee at moonlighting as a movie star however confessed he might not hit the ball as he as soon as might.
“I performed it very bodily and had many accidents. I can not say what number of components of my physique have been changed,” mentioned the erstwhile king of the highly effective serve. “Life as a tennis-winning machine is lots more durable than it seems to be.”
Reporting by Thomas Escritt; Modifying by Emelia Sithole-Matarise
: .
