A German Ace Shows His Rocket-Like Serve : At 17, Boris Becker Is Just Now Beginning to Realize How Far He Might Go in Tennis

It’s an old story, but in this version the Red Baron might win.

In the annual battle of Britain, a German tennis ace has taken flight, capturing hearts and headlines along the way while inviting comparison to German Baron Gottfried Von Cramm, who last played here when titled people wore monocles.

Boris Becker is a big, skinny kid with freckles and reddish blond hair and looks like he ought to be drinking a milkshake or maybe carrying some fraulein’s books to school in his home town of Leimen.

But this is Wimbledon and this is Britain and, anyway, what headline writer could resist?

So the young German with the big serve who won at Queens and has, uh, bombed his way through four rounds of championship tennis here becomes Boom Boom Becker and Blitzkrieg Becker and Bomber Becker.

“I don’t think it’s very good, the Blitzkrieg headlines about me,” Becker said Monday. “I am a German, but I’m not a general or soldier or anything like that.”

No, he is a tennis player. But that is like saying Rommel was a general. You sense excitement the moment Becker steps on the court. You imagine it must have been this way the first time Mickey Mantle played center field at Yankee Stadium. Magic isn’t too strong a word.

It is only once in a tennis generation (every five years or so, that is) that the likes of Boris Becker come along, and in each case the world has grown impatient with the waiting.

He’s 17, he serves like Dwight Gooden pitches, and some day Becker, who is 6-1 and growing, may well be the best tennis player in the world.

“He won’t win Wimbledon, not this year,” said Joakim Nystrom, the seventh-seeded player here and a five-set loser to Becker on Monday. Maybe next year.

“On grass, he’s already one of the top three, four, five players in the world,” said Hank Pfister, whom Becker beat last week.

Even John McEnroe calls Becker dangerous.

For sure, he’s too good to ignore, but there’s no danger of that here. “I’m just a nobody,” Becker tried to protest early last week. In a sport where new faces--even freckled--are the game’s lifeblood, Becker has the unmistakable look of a champion.

Ion Tiriac, a tennis Svengali who nurtured Nastase and inspired Vilas, has taken over as Becker’s manager and made the youngster his life’s work.

“His coach, Gunther Bosch, told me about him years ago,” Tiriac said. “I went out to see him last April and May to try to get a sense of what he was made of.”

Tiriac, a dark, brooding Romanian whose mustache even looks stormy, is legendary in tennis circles. He was a soccer player, hockey player and you wonder if he wasn’t also a spy--for both sides. Wouldn’t he break the young man?

That’s what Tiriac wanted to find out.

He pulled him out of school and sent him on the road. “A Gypsy,” Tiriac said. And the worst kind of Gypsy. It wasn’t only that he was 16 years old and away from home, he had to qualify before he could even enter his weekly tournament.

“I had to see how mentally strong he was, to see if he could take the aggravation,” Tiriac said. “I wanted to see how far I could push him.”

Once, in far away South Africa, Becker, suffering from sunstroke, lost his qualifier and almost lost his nerve. He had found his limit. “If I could win just one more match a tournament . . . ,” Becker told Tiriac.

That was just before he made the quarterfinals at the Australian Open and left qualifying forever behind.

Just months later would come the first tournament victory on the grass at Queens. The bookmakers fell for him right away, making him the fourth favorite here. How far can he go?

“We learned something today,” Tiriac said Monday. “To win a five-set match at Wimbledon, he has to have guts.”

Only Tiriac didn’t say guts, he said something stronger, something a sportsman reserves for a fellow sportsman but which finds no place in a family newspaper.

It was a gutty match for a 17-year-old, the second time he has ever gone five sets. Nystrom is a clever Swede, one of the new generation, who can make a big hitter look bad. Mats Wilander had handled him earlier this year in the Italian Open.

In the fifth set, neither player could hold his serve, and the ninth, 10th, 11th and 12th games ended in breaks. But it was Nystrom who broke in the end. In the 16th game of the final set, Nystrom could manage only one point, Becker passing him for the winner and then thrusting one fist to the sky. Becker had won, 3-6, 7-6, 6-1, 4-6, 9-7. He had arrived.

“His best quality as a tennis player is his determination,” Tiriac said. And his serve isn’t bad either.

“It’s as good as any I’ve ever seen,” Nystrom said.

Pfister wanted to take the compliment even further. He said he’s never seen a 17-year-old who was the equal of young Becker.

“To be fair, I didn’t play Borg until he was 20,” Pfister said. ‘McEnroe wasn’t that strong psychically. You just can’t imagine a 17-year-old with that poise and power.”

Today, Becker, who is ranked 20th in the world, plays Tim Mayotte, seeded 16th and a renowned grass player. If he gets past Mayotte, Lendl is lurking. He’s not rushing it.

“There are a lot of good guys who could win this tournament,” Becker said. “Maybe I am one of them. I don’t know.”

He’s poised even in the interview room, speaking a foreign language, trying to recount a life story that has has barely begun.

A junior tennis champion, playing on a tennis court in a club his architect father designed, Becker has been pointed starward from as long ago as he can remember.

He’s smart and he’s tough and he plays hard. When he’s playing on a hard surface, it is usually stained with his blood. And he’s got that serve and Tiriac says his ground strokes are right there. He needs work on his footwork and he needs some experience.

How far will it take him?

“You guys are speculating as well as I am,” Tiriac said. “I’m still learning about him.”

A year ago, Becker had to qualify for Wimbledon. He was not insulted. At 16, he won his first two matches and was playing a fourth set against Bill Scanlon when a ligament tore in one leg. They had to carry him off in a stretcher, but not before he had hobbled over to shake Scanlon’s hand.

Yet, there he was Monday on Court 1 making a memory. But it won’t always be that way.

In the Italian Open, he thought his big serve could carry him past Yannick Noah because Noah was hurting. In the end, Becker was hurting.

“He learned a lesson,” Tiriac said. “He’s 17.”

That’s the scary part. He’s 17. How far can he go?