Becker and Wimbledon: A True Tennis Love Affair

When Boris Becker returned to Church Road one more time to start this fortnight, rackets in hand, the sentimentalists rejoiced because he was back at Wimbledon, back where he belongs. But when he won his first three matches--starting with a back-from-the-dead, five-set thriller in the first round--Becker’s fans slid a little closer to the edge of their chairs.

Could Becker really come out of semi-retirement and win here one more time? Could he somehow put together an encore performance that could serve as a perfect bookend for his first burst onto the Wimbledon scene when he was a 17-year-old qualifier, a kid who flung himself to the grass for volleys, popped back up with skinned knees, and stormed his way to the ’85 title behind a machine-gun serve that earned him the nickname Boom Boom?

Becker, 31, plays the tour only sparingly since leaning across the net here two summers ago and letting Pete Sampras in on the secret he’d soon tell the world--Becker was announcing the ’97 final they just played would be his last match at Wimbledon. But he’s always been able to conjure up miracles here unlike anywhere else. Heading into his fourth-round match Wednesday, Becker was hoping to use his power-charged game to make Australian favorite Patrick Rafter--the No. 2 player in the world--feel like shot puts were slamming off his racket strings, not tennis balls.

Becker’s start was promising. He volleyed crisply, summoned a couple of timely aces. He sent three drop shots parachuting softly onto the grass inches out of the lunging Rafter’s reach. But after five or six games--just as the menacing gray clouds overhead began to scud away, bathing the grounds in brilliant sunshine for the first time in two days--the magic began to drain out of Becker’s game. “I left my serve at home,” Becker sighed later. And the autopsy of his second goodbye at Wimbledon--a dry-eyed, 6-3, 6-2, 6-3 loss to Rafter--really was that simple.

But only if you’re talking about the match and not Becker, the man.

As passages go at Wimbledon, Becker’s is the most lamented since Martina Navratilova retired from here five summers ago--and for many of the same reasons. Like Navratilova, Becker has always loved Wimbledon. He often rumbles in his deep German accent that he was “born” on Centre Court. Even a single question about the place can send him into an extended rhapsody about everything from the physical toll that playing on grass exacts to the beauty of the club’s hydrangea-covered grounds to the inventiveness that Wimbledon coaxes from your game.

Like Navratilova, Becker always brought a tormented but unbridled passion to his matches; the tennis both of them play is a daring, out-loud game. Losing a mere point is enough to prompt him to turn a death stare on a line judge, or throw his arms into the air in disgust, or toss his head like a spirited colt. He’s liable to scream at the skies after a double fault, or deride himself in German loud enough to startle the Royal Family members from their daydreaming about the champagne and truffles awaiting them at the palace. And Wimbledon fans loved Becker for all of it. They knew he wanted to win here more than anywhere in the world.

It mattered a lot, too, that he told them that. Again and again.

“It was a great love affair, to tell you the truth, like nowhere else in the world,” Becker said. When Becker lost the ’97 final to Sampras, he surprised everyone by announcing he wouldn’t play Wimbledon again. He even kept his promise for a year. With full retirement looming later this year, he just couldn’t stay away.

Long after he quits for good, Becker will be remembered for the way he threw his 210-pound body around these courts. And the way balls cracked off his racket like gunshots. “Now you have more guys with power games (but) I was more or less the first one with a heavy power game to break through,” Becker noted. “What really bugs me all along is losing four finals,” he groused. “That’s about four too many.”

Becker’s lofty status aside, Wednesday’s highly anticipated battle against Rafter was one of those matches you hardly see in tennis anymore: a clash between two swashbuckling serve-and-volleyers, a nearly extinct breed on the modern tour. And that’s too bad. Tennis can’t get any more entertaining than the net-charging game of Becker and Navratilova. Wednesday, Becker said he had only one regret: “That I wasn’t able to give the crowd a better match.”

It was the competitor in Becker talking. And you’d expect nothing less. When the match was over, and he and Rafter exited, it was fitting that Becker paused to drop his bag and face the standing crowd, then applaud a few seconds with them. Becker would soon disappear into the tunnel amid the happy noise. But the last pose was a nice way to remember him. Loving the place that loved him back, to the unwanted end.