Looking back, I hope I helped the German people to reach an understanding of how having a different skin colour is not as big an obstacle as they thought. In the early 1990s, as now, there were many women in Germany with differing skin colours, but they weren’t called German, they were given names like ‘mixed race’, ‘black’ and so forth. So maybe that was an eye-opener to some people in Germany: that you can have some genuine Germans who don’t fit the look that most Germans expect a typical German to have. And I hope I helped them towards that understanding. Things have changed a little, especially with the number of players of Turkish origin in the German national football team, but even now there are still many people who have difficulty accepting that you can be German and not have white skin.
Perhaps not surprisingly, mixed-race Germans became my biggest supporters, and that’s the case to this day. Although Barbara and I have now been divorced for longer than we were married, I still have my mixed-race boys, and I live my whole life with people of different ethnic backgrounds, and mixed-race people respond positively to that. If you like, it’s a political view without trying to be political, which makes it more credible because I’m actually living it.
Partly because of my relationship with Barbara and partly because of other statements and comments I’d made, I started to become less a sportsman and more of a personality who is famous for tennis, but who also has opinions about the world of politics and social issues. I had always read about the world and taken an interest in it, but I felt I was never asked about my opinions in the locker room, or by the media. I wanted to make Germany look at itself: the natural German approach is to follow orders, and I felt people should think more. There was some rebelliousness in there, but also a principle.
As I’ve said, there was a lot going on in 1991 – I was concerned about the Iraq-Kuwait war at the start of the year, we had the attempted coup against the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the summer, and it was the first year after the reunification of Germany. I felt I could say things because I’d been to Africa, to Australia, to America, and most Germans hadn’t. And since I’m supposed to be a German role model I might as well talk about what I’d seen with my German eyes. I felt I could legitimately talk about such things, it wasn’t as boring as forehands or backhands, and I think the resonance was good. Looking back, it probably put me on a higher platform; I wasn’t just considered a good tennis player but probably the most international German in those days. It didn’t mean I knew everything about politics, of course, but I had an opinion to which I was entitled, and I talked about it. That pleased me, and it gave me a new zest for life, a new comfort zone, and it helped to prolong my tennis career.
It would be wrong to think I just had opinions that came from nowhere. I was doing a lot of reading at that time. I was into Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, and other books that amounted to heavy intellectual stuff for somebody ‘just’ playing tennis. I felt there was a void – that there was something I wanted to know and needed to learn; I wanted to understand other high-profile people’s lives, what they went through, maybe in the hope that I could pick up something. I became crazy about biographies – from Michael Jordan to Marlon Brando. I loved the one about Brando, I felt very close to his life and what he went through. I was also fond of the biography of Muhammad Ali, The Fight by Norman Mailer, which became my ritual reading before matches – I read it all the time because it gave me so much to think about. I read them all – you name one, I’ve probably read it. That was my theme. They filled the void; they gave me something no-one could tell me. We’re talking about the days before the internet, and in those days more people read books. I became a thinking tennis player, almost an intellectual tennis player. I said we could talk about tennis, but let’s also talk about the communist party, or about the Cold War, or about racism – I was more interested in talking and learning about those subjects rather than my tennis-playing form. I felt good about that, I felt satisfied.
I also felt I had a bit of catching up to do with the press. I knew that in some of my press conferences in the period up to Wimbledon 1991 I was probably giving the wrong impression due to the state I was in. I didn’t like that and at times I wanted to explain why I seemed a difficult character – why I didn’t speak much or why I seemed reclusive. I was reclusive because I needed to find a bit of strength – and I accepted that the press had to write about that, but I wanted to give an explanation about why I was like that, and that the real Boris Becker was much more interested in world affairs than just about tennis.
If you look at my results over the three years from Wimbledon 1991, you could view my career as being in a bit of a lull. I think of the lull as being only about 18 months. I believe that all top-level athletes have one lean or ‘dog year’ in every seven – so if you count back to my first Wimbledon, I could be forgiven for having a ‘dog year’ from the second half of 1991. But there were plenty of highlights in the lull.
Having reached six finals in seven years at Wimbledon, most people saw my defeat in the 1992 quarter-finals as a disappointment. Yes, it was disappointing, but I lost to Andre Agassi in five sets and most guys would love to be in the Wimbledon quarter-finals just once, so I didn’t disrespect myself. Agassi, meanwhile, seemed to be charmed at Wimbledon that year – he went on to win the title, beating Goran Ivanišević in the final. I’d also won two five-setters that year, one against Martin Damm in the second round when I didn’t play well, the other against Wayne Ferreira. Wayne and I were locked at two-sets-all on Monday night, and I won the fifth set on Tuesday before playing Agassi on Wednesday. My ability to win interrupted matches at Wimbledon was still alive and well.
One of the biggest highlights of my career came in the middle of 1992 at the Barcelona Olympics, but it was a strange one. I went to the Olympics as a member of the German team. I stayed in the Olympic village in the German apartment. I lost early in singles, but I was still in the doubles, and my doubles partner had also lost early in the singles, so we could both focus on the doubles. The only problem was that we couldn’t stand each other. My partner was, of course, Michael Stich.
I’ve talked already about my relationship with Michael – about how we didn’t hate each other and that we were simply not friends. But the rivalry both as top-level tennis players and as German sportsmen meant there were times when relations between us were really not good, and one such time was in Barcelona. We were ranked pretty much the same, both in the top five, he’d beaten me in the Wimbledon final in 1991, and we weren’t speaking to each other. I was partly at fault, because I saw him as a competitor who could beat me and I didn’t want to give anything away. Up to the quarter-finals we literally would meet an hour before the match, warm up a little together in silence, and then play and win. We had a walkover in the first round so we didn’t have to talk to each other, and then we beat the Greeks, Tasos Bavelas and Constantinos Efremoglou, which we could also do without speaking.
That set up a quarter-final against Sergio Casal and Emilio Sanchez. They were one of the best pairs of their era, they were in form having won a clay court tournament in Austria the week before, and they were both Catalans so they were red-hot home favourites. It was then that Niki Pilić, who was the German men’s tennis captain at the Olympics, got Michael and me round a table and said, ‘Guys, for you to beat Casal and Sanchez, you have to speak, you have to communicate – otherwise you’re going to lose.’ So we started talking, we developed some sort of chemistry, and we ended up winning in five sets. We even hugged each other at the end. After months of not talking to each other, a great friendship suddenly blossomed – or at least a friendship for the weekend. We had another five-setter in the semis against Frana and Christian Miniussi of Argentina, but we came through it. We beat the South Africans Ferreira and Piet Norval in the final in four sets. In those few days we spoke at lunch, we acted like we were normal, and we ended up winning the gold medal!