Boris Becker : German Teen-Ager Proves He’s a Champion Off the Court, Too

Boris Becker will turn 20 on Nov. 22. If he returns to play in next February’s Pilot Pen tennis tournament here, he will still have nine months to wait until he can legally buy a beer in California.

But not to worry. Becker’s cup runneth over in every other way.

This prodigy from the small West German town of Leimen is a ready-made episode for “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” He is a tennis Midas. Everything his racket touches turns to gold. Consider:

--He is ranked third in the world, down a notch from where he finished last year, but nicely positioned for a run at top-ranked Ivan Lendl as the year and the tournaments get more serious.

--He has won the last two Wimbledon titles, something more desirable to players than any ranking. In fact, his record in three years at Wimbledon is 16-1.

He suffered his only Wimbledon loss in 1984, when he injured his knee in the fourth set against Bill Scanlon and had to be carried off on a stretcher.

--In 1986, he won $1,434,324, thanks to records of 69-13 in singles and 36-13 in doubles. That breaks down to $13,660 every time he won a match, or $10,949 every time he played.

--His total winnings at the end of 1986 were $2,099,950. Unless his right arm falls off or something equally tragic happens, he conceivably could have won $4 million by the time he reaches his 21st birthday. That will buy lots of beers, in California or anywhere else.

--He is surrounded by skilled, competent advisers and coaches. He is managed by Ion Tiriac, the former Romanian player whose gruff exterior and frequent bark keep much of the outside world from getting a bite of Becker. He is trained and conditioned by Frank Dick, a Scotsman who also coaches Daley Thompson of England, the Olympic decathlon champion.

A coaching replacement for Gunther Bosch, who had a falling out with Becker recently, is being sought. Reportedly, only former world-class players will be considered.

--He is 6 feet 2 inches and 175 pounds, has strawberry-blond hair and penetrating blue eyes. Not surprisingly, he is idolized and pursued by young women, a situation that he runs from at a snail’s pace.

Other tennis players get sore elbows. Becker gets groupies. As he told Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show” last week, when asked about the girlfriend he had brought with him: “You are a man, I am a man, and I guess we like the same things.”

Carson had the good sense not to raise the question of alimony. While spoil things for somebody so young?

Why even talk of spoiling things? It would seem that nothing could spoil the charmed world of Boris Becker, a world that is almost too good to be true. His seems a storybook existence. Were he to help little old ladies across the street between matches, nobody would be surprised.

Others have talent. Others have money. Others are surrounded by able helpers and advisers. Others have good looks. The surprising thing about Becker, though, is that he has taken all this in stride. Indeed, in a world of professional tennis filled with pouting adults and thumb-sucking millionaires, the real measure of Becker is how well he is handling all this.

Maybe, as John McEnroe has suggested, he is just too young to know any better. Then again, maybe he does know better. Much better.

It is Sunday afternoon in the desert.

The Pilot Pen tournament will start Monday, so Sunday is kind of a free day, a day for the tennis types to kick back and enjoy the warm sun in the opulence of the new Grand Champions hotel. This is not a place for people of ordinary tastes or tax brackets. This is one resort complex where you don’t dare leave home without it, and it would help if it’s a gold one.

It is a day to watch the final of a grand masters tournament, grand masters being a gentle euphemism for competition between players whose reputations and first serves have both been eaten away by time.

And it is a day to ogle Boris. In Germany, they mob him. In Palm Springs, they scrutinize him through designer sunglasses.

What is this rich young man like? Will he clench his fists and loudly proclaim his great shots like some excitable and unkempt soccer player? Will he dive all over the clean new courts and skin his knees?

The occasion is one of those clinics for charity that, all too often, turn out to be more self-serving and promotional than money-raising. This one, for UNICEF, the United Nations children’s fund, is sponsored by Puma, and, because of Becker, is different.

There are 22 youngsters whose names have been drawn by lot. They get to hit with Becker in pairs. It is more than just token rallying.

While Tiriac prowls about--other people walk, Tiriac prowls--Becker hits hard to the youngsters who can hit hard back, and soft to those who can’t. He talks to them, urges them to chase shots. And, perhaps surprising for someone whose body is worth millions, he chases helter-skelter and lunges after many of their badly misplaced shots.

At one point during the fun, Becker hits a high lob to a 12-year-old girl, then follows it by hurdling the net and sprinting directly into her hitting path before the startled girl, spotting him at the last second, eases off a bit on her slam shot.

Comedian Alan King, sharing the microphone with the prowling Tiriac, gasps at Becker’s maneuver and says, “You’re my No. 1 seed, so quit with the jokes already.”

King is wrong on two counts. Stefan Edberg, No. 2 in the world, is the tournament’s top-seeded player, a notch above Becker. And Becker is having too much fun to quit with the jokes already.

Becker stays on the court for 1 hour 50 minutes. He shakes each child’s hand when the rallying is done. He demonstrates forehands, backhands and serves while hitting against Slobodan Zijovinovic of Yugoslavia, another ward of Tiriac whose nickname is Bobo and who fittingly plays the role of the clown in the clinic.

“Usually, I hit with Boris and play the one who misses,” growls Tiriac to the crowd. “But it is so much easier with Bobo.”

The crowd, estimated at 3,000, loves it. They have paid $15 a head to see this, and they aren’t being disappointed. No rock star-like token appearance from the man who is the subject of “Borismania” in his home country. At the end, even some of the designer sunglasses are coming off. This young man needs to be seen up close.

This is Becker’s third such clinic. He does them free and is scheduled to do at least two more in other parts of the world. In Hamburg, 14,000 people turned out in a 10,000-seat stadium. Tiriac even makes sure that he and Boris and Bobo contribute in another way to the cause. Before the session starts, he hands an aide a $100 bill and growls, “Three tickets. Go buy.”

Near the end, well past the time when most of his fellow tour stars would have been out of patience and politeness, Becker is still chasing down errant shots by one last little girl. She can barely get the ball over the net, and she is obviously petrified just being here. So Becker stops, gestures for her to come to the net, bends over eyeball to eyeball with her, and gives the bill of her cap a gentle tweak. She smiles widely, then hits her next two shots over the net.

Interviews with Becker come hard. But that has nothing to do with his unwillingness to talk, or to deal with the press. Tiriac doesn’t lock him up, but he does shield him. Last year, Becker told a Times reporter that he liked to talk and that he would talk as long as he could “until they come to get me.”

This time, access was granted after the Sunday clinic. “Five minutes,” Tiriac said. But that was long enough to see that what Becker appears to be from afar is even better up close.

“I liked the clinic today,” he said. “There are some special things in life you must do, and helping children is one of them. I started trying to do this kind of thing when I was 15 years old, and now that I am in even a bigger and better position, I want to keep doing it.”

Does he feel he needs to help the general image of tennis players?

“I think doing something like this shows people that many of us that can do things on the court also have the brains to do some things off the court,” he said. “There are certain expectations if you are famous. You need to do things like this.”

OK, where did the expectations fit in recently when you lost your poise and had a well-publicized blowup that included cursing an official and hitting balls into the stands in the recent Australian Open?

“I had a very bad day,” he said. “Not just bad, very bad. You know how everything goes wrong the whole day. You have it in your office. So do other people. It was just very, very bad and I don’t like to think back on it.

“I just hope that one thing like that doesn’t have people wondering about me. I would like it if people would judge me in what I do over the next months and this year, rather than just that one thing.”

You are gathering such a following in this country. What’s it like in Germany? What’s it like to go home?

“No American can believe it,” he said. “It is beyond anything you might imagine. I cannot go anywhere or do anything without people being around me all the time.

“There are TV cameras everywhere, always looking. It is nice that people like me, but there is just no privacy ever. I stay in my hotel room mostly. There it is quiet.

“In America, there are so many stars, another one doesn’t matter. It is so different in Germany. The only thing here that is close to being like Germany, with people all around me all the time and everybody screaming for me, is New York City for the U.S. Open.”

Klaus-Peter Witt is a reporter for Bild-Zeitung, a Hamburg sports newspaper with a European circulation of 6 million. For years, Witt and the staff of Bild concentrated mainly on soccer.

That was before Boris Becker.

“When Boris won his first Wimbledon, I worked two weeks just like a dog,” said Witt, here to cover Becker in the tournament.

“I couldn’t write enough. When he made the quarterfinals, I wrote about a full page worth. In the semis, two pages, and then three or four pages for the finals.

“We went on from there to Monte Carlo, where he went to rest. And I didn’t see our paper right away. But when I did, and there was this huge front page picture of Boris, I was absolutely knocked down. Then it hit me how big he was.”

Witt calls Becker a “national phenomenon” and takes it even a step further.

“He has become the son of a whole nation,” Witt said, pausing to let the implications of such a statement sink in.

“It is not just the young people, but the old people, too. They took a poll of his recognition factor in West Germany, and it was 98%. That was better than the chancellor. He is more popular now than Max Schmeling or our soccer star, Franz Beckenbauer.

“It is just crazy what he has done for our nation. It is a strange feeling. After the war, we have had national heroes, but never an international hero that everybody recognizes.”

Witt said that shortly after Becker’s first Wimbledon title, the West German tennis federation had an increase of 200,000 juniors signing up almost overnight. He said that Becker became an instant marketing tool, a sudden bonanza for product recognition.

“The closest place you can have for advertising is next to Boris Becker,” he said.

The German division of the Ford Motor Co., came up with a four-match Ford Challenge Cup with each match featuring Becker, of course. All four matches were sold out, attracting 12,600 people to the indoor stadium in Dortmund, a record crowd for such an event in West Germany.

“People were waiting in line for days, sleeping in the cold in sleeping bags, to get tickets,” Witt said. “And Dortmund is the city that has the highest rate of unemployment in West Germany, 17%.”

Witt said he has followed Becker since Becker was 15. He said he likes Becker, that they have a very professional relationship, and that Becker has never criticized him or even spoken to him about anything he has written.

“Mostly, I think he is a soft, polite guy,” Witt said.

Witt also said he thought Becker’s outburst at the Australian Open was unfortunate. “He behaved like a Bavarian,” Witt said.

Witt also knows that that kind of criticism--any kind of criticism for that matter--does not sit well back home.

“After he won at Wimbledon the first time, somebody took a picture of him sitting with a girl in a swimming suit at a pool,” Witt said. “It ran in other papers first, then we ran it. We almost had to, because it had been in the other papers.

“Well, the day it ran, I was in the office as the news chief and the phone just rang and rang. Lots of calls were from elderly women, saying that they didn’t believe Boris would sit there like that with a girl in a swimming suit. It was a picture, but people still wouldn’t believe it was real.”

Even the recent heavily publicized split with Bosch, his longtime coach, a former star tennis player himself and a very popular figure in West Germany, did little to tarnish Becker’s image.

“At first, when they took a poll, 50% were for Boris and 50% for Bosch,” Witt said. “But after a while, it went back toward Boris.

“Bosch is a good man. It was a bitter split, because he had taken Boris from boyhood to manhood. But it was time. Boris didn’t need to be helped with everything. He didn’t need to go to breakfast each day with Bosch. He has a girlfriend and he wants to go with her. He is growing up now. He is no longer a boy.”

It is almost impossible to find somebody who dislikes Boris Becker. Oh, perhaps Lendl, who, at times, appears as if he wouldn’t like Will Rogers, even had he met him. But then, who knows about the mysterious Lendl? Who knows what sort of behavior patterns he forces upon himself as a discipline for staying No. 1?

Tim Wilkison, the veteran left-hander who occasionally plays doubles with Becker and who befriended the youngster long before he was a superstar and Wimbledon champion, said the Becker-Lendl scene is often kind of funny.

“I think Lendl is mostly ambivalent about Boris,” Wilkison said. “I think he’d like to kind of keep him at arm’s length, at a distance he can be more comfortable with for somebody who is a challenger to his No. 1 status.

“But Boris doesn’t care about that. You’ve gotta remember, in so many ways, he’s still just a kid. He’ll go into the locker room, see Lendl and walk right up to him and start talking. He’ll ask him about his golf game, or about a big first serve he hit against somebody earlier in the tournament. It’s fun to watch, because Lendl really doesn’t quite know what to make of it.”

Wilkison, who beat Becker in a tournament in Atlanta last year, but who lost to him here Wednesday, 7-5, 6-4, said that many things apart from his tennis skills impress him about Becker.

“My wife and I were commenting on this recently, while we were watching him doing an interview on TV,” Wilkison said. “First, we watched McEnroe mumble through some answers--and what’s he, 27?--and then Boris handles his interview beautifully. Smooth, interesting, has something to say. And he’s doing it all in a foreign language. We forget that.”

It is dark and getting cold in the desert. It is Tuesday night of tournament week, and Becker is about to make his first competitive appearance. He will play doubles with Eric Jelen, his West German Davis Cup teammate, and the match will be moved from its scheduled stadium court to the smaller clubhouse court because Mikael Pernfors and Ulf Stenlund are engaged in a base-line duel in the stadium that may last until Friday.

When it is announced that Becker is about to play, hundreds pour out of the stadium and head for the clubhouse court.

Becker doesn’t disappoint them. He and Jelen beat Vinnie Van Patten and Todd Witsken, 6-3, 6-4. And a good time seems to be had by all, including the outgoing Van Patten, who says afterward: “I really respect Becker as a player and a person. He’s a young guy who just has it all together.”

Van Patten knows how to play to a crowd, and so does Becker. At one point, Becker chases a wide shot at full speed, can’t quite reach it, but continues on into the crowd and takes a seat, where he remains, racket in hand, big grin on his face, for a good half a minute while the delighted crowd laughs.

It is probably no coincidence--nor is it lost on the crowd--that Becker has just happened to find an empty seat right next to a pretty blonde.

Charlie Pasarell is the tournament director. He also is the businessman who had the idea of putting a plush hotel here, the hustler who traveled the world to find financing for his project, the dreamer who thought it would be a grand scheme to put a 10,500-seat tennis stadium in the middle of a desert.

But more than anything else, Pasarell is a tennis booster. He is from Puerto Rico, he played at UCLA and went on to a fine pro career himself, once rising to No. 1 in the United States.

And so, when he says he has never seen anything like Boris Becker, it means something.

“Boris is a tremendous person,” Pasarell said. “At the age of 19, to have his presence and personality is almost beyond belief. He just charms everybody.”

But it was more than simple charm that prompted Pasarell to seek Becker out and sign him as a spokesman and ambassador for the new Grand Champions Hotel.

“Shortly after he won his first Wimbledon, I was reading an interview with him in Time magazine,” Pasarell said. “In it, he talked about coming back to West Germany after Wimbledon and, maybe six months later, being out on the courts, just practicing, and looking up and seeing people watching him. And seeing the looks they had in their eyes, a kind of a blind worship.

“And then he said, and I’ll never forget this, that it struck him at that moment how what had happened with Hitler 40 years ago, and people following him, could have happened in Germany.

“It ended with him saying that he wanted people to like him and to be proud of him. But he didn’t want them to do so blindly.”

Boris Becker is walking around the tennis complex. He is with two friends, and he is aware of the heads turning and the excitement being created by his presence.

Yet, he doesn’t hurry. He’s not asking for more adulation, but he’s not turning down what is there, either.

A tall, heavy man with a thick beard asks him to pose for a picture with one of the man’s friends. Becker smiles and does so. Then the man wants more. Another picture. Another angle. How about you taking a picture of me, Boris?

Becker smiles, shakes his head as if to say enough is enough, and moves away in such a smooth, steady way that the man he leaves behind gets the message without being offended. At 19, he has already learned to use body language, a skill that many otherwise successful businessmen try unsuccessfully for years to master.

Others try to get his attention, to stop him for an autograph. He declines in a friendly style, giving the impression that, had he not had someplace to go he would have gladly stopped.

Off to the side, in the direction Becker is moving but well off his direct path, stands a little boy, perhaps 6 or 7. He has a pen and a program in his hand.

Becker sees him, alters his course, slips past half a dozen adult females gushing in his direction, takes the pen from the boy and signs the program.

Five seconds later, he is gone. Left in his wake are scores of adults and teen-agers, all abuzz over having just seen Boris Becker up close. And one little boy, 6 or 7, mouth agape.