He Fights His Battles on the Playing Field

Sportswriters couldn’t believe their good luck when that young West German from Leimen won Wimbledon.

First of all, there was that name. If you sat up nights you couldn’t come up with anything more felicitous: Boris Becker.

It had everything. Alliteration. Bombast. Almost rhyme. Charles Dickens would have invented it. Hemingway never had a greater inspiration. Edgar Allan Poe could have written a poem around it.

It had a fictional quality about it, almost as if it were from the Hardy Boys series, or a character in Tom Swift:

--”Boris Becker and His Atomic Racket.”

--”Boris Becker at the Seashore.”

--”Boris Becker Goes Hawaiian.”

--”Boris Becker, Set Point.”

The possibilities were endless.

Then, there was that background. The boy from the small town in Germany that time forgot. The pro from the Brothers Grimm. The player from the tree house. The Wagnerian hero. Maybe he’d turn into a swan in the last act.

But, best of all, he was German. That gave the journalists free range. Visions of typical Teutonic allusions danced in their heads like a parade of wooden soldiers. The military motif was off and rampant. Blitzkrieg Becker came swiftly to mind. The field marshal of tennis.

The spiked helmet came out of mothballs. Ideas rolled. Shouldn’t he be playing in jackboots and a steel helmet? Shouldn’t he make the cover of Sports Illustrated with an Iron Cross pinned to his throat? Shouldn’t he exchange his racket for a baton when going out in public? Shouldn’t he be addressed as “Your excellency” by everyone under the rank of corporal?

You kept waiting for the headlines and leads: “Boris Becker went through Wimbledon’s seeds like von Moltke through the Low Countries here today.” Writers could speculate that he would goose-step onto court. Other players arrived by limo. Becker would probably come by Panzer unit.

And so on.

Alas! Herr Becker would have none of it. He put his No. 11 foot squarely down on the literary license. The war was over. Even the comparatively mildly military allegory of Boom Boom Becker left him disturbed.

“I am a sportsman, not a soldier,” he complained. “When my mother calls me, she doesn’t say ‘Come here, Boom Boom,’ she says ‘Boris.’ ”

He made it plain that he wants it known he comes from a Germany that wins Wimbledon and a Masters, not Paris or the oil of the Caucasus. “I came to play games, not conquer territory,” he said.

So the poets of the press box had to sigh and make do with what they had--which was a kind of heavy-legged German kid, who, if he hit a ball with the authority of a Reichswehr 88-millimeter field piece, didn’t care to have it written that way.

What he had done hardly needed the military equivalencies, anyway. This gangling reddish-blond teen-age giant, barely out of high socks and lederhosen, had done something no one his age and rank had ever done before. He had routed the flower of world tennis at Wimbledon to become the first and youngest and only unseeded player ever to win that storied event.

In so doing, he had captured the hearts and minds of the world by being the first non-brat to win that tournament in years.

He did it in the most un-Germanic of ways. Given his background, tennists might have expected unser Boris to play the kind of classic, set-piece, mathematically perfect game of a kid who learned the game by the book, who had been programmed into position by staff manual. Clausewitz tennis.

Instead, he played tennis the way Ty Cobb or Pete Rose played baseball, or Dempsey fought. He played a scrambling, dirty-uniform, get-there-at-all-costs and hang-the-form-charts game of a member of a street gang.

“He plays tennis like you might steal hubcaps,” one tennis announcer pointed out.

He was a brawler, a swarmer, an infighter. He attacked the ball as if it were a swarm of bees. He didn’t hit it, he swatted it. He skidded, slipped, tumbled and lunged. It wasn’t a game, it was a rumble. You didn’t get aced, you got mugged. Love had nothing to do with it.

He did lots of things wrong, but the scoreboard never knew it.

Germany used to have a great player, Baron Gottfried von Cramm, who played the game as if it were high tea. He always had the correct finger on the racket and he looked great losing. Becker doesn’t even look great winning. He plays as if he’s trying to plug holes in a roof during a thunderstorm.

They used to say of Arnold Palmer that the only thing he did right with a golf club was win. Boris became the tennis equivalent. He hit off the wrong foot, his backhand was unclassic, his forehand collapsible--but the ball came rocketing back like one of Nolan Ryan’s fastballs. He has the nerves of a 17-year-old-- i.e., none.

He is here in Indianapolis this week to play in the U.S. Clay Courts, and he has turned this non-event into the tennis soiree of the season so far.

No one minds that John McEnroe, Jimmy Connors, Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert Lloyd are, as usual, not here. Boris (Don’t Call Me Boom Boom) is, and the hotels and the stands are full, TV is standing by and even the pro football Colts are taking an inside page in the local papers this week.

Clay courts is a refinement of the game in which the surface favors the player whose game is modeled after a barn door. Which is to say that he can return every shot at the same angle and velocity in which he received it. It is a form of play requiring enormous patience, somewhat like a dog fetching a stick or a bird hour after hour.

It can wear out the tempestuous player. It is a tournament that has been won by the likes of Tut Bartzen, Chuck McKinley and Manuel Orantes. It has been lost by some of the big hitters, although Bill Tilden, Pancho Gonzalez and even Connors made a point of toughing it out to win several times.

Boris believes that he can play this game, too. He grew up on clay, he said.

Besides, the German-American Davis Cup competition is scheduled for clay courts next month. Germany has never won the Davis Cup.

If Becker wins both of these feats of clay for Germany, he may have to relent--to the extent of at least answering to a single Boom if someone hails him by it.