We should have won in two days, but Andreas Maurer and I lost the doubles 7-5 in the fifth set, and in the live fifth match I beat Aaron Krickstein 6-2, 6-2, 6-1. That made the last German who knew nothing about tennis realise that, for some reason, this Becker guy was the most popular person in the whole country.

The momentum continued in Frankfurt for the semi-final in October against Czechoslovakia. There was a marathon match between Michael Westphal and Tomas Smid on the first day, remembered by many for the carpet surface peeling away from the stone floor after Westphal came to the net for a volley. But once he had won that match, 15-13 in the fifth, we were away, and we won 5-0.

That gave us a home final the week before Christmas, which they staged in the Olympiahalle, the massive indoor arena built for the 1972 Munich Olympics. It had never been used for tennis before, and it was even bigger than Hamburg, with nearly 15,000 spectators, and sold out. The remarkable thing was that it clashed with the middle of the football season, but it still sold out – the whole country was watching. The biggest television sport show at the time was Das Aktuelle Sportstudio, a live Saturday night review of the day’s sport with highlights and studio chat, and after every match we were interviewed in their live studio. It was the first time a tennis event had been televised in such a major fashion. We lost the final to the mighty Swedes because Maurer and I were outclassed in the doubles by Nyström and Wilander, but that weekend put tennis properly on the map in Germany and indirectly was a massive investment for me in my future playing career.

But that brought pressures. By the end of the year I’d established myself as a top five player, yet everybody expected me to shoot to No. 1 overnight, at least that’s how it felt to me (and I had certain expectations as well). I felt I was good, but something was missing. It was only later that I realised what it was: I needed to win Wimbledon a second time, just to show the world that the first was no fluke.

Once again, the key to winning Wimbledon came in a moment of crisis. I didn’t question whether I would make it as a professional as I’d already done that, nor was I ready to quit the way I was in South Africa in November 1984. But I did tell my coach and manager to stop coaching me. And that was just two weeks before Wimbledon began.

The first couple of months of 1986 were OK, but then I had a stretch in which I always seemed to lose in the quarter-finals. There were four or five tournaments, including the French Open and the clay court tournaments. I even lost in the quarters in Queen’s and failed to defend my first title. I lost to Tim Mayotte, and that was when I hit crisis point. It’s hard to define what it was exactly – I wasn’t on the verge of burnout, but I felt I was working in ways I didn’t believe in and in directions I didn’t believe in. I was listening a lot to Ţiriac and Bosch, but with all the quarter-final defeats I wondered if I was maybe listening to them too much.

After I lost to Mayotte at Queen’s, I said ‘Listen guys, let’s sit down. I’ve got to change. I’m not going to win Wimbledon like this. I’ve listened to you, I’ve been an animal in practice, I’ve done more than you’ve asked me, but something’s not clicking any more. I need to rediscover my instinct, my natural aggressiveness, my sense of going for my shots under pressure.’ So I asked them to say nothing to me about tennis over the next two weeks. I said they could drive me to the courts, they could pick up the balls in practice, but I didn’t want any input about tennis. I said if I was wrong, then so be it, they could then say they were right, but I wanted the opportunity to do what I believed was right.

So you have an 18-year-old telling his coach not to coach him, and his manager, a former top player and proven coach, not to give any tennis input either! That put me under pressure in my practice week. I felt good about what I’d said; in fact I felt I should probably have said it two months earlier, but the moment just hadn’t been right. I felt released, in control again, I was making decisions about how I wanted to practise and play, and so forth. I had a heightened awareness. Obviously everyone thought I was mad – after all, nobody had ever won Wimbledon at that age before me, let alone defended it.

As I walked out on to Centre Court at 2pm on the first Monday as the defending champion, it felt good to be back. But I actually felt ready to close the chapter of being the 17-year-old Wimbledon champion. ‘This is now it,’ I thought. ‘Enough waiting, enough of whether I could do it or not – let’s play!’ And in retrospect it was probably my best Wimbledon ever. The type of tennis I played, the way I focused, the way I played with sheer aggression and single-mindedness to win – that was probably me at my very best.

The draw wasn’t that easy but it started with Eduardo Bengoechea, which was OK because like many Argentineans he wasn’t great on grass, and I went through him in straight sets. Tom Gullikson was harder but I beat him in straight too, and then I had a tough match in the third round against Paul McNamee in which I dropped my first set. That set me up to play Mikael Pernfors in the round of the last 16 on No. 2 Court. Pernfors had beaten me in the quarters at the French in what was his breakthrough tournament – he had gone on to reach the final of the French and was the new rising star. It was after I beat him in straight sets that Ţiriac and Bosch finally asked to say something to me. They said ‘Keep on going – we’ve got the message. Do what you do; this is amazing. Just keep it up.’ That was very soothing, it gave me a good sense that they understood what I had to go through. I felt my team was back: my team believed in my leadership again.

So I was back in the quarter-finals, and people finally began to take seriously the idea that I might defend my title. There were a few differences to the previous year, like the fact that I’d changed hotels. Despite the superstition of wanting to stay in the same hotel in which I’d won the title, the Gloucester was too busy. It was the players’ hotel and I wanted some privacy. I liked the neighbourhood but wanted a smaller hotel nearby, so we stayed in the Londonderry (now the Metropolitan). But we still had dinner at San Lorenzo’s, I still had my same meal every night of T-bone steak with pasta, and I was still under the radar.

My quarter-final opponent was someone I genuinely feared. Miloslav Mecir was a tough adversary for me, because he had a good backhand and he returned very well. But I was in my favourite second-match-on-Centre slot, and I defeated him by the near-identical score with which I’d beaten Pernfors in the last round. I was incredibly determined.