".....51-year-old bankrupt German tennis champion Boris Becker will be auctioning 82 items including his trophies, replicas, and medals, cups, watches, etc online to partially clear his debts. He stopped the sale of his prized collection in July last year. The former world number one claimed that he had been appointed by the President of the Central African Republic as a sporting, cultural and humanitarian ‘attache’ to the European Union. The Central African Ministry of Foreign Affairs, however, responded by declaring that his passport was a fake one. The auction is, however, not expected to be enough to clear the debt of millions of pounds that he owes to the Spanish courts for the work carried out in his villa in Mallorca...."
Flashback:
Swede Bjorn Borg's dream run of five Wimbledon titles from '76 to '80 was halted by a brash brat called John McEnroe in '81. He then ruled the center court for the first half of the '80s with Jimmy Connors for his main challenger. Ironically the number one for a long time was the Czech Ivan Lendl who won everything but the grass court title (and in dismay remarked that 'grass is for cows'). So when I sat down to savor yet another Wimbledon final on television one fine evening in 1985, I was expecting to see two of them or a Mats Wilander on screen.
But the strange sight that greeted my eyes was of 8th seed South African Kevin Curran battling an unseeded 17-year-old West German boy called Boris Becker. History was made as Becker won, becoming the only unseeded player to win the title. He is still the youngest to lift the cup (the junior champion that year was older than him). Proving that it is no fluke, Becker won the next year too, and after losing in the final to Stefan Edberg in '88, won again in '89. He went on to finish his career with 3 Wimbledon, 3 French Open, 2 Australian Open, and 1 US Open titles. He was twice part of the Davis Cup winning teams, apart from winning assorted major tournaments, both singles and doubles.
In recent years he was the coach of Serbian Novak Djokovic, one of the greatest tennis players of the twenty-first century, the others being Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.
Becker's is the sage of a star going from having a career earnings of over $25 million (Rs 1.73 billion) to being bankrupt. Bad financial planning, hefty divorce settlement, discreet love life, etc were his undoing. There are lessons in his life story for every sports aspirant.
(2019)
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