Boris Becker’s career went from “boom boom” to “bust” in a Berlinale film.
BERLIN: As a young tennis player, Boris Becker’s powerful shots earned him the nickname “Boom Boom.” His career took him from the top of his sport at age 17 to prison at age 54, and he doesn’t know if it could have gone any other way.
“It’s very hard to win Wimbledon at 17,” the former German tennis champion said before a documentary about his life was shown for the first time on Sunday at the Berlin Film Festival.
“You have to be a little crazy to cross the line and do things no one has ever done before.”
Becker was one of the best tennis players in history, and he won six Grand Slam titles. However, he was terrible at managing his life outside of tennis, which led to problems like sleeping pill addiction and a prison sentence.
He told a news conference, “You expect world champions in a sport to be like everyone else, but we’re not.” “In real life, it’s not good to think that way.”
Alex Gibney’s “Boom! Boom! The World vs. Boris Becker” is the work of an unashamed fan. It mixes court highlights with interviews with a stellar cast of tennis greats, including current number one Novak Djokovic, the Romanian who found him, and rivals John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg.
Gibney said, “I liked Boris because, unlike most athletes, he is a great storyteller.” He said he pictured the movie as a “docu-western” with Ennio Morricone’s music as match points to show that sense of drama.
The last interview took place two days before he was sent to prison in April of last year by a London court for hiding assets from his bankruptcy proceedings. Becker, who served eight months of a two-year sentence, said, “I didn’t know what the rest of my life would be like.”
Becker said he liked bad-boy actors like Sean Penn, Jack Nicholson, and Marlon Brando. He couldn’t hide how happy he was to be a movie star on the side, but he did admit that he couldn’t hit the ball as well as he used to.
“I played it very hard and hurt myself a lot. I don’t know how many of my body parts have been replaced “The old king of the powerful serve said this. “It’s a lot harder than it looks to be a tennis-winning machine.” (Reuters)