HOWZAT

IN THAT fine anthology of his work, The Bases Were Loaded, the American sportswriter Tom Callahan tells a wonderful story about a working vacation to London in the summer of 1985. Every morning before heading off to report on the first week’s play at Wimbledon, Callahan breakfasted with his wife at the “Apple Something Cafe”, just around the corner from the Gloucester Hotel. And every morning, because space was tight, they invited this big German kid with peach fuzz and orange hair to share a table with them.

“Our chance meeting,” Callahan writes, “was a testament to what a rotten reporter I am. He fell in with us three or four straight days. I never asked Becker a single question about the tournament. I knew Becker as a hard server who had broken his leg in Wimbledon’s juniors the year before.

“Becker’s English was slight. His manner was warm. I was astounded and delighted that he survived the first week of the fortnight. After that, of course, when the whole world wanted to ask him things, he vanished.”

Becker was 17 years and 200 days old when he arrived in London that summer. He couldn’t drive, didn’t drink beer and his mother sent him toothpaste because she was worried about his teeth. He was a boy living his dream.

“I lost in the second round of the French Open,” he says, “and came over immediately and had ten days off. I went to the Hard Rock Cafe for lunch and had a big burger and coke. I would go through some stores and buy some music and jeans and everyday stuff. It was exciting to be away from my parents, to stay in a hotel, to have that freedom. And hotels at 17 meant freedom.

“The most fascinating thing for me was that I was in the tennis bubble. 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 (Gunther Bosch) and a manager (Ion Tiriac) and they kept me in the bubble. I was eating at the same Italian every night and playing one match at a time. It was only after I won that my life changed.”

Becker was a global superstar with two Wimbledon titles when Callahan caught up with him again in 1987: six books had already been published about him and he was conducting 250 press conferences a year.

Callahan had travelled to Rome for an interview which, like all one-to-ones with Becker, would be restricted to the lobby of his hotel. But Becker had a good memory and immediately invited the writer upstairs to his room.

The boy had grown an inch or three since their last meeting and was slowly coming to terms with fame. “It’s silly to say it about a tennis player,” he told Callahan, “but I’m an unbelievable hero in Germany. And Germany needs heroes more than any place.

“Some of it I don’t care for. The eyes of some of the fans at Davis Cup matches scare me. There’s no light in them. Fixed emotions. Blind worship. Horror. It makes me think of what happened to us long ago.

“And yet I want to be a hero, a small and good kind of hero, even though I know heroes have very short lives.”

Did he achieve his goal? Was he a good kind of hero? Well, strip away the Aryan supremacy and arrogance he strutted on court and there was no disguising a pretty decent human being. But it wasn’t easy. “All those girls: hysterical, crazy, waiting for hours for him outside hotels,” Gunther Bosch, his coach, once observed. “Is it fair to do this to a child? How can he find out what’s real and what’s a sham?” “When I was a child,” Becker says, “I had these posters of James Dean in my room. I was a big admirer of his work — well his three-and-a-half films or whatever it was — and was fascinated by him living on the edge, the edge being the line between life and death. Looking back, my life was kind of the same.