Shame, set and match
Michael Henderson
San Francisco A SPORTMAN's fall from grace is never a pretty sight. Fools that we are, we imagine the players of games to belong to some purer world, even though that is manifest nonsense. They inhabit a dream world, removed from the muck and nettles of 'ordinary life', protected from the business of earning a living by the indulgence of our support.
If you ask Boris Becker what he thinks of that dream world, however, he might give you a pithy answer. The German tennis player, a Wimbledon champion at the age of 17 and a star among stars, stood in the dock last week in Munich, a penitent man, as the court found him guilty of tax evasion. He was fined half a million euros and handed a two-year prison sentence suspended for three years. The Centre Court must have seemed a long way away.
Furthermore, he had to endure a public rebuke from the judge, who sounded a formidable lady. 'I don't want to hear any more out of you concerning tax matters,' she told the fallen star, wagging a finger at him. Rarely has a sportsman been humiliated in such a public way, and on his own patch, too, because Becker is a modern German hero. The gist of the case against him was that, while claiming to reside in Monte Carlo, Becker was living most of the year in Bavaria. The judge took into account that he had made a clean breast of the situation, and Becker was happy to say afterwards, 'I am a free man. That is the most important thing and this marks the end of a very difficult phase of my life.'
From this distance it seems that Becker has been harshly treated. Certainly, one doesn't have to look very far in British sport to find people who have been more fortunate in their dealings with the law. Becker has always come across as one of sport's good guys — a superb champion, and an honourable one, with a sense of proportion. 'Nobody died out there,' he once told reporters after a defeat. 'I just lost a tennis match, that's all.'
The more one looks at it, Becker's achievement in winning Wimbledon in 1985 as a teenager — and his no less astonishing performance the following year when he retained his title — is one of the great feats of sport. But it brought the usual problems: fame, and how to cope with it; how to cope also with the train of 'advisers' who are never far away when there is money to be made.
Becker has coped better than most. Despite his tax problems, which seem to have sprung from human error rather than dastardly plotting, he emerges as a human being, in touch with the world around him. This summer he was a member of the BBC's Wimbledon panel, sporting a leather jacket and a hairdo that made him look like a middle-aged rocker — and jolly well he did. His English, it goes without saying, is markedly superior to many native speakers.
This great champion, therefore, deserves if not our sympathy then a fair hearing. He gave pleasure to many people over a storming decade, and has maintained a perspective on life that should serve him well in these unhappy days. Just think: he's 34 and his glory days are behind him. 'Plush velvet sometimes; sometimes just pretzels and beer.' Being a teenage star is sometimes tougher than we think.
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