After a big tournament like Wimbledon, you go home. But where was home now? Where did I live? I’d moved to Monaco at 16 in a flat set up by Ion Ţiriac, but my parents still lived in Leimen.
My first destination after winning Wimbledon was Monte Carlo. When I asked Ţiriac about this, he said, ‘I have to educate you now. Your life will never be the same…’
So for one week we stayed at the Old Beach Hotel in Monte Carlo. My apartment was very small, and Ţiriac wanted to be with me and explain what had just happened. And in that week it hit me.
One of my favourite albums ever was The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Hill wrote it in the late 1990s, and it refers back to problems in her group The Fugees and with her pregnancy. Looking back, what Ţiriac did in the couple of weeks after I won Wimbledon in 1985 could be termed ‘The Re-education of Boris Becker’.
He explained in great detail what it would mean. The clothes I should wear – which shoes, which belt, shirts: blue, black, grey. He really gave me the whole lowdown. If you go to the Hôtel de Paris, you can’t go in jeans and sneakers. If you go to a function you need to put on a tie, so he taught me how to tie a tie. Not that my father hadn’t taught me, but I was a teenager, I didn’t need to know how to tie a tie – my four-year-old who’s growing up in England knows how to tie a tie because it’s part of his school uniform.
Ţiriac drummed into me that there are a lot of dangers in being young, rich and famous. Girls will come, they’ll tell you anything, be careful when you go to night clubs, what they put in your drinks. I said I didn’t drink – he said it doesn’t matter; they can put things in your water. Be careful with any girl you speak to, just open your eyes. You have great parents, they’ve brought you up to be smart and self-reliant, but now it’s different. People know that you’ve made a lot of money, and you’ll make a lot more money – you’re 17, you’re the golden ticket for so many. And he repeated that sentence every day until it was embedded in my consciousness. You laugh at first, you don’t take it seriously, but then you go out with him, and you realise what he’s trying to say. You see a girl who a month ago couldn’t be bothered to turn round, and now she’s asking you to go out with her. So by my own experience I realised how people had changed towards me. I’d been living in Monte Carlo before Wimbledon, so it wasn’t the first time I’d been to Jimmy’s Bar, but it was the first time everyone at Jimmy’s Bar wanted to come to my table.
It was only after a week of this ‘re-education’ that I was able to spend some time at home with my family. And thankfully I found two people who hadn’t changed: my mother and sister. They have never changed. My father was rather taken by the whole phenomenon, he was very proud of his boy; we had to calm him down sometimes, stop him from parading me too much and arranging too many interviews. My mother and sister were always cool – in fact my foundation right up to today has been the most loving and normal mother and sister. Through thick and thin they have been totally down-to-earth. They were happy and they celebrated my successes with me, but to them I’m still young Boris, and I’m so grateful for that.
The 11½ months between the two Wimbledons felt quite rough, but looking back they weren’t that bad. I wasn’t winning every tournament, which was to be expected, but everyone had a field day, saying my Wimbledon success was a flash in the pan – that I was famous for 15 minutes, never going to win another Grand Slam, should have lost to Nyström, should have lost to Mayotte, etc. Who was I to prove them wrong? I did win Cincinnati that summer; I also lost early in the US Open. I played OK and reached the final of the Masters in New York, where I lost to Ivan Lendl. All of which isn’t bad for a 17-year-old – it would be considered a fantastic achievement today – but people were sort of expecting the summer of 1985 to repeat itself every month, and that was never going to happen.
There’s another aspect that I think people find hard to understand, maybe it even seems ungrateful on my part: I think I’d have been a better player if I hadn’t won Wimbledon at 17. I think it put me in a golden ball of repeating that performance over and over again, and it didn’t give me the freedom or time to explore new things in tennis. I explored a bit later, but I think the Wimbledon win in 1985 stopped my development for two years. I wanted to win another Grand Slam and to play like that because I’d won like that, instead of working on my backcourt game, getting better on the backhand, improving my footwork, and just trying more things out. I was trapped by my own success. It’s difficult to say whether I’d have won more majors if my breakthrough had come later, but I know I relied too long just on my serve, and you can’t do that. It was too risky, but I was too methodical – it was serve and power, instead of a lesser serve, crafting the point, and working on the volley a bit more. I felt I missed out on a couple of years of exploration.
The main focus for the rest of 1985 was on team tennis, because West Germany had four home Davis Cup ties that year and reached the final. The enormity of what my Wimbledon title meant at home hit me when I flew to Hamburg for our Davis Cup quarter-final against the USA, four weeks after Wimbledon. When we beat Spain in the small southern town of Sindelfingen in April, we’d felt the buzz with three or four thousand spectators, but the stadium wasn’t completely full. For the quarter-final, Hamburg’s Rothenbaum stadium was packed with 12,000 people on all three days, and the buzz was just amazing. It was the first time Germany realised through its own experience that there was an international German sports star in tennis. We’d never had such amazing publicity: the weather was rainy, as usual for Hamburg, but the crowds still came out. It wasn’t the football season, so all the focus was on tennis, and the tie went to a live fifth match.