Advantage Becker
A red-haired slightly wide-eyed German boy steps onto centre court at Wimbledon after a blistering two weeks. He walks with a gait all uncoordinated, like a PlayStation teenager told to go out and play in the sunshine. He’s the nerd cast in movies made for kids and dresses like the exchange student in the same film.
He takes his place on the baseline, bounces the ball, and flexes his shoulder, winding it up as if to serve. He bounces the ball again then rests it against his racket. In a one-two-three move he shifts forward then arches back before coming forward again to serve the ball. BOOM! Another BOOM a few seconds later–the smash that wins the point.
That was Boris Becker starting his first Wimbledon final back in 1985. Three hours and 18 minutes later, his arms and legs spread-eagled into a standing star shape with his head tipped back, he would become the Championship’s youngest ever winner. For his next trick he’d win it again the following year.
He blitzed past his opponent Kevin Curran that day, a 17-year-old showing sheer balls not only to stare Curran down after each point but even to clash shoulders as they passed to change ends. Golden hair, golden ego, golden balls; Becker would make centre court his front room and would be adopted by English crowds desperate for someone to call their own.
This match marked tennis’s handover to a new generation. McEnroe, Connors and Bjorg were out, replaced by Edberg, Chang, Agassi and ultimately Sampras. Becker won six Grand Slams, $25million and grabbed the game by the rackets, dragging the paying public along with each diving volley and one-handed backhand. They wanted their hero and they got one. Incredible, for he was German and had ginger hair. But if you didn’t like it there was always the iron Ivan Lendl.
So 23 years on from that day at Wimbledon, the day he became the youngest winner at 17, poker is now Boris Becker’s future, from a game where he controlled the outcome to one that, well, needs a touch of luck.
“Let me tell you I did not control tennis completely. Far from the truth! I remember most of the matches I lost not the ones I won. But funny enough there are lots of similarities between poker and tennis, in terms of the mental attitude. You need a similar kind of discipline, concentration and endurance to play a whole tournament. Wimbledon is not won in the first round. No one will win the tournament tomorrow.
“But it’s true, I’m a much better tennis player than I am a poker player. But that’s the fun part. I don’t think anyone expects me honestly to win the tournament this week but…”
“Stranger things have happened?” I said, unable to come up with anything else.
“Yeah, exactly…” he replied, probably thinking the same.
But Poker Stars don’t need their new charge to win, just to play. This is no gambler’s fallacy in operation, just purified marketing; the high-octane kind that can shoot a corporation into orbit with the ignition of one or two drops.
The poker world is awash with, well, washed out sport stars. Through no choice of their own, old lags like Doyle Brunson and TJ Cloutier, both former athletes, opted for poker to quench a thirst for action that their bodies could no longer provide. Their minds refuse to acknowledge what their legs and lungs tell them, crying out for adrenaline; a drug to keep them young a little longer.
“Once you’ve been a competitor or a professional player in any field, that is obviously going to flow through your veins. It’s something you have or you don’t have. I don’t have to put on a mask [when I play poker] to bring that out, it really comes on naturally.
“I have moved on from my first profession and retired almost ten years ago to other areas in my professional life, so my life still goes on very well without having this rush every day that I’ve had on the tennis court. Now obviously poker is going to give me that back.”
And dealing with the pressure; will the tennis experience help deal with that?
“I hope so. I don’t think the biggest obstacle [when I play] will be whether I have the right mental attitude, whether I can cope with the pressure, because I think I can. The question is–‘am I a good enough poker player?’”
The answer to that question remains unanswered having first bust out of the Main Event early on, and then cashing sixth in one of the side events.
Wimbledon
We’re on the eve of another Wimbledon championships, where whinnying cries of “Come on Tim!” from frumpy women with a passions for queues, picnics and plimsolls, will morph into “Come on Andy!” marking the arrival of Britain’s short, damp summer, with sunshine dependent on a successful Andy Murray.
Becker’s career spanned 14 years in that sunshine, including seven Wimbledon finals, the last of which came in 1995. By then Boris was over the peak and on his way down the darker far side of the mountain, dethroned by the might of the man many tipped to take over in his mould–Pete Sampras.
It was after his quarter final defeat to Sampras in 1997 that Becker whispered to the American that he wouldn’t be back. Indeed he wasn’t in ‘98, but he returned in ‘99 for one last shot at glory. But time was sapping the strength from his legs, the power from his serve and the fine tuning that kept his spine in one piece. The curtain had to close and was drawn by Patrick Rafter in round four.
Now Germany’s most popular sporting hero is Poker Stars material. The same way that Jean-Claude Killy and OJ Simpson once sold Chevrolets together after careers spent speeding through their sporting prime, Becker is now a corporate man and he’s picked the biggest company in the business to work for.
So it wasn’t entirely his fault that tennis wasn’t exactly what he’d come to talk about, arriving in Monte Carlo to play in the European Poker Tour’s Grand Final. So time was of the essence, or at least that’s what I decided. Whilst the poker pack wanted stories of his experience of cards, his chances in the event and any World Series aspirations, I resolved to serve him a few tennis zingers to see if he could thwack them back my way with well placed cross court returns.
Did he still think about that time, those newsreel moments on centre court over 20 years ago? No not really, he said. Okay. How did he handle being 17-years-old, going from unknown boy of school age one day, to a Grand Slam champion the next? It’s not something he really thought about, he said, steering things back to poker, which he apparently played during rain breaks at Wimbledon. Terrific, I thought, a link!
But that was it. Everything else was off-limits. Verboten! The Teutonic hero had his mind on different kinds of aces, and with his sponsors not far away he was not in the mood to veer from the party line and waste valuable marketing time.
He does have less of the geek about him now. His slicked-back “Sonic” hair and skin the colour of sunburn mark him out from the suits. His eyes remain the same, slightly too far apart, big and wide, easy for looking in all directions. Like an owl or a big eyed tree frog; maybe, I thought, he can’t quite shake the need to anticipate balls coming at him from out of nowhere–the same way old soldiers look for snipers in first floor windows.
But I wasn’t giving up, not yet. I flicked through my rehearsed questions… Why it was that Britain produced one player at a time, whereas the rest of the world builds in bulk? And what is it about Wimbledon? What exactly is the difference winning there than in Australia, France, or the United States? Is that sentimental stuff just bullshit?
Questions I’d never get answered. Those replies and more would remain in his head like coal seams. As far as tennis was concerned, whilst he was on the poker dollar, that was all in the past.
I doubt that Becker’s poker debut will be anything like his first victorious tennis Grand Slam, a well meant comparison which he waved away. Boom-Boom, or Baron von Slam as he was once known, might not get equal regard at the poker table but he remains one of the most fascinating icons of sport. Broom cupboard, paternity suits and tax evasion would wait till later. But back then it was all tennis, and he made the game shine.
“The most fascinating thing for me was that I was in the tennis bubble,” he once said in an interview with The Times. “I wasn’t thinking about the big picture. I didn’t notice what they said on television, I wasn’t reading any papers. I had a coach and a manager and they kept me in the bubble.”
Maybe the same thing was going on now. The bubble is inflated again and the media, well, they can hear all about it some other time.
But on the eve of this year’s Wimbledon, where the forces of world tennis will descend on the village lawns of South West London, where school teachers hoard packs of their charges into coaches and line them up for three hours for strawberries, jackets and ties, memories of Boris remain fresh.
Will we ever see another like him? Well, Boris wasn’t saying. There’s certainly a danger he’s the last of that mould, with a new design of player performing in a world of suspected match fixing, drug abuse, and maniac coaches with busy hands. Can the pleasantries of Wimbledon last, or is tennis too riddled with high-priced shenanigans for fans to ever support the rise of one of its prodigies?
“I want to be a hero,” Becker once said, “a small and good kind of hero; even though I know heroes have short lives.”
Well, Boris just got a second life. It might not shine as brightly as the first but the thing about poker–and lights that burn less brightly, now I think of it–is that, handled correctly, they tend to last a lot longer. He may not be in the mood to talk about tennis much, but he may stick around for a while.
2 comments
If you are a Gambling.com member, please login at the top left of this page.
If you are not a Gambling.com member, please complete our sign up form—membership is free and it takes just a minute or two to sign up.
Posted by Thalia – 7 Sep 2008, 5:24 AM
I don't know whether to feel sorry for the "washed out" athletes or not. I've seen a lot of others, like celebrities, now playing in the big tournaments. The seem to be doing very well for themselves.
Posted by littlesusieq – 24 Sep 2008, 3:18 PM
Most of the athletes are not "washed out" but retired as their bodies naturally could not keep up with younger players. The term denotes their not being good enough but that is often not the case. Most of the athletes going over to gambling were incredibly talented.