Becker still holds court with mind games

Andrew Longmore, The Australian.
June 25, 2007

THERE is a less happy Wimbledon anniversary for Boris Becker to celebrate this time. We have had the reprise of his astonishing victory in 1985 and his defence of the men's singles title the following year, and now we have to remember his first Wimbledon defeat, by an unknown Australian called Peter Doohan all of 20 years ago.
The match was not memorable, but the press conference was. Doohan had done his homework and sensed the young champion, still just 19, might be vulnerable in the early rounds. He took his chance. But in defeat Becker revealed something much greater in himself than the mere winning and losing of tennis matches.

"What did I say?" he asks, sitting in the executive suite of a smart London hotel, looking every inch the successful businessman.

"Oh yes, I remember now. 'It wasn't a war. Nobody died out there. I just lost a tennis match'."

Becker believes it is as true now as it was then, but the innocence of the remark brought a roomful of journalists to confront two further truths: the first was that a teenager from Munich had just educated his elders in the trivialities of sport; the second was that, if we did not know it before, we were in the presence of a real star, on and off the court.

Becker and the press were made for each other. Now he has hopped over the other side of the fence as not only a trenchant and acute critic of the game, but a television reporter, asking difficult and often inappropriate questions to sports stars who want only to seek the comforts of the dressing-room.

When Dirk Nowitzki missed a game-winning jump shot for the Dallas Mavericks in last year's NBA finals, Becker had to ask what happened.

"I spoke to David Beckham after the Ecuador game (England won 1-0) in the last World Cup," he recalls. "He had just been sick at the side of the pitch and it was all over his shirt, but he came over to talk. I didn't need to ask him about it because I knew he would talk.

"Same with Dirk. All he wanted to say was why he missed. I didn't need to ask him why. It helps, though, if there is respect for each other."

Becker was always a skilled post-match interviewee. He said just enough to discourage a follow-up question but not enough to mean much.

He always talked sense and is doing so again now, not so much about the technical aspects of the backhand and forehand or volley, but about gamesmanship and the psychology of matchplay, which he believes is a forgotten art.

"Sometimes you had to interrupt matches, put the other guy out of his rhythm," he says. Becker was the best shoelace tier in the game, and his shoelaces always came undone at critical moments.

"Maybe argue with the umpire, question a call," he says.

"Can you imagine what Ilie Nastase would have done against Roger Federer? Nobody does that to Federer, nobody tries to get inside his head and disrupt his rhythm."

At least, not on the green grass of Wimbledon's Centre Court.

"I was watching a match sitting next to (Ivan) Ljubicic the other day in Hamburg and a guy, I can't remember the name, was playing Rafael Nadal and, on one point, he came to the net and hit a winning volley. Ljubicic says, 'Ah, that's how you beat Nadal'. I was amazed. He'd only just worked it out."

Ion Tiriac, Becker's first mentor, taught him the psychological subtleties of the game. Tiriac, a gruff Romanian who made Brad Gilbert, Andy Murray's combative coach, seem like an amateur when it came to winning ugly, knew how to manipulate matches, how to win when playing below his best and how to draw an opponent into playing the way he wanted.

During his second Wimbledon, Becker was worked so hard by Tiriac that he recalls screaming "why do I have to serve another hundred balls?" at him in frustration.

"He wanted to know how far I was prepared to go to win. That fighting spirit always came through in my matches," Becker says.

"I always fought to the last point. Too many players, if they lose the first set now, the shoulders drop and the body language is not right. It's what I can bring to commentary at Wimbledon. I understand where the pressure points are in a match and what is going on inside a player's head, what they are doing and, more importantly, what they should be doing."

Even Federer doesn't play so smart sometimes against Nadal, staying back when he should go forward, trying to play him at his own game, a champion's trait recognisable to Becker.

"It's pride," he explains. "'I'm Roger Federer, I'm not going to change for anyone'. But he will never beat Nadal in the French Open if he plays as he did in that last final."

Becker finds the modern professional, with notable exceptions, one-dimensional, too swift to accept fate, whether it's losing the first set or taking a line call. Few players, he says, truly understand the mentality of the game, one of the reasons why Federer has dominated all players bar Nadal and on all surfaces except clay and why, back in Beverly Hills, Pete Sampras believes he could still be a contender for an eighth Wimbledon title.

"Pete would still have a good chance," Becker says. "OK, your feet get slower and your body is older, but Pete had some weapons out there and he would keep coming at you every point. Even if he was playing Federer, Pete would keep coming to the net, coming to the net, making him hurry.

"Wimbledon is about rallying now, everyone stays back, so he'd have a chance."

Becker will find Wimbledon changing 22 years on from his debut. The Centre Court is being fitted for a roof (a good thing) and Hawk-Eye is making its debut (also good). Federer, he believes, is more vulnerable in the first week this year than ever before. "He pulled out of Halle, changed his routine, that's very interesting," he says. "But if he reaches the second Monday, nobody will beat him."