SHARE
COPY LINK

INTRODUCING

Introducing…Boris Becker

Introducing…is The Local's guide to the fabulous world of German celebrity. Know all there is about tennis legend and public lothario Boris Becker? Meet the man who is as famous in Germany for his turbulent love life as his boom-boom backhand.

Introducing…Boris Becker
Photo: DPA

Becker married his Dutch girlfriend Lilly Kerssenberg in St. Moritz on Friday, but Germany was only invited to his nuptials on Sunday. That’s when 4.6 million viewers tuned into RTL television’s exclusive coverage of the former Wimbledon winner’s second marriage. After finishing his career on the court, Boris has managed to turn his very public love life into his second occupation – much to the equal glee and chagrin of Germany.

Boom-Boom Becker? Handy with a tennis racquet, but cursed with messy ginger hair, right?

Correct! Boris burst on to the tennis scene and the wider world’s attention by becoming the youngest ever Wimbledon men’s singles tennis champion in 1985. At that time he was only 17. Over the course of his career, he went on to become the world No.1. Amongst his 49 trophies, he garnered a total of six Grand Slam titles, an Olympic Gold medal and helped Germany to its first Davis Cup victory.

Yeah, it’s the stuff of legend, if only for those short shorts. So what’s there left to say?

Well, even though sports fans would probably disagree, the post-tennis life of “Bobbele” (another one of his bizarre nicknames) has been even more entertaining than his illustrious sporting achievements. A series of high-profile disgraces have seen him slip from being the darling of the German sport pages to making much less appealing headlines in the tabloids. The latest chapter finds the German public being presented with “Boris-Becker TV,” his very own reality show.

Becker’s doing reality TV? Searching for the new teenage tennis sensation no doubt!

No, no. Slow down. Apart from a few stints as a Wimbledon commentator for the BBC Boris has pretty much left the world of serve and volley behind him. Since then the double faults in his personal life have meant Boris has spent far more time in a different kind of court in recent years.

Oh dear I smell lawyers, come on then what happened?

Well, things seemed to be going great for a while. The bulging trophy cabinet meant there was money in the bank and in 1993 he married Barbara Feltus, the daughter of an African American serviceman and a white German woman. The mixed-race marriage along with his outspoken stance against racism saw Boris widely hailed at home and abroad as a shining example of the newly tolerant Germany.

Ok! This all sounds fine to me. What’s the problem? You can’t take someone to court for being a model citizen can you?

Surely not! But the good times weren’t to last. After a three year investigation Boris in 2000 was confronted with serious tax-evasion charges. He claimed he was living in Monaco when he’d actually been spending most of his time back in Germany.

No way! Did he go to jail?

Of course not. It’s one of the most famous tennis players in the world we are talking about here. Boris dug his heels in and strongly denied any wrongdoing. He claimed his pad in Germany was only a loft in his sister’s house and that he only “barely understood German tax laws” anyway. But that plea fell on deaf ears and he was found guilty. Somehow he managed to dodge the three-and-a-half-year prison term the prosecutors were pressing for, but he was eventually sentenced to two years probation and a fine of $500,000. Oh, and he also had to cough up the $4.6 million in back taxes in 2002.

Jeez, how did they nab him in the end?

Ironically, key aspects of the prosecution’s case were built upon some 210 scrap books of Hans Gerd, Boris’ supposedly “number one fan.” In an almost unbelievable display of Teutonic thoroughness, Hans had kept detailed day to day records of Boris’ whereabouts for years. And unfortunately for “Bobbele,” that included his comings and goings between Germany and the French Riviera.

Curious. I thought stalkers just go through your rubbish and write you bad poetry?

It seems German ones are different. Anyway, from there on things just got worse. With the threat of possible bankruptcy hanging over his head, Boris just got himself into more trouble. Instead of keeping his head down, he was caught up in one of the most bizarre paternity cases seen in the media for a long time.

After a public fight with his wife at London’s posh Japanese restaurant “Nobu,” Boris had an eventful encounter in one of the restaurant’s broom closets.

Looking for a fresh napkin, I guess?

No, not quite. In fact, it’s now widely known that a drunken Boris fathered a love child during a moment of intimacy in that very broom closet with Russian-African model Angela Ermakova, one of the restaurant’s waitresses.

Hang on, I didn’t think service was included in UK restaurants.

Think you’re funny? Well it was no laughing matter for Boris. Some reports even maliciously suggested that he was slightly confused as to who he was enjoying his moment with due to a passing physical resemblance between Angela and his wife.

Boris initially denied that the child was his and his defence team proceeded to come up with a series of increasingly imaginative excuses for the scandal ranging from semen theft to a blackmail plot masterminded by the Russian mafia. But apart from the undeniable resemblance of the little girl to her father, a DNA test proved that it was indeed his spawn.

I take it he had to dig a little deeper then…

Yep, during a court case in 2001 Boris finally accepted the child as his own and paid Angela a staggering $5 million. But at least Nobu was so happy with all the free publicity that they insisted on giving Boris a hefty discount on his bill whenever he returned to one of their restaurants.

Well every cloud has a silver lining as they say, but all of this must have made Barbara Becker somewhat angry despite the cheap sushi?

You said it. Unsurprisingly Boris and Barbara split less than a month before the paternity case was finally over. The divorce settlement heard in Miami cost the star a whopping $14.5 million and lost him custody of their two sons. And the juicy details of Boris’ playboy behaviour and extravagant lifestyle were even broadcast live on German TV.

Gracious, I hope he’s tried to keep out of the headlines since then?

You’d think. But Boris started to enjoy his newly found freedom, and he’s had a string of affairs since his divorce. Almost all have lived out before the eyes of the world. The absolute highlights were Boris dumping Lilly Kerssenberg by text message and two years later being dumped by text message in return by his girlfriend at the time Sandy Meyer-Wölden.

But blonde Sandy clearly wasn’t Boris’ type since he just married brunette Lilly on Friday after reconciling last year. How serious can he be, you ask? As serious as anyone allowing their nuptials to be broadcast on German TV. Here’s hoping Boom-Boom’s heart has found true love.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

TV

REVEALED: The French in-jokes from TV series Call My Agent

The global success of the French TV series Dix pour cent (Call My Agent) is all the more remarkable for it being choc-a-bloc with rapid-fire jokes that you need a thorough knowledge of French culture to understand.

REVEALED: The French in-jokes from TV series Call My Agent
The stars of TV series Dix pour cent (Call My Agent). Photo: AFP

As well as being an excellent and funny watch, the TV series set in a Paris talent agency is also highly educational.

While the series mostly follows the lives and loves of the agents, each episode has a guest star, playing themselves. These are all big names in France so the show provides a crash course in the big names of French TV, film and music, from the obvious like Jean Dujardin to the less internationally well known like Audrey Fleurot.

READ ALSO Five Netflix series that will teach you French as the locals speak it

 

But while some jokes are funny wherever you are from – like Jean Dujardin 'going full Day-Lewis' and gnawing the head off a live rabbit – there are also plenty of French 'in jokes' that people who grew up elsewhere are likely to be oblivious to.

Here's a selection of some you might have missed:

Get thee to a nunnery

Actress Beatrice Dalle refuses to play a nude corpse at the start of her episode, abandoning the morgue for the convent to take time out from an industry she says is dictated by the lascivious male gaze.

Fair enough. But for decades Dalle has excelled in extreme and outrageous roles as an object of desire, from her breakthrough in the racy “Betty Blue” to sex-crazed cannibal in “Trouble Every Day”.

In real life, Dalle often hangs out with nuns enjoying convent retreats and speaking openly about her faith and love for Jesus.

Abracadabra

The first episode of the fourth series features what would seem a random bit of fantasy, with a dwarf snapping her fingers and a lift door closing like magic. The gesture comes from a long-running French TV series, “Josephine, Guardian Angel”.

In it diminutive angel Mimie Mathy helps the needy with empathy and magic and at the end of her mission disappears with the same finger-click she makes in the lift.

But in “Call My Agent!” Mathy is no benevolent spirit. Mischievously flipping type, she plays a nasty piece of work looking to settle a score with ASK.

Forever Godefroy

Jean Reno may be familiar to world audiences from “Leon” and the cool pilot holding his own against Tom Cruise in the original “Mission: Impossible”.

But as far as the agents at ASK are concerned, Reno will forever be Godefroy de Montmirail, the idiotic medieval knight who time travels to the 20th century and drinks water from the toilet in the slapstick “The Visitors”.

That is the name that keeps getting repeated at the agency, much to Reno's dismay.

Because Godefroy de Montmirail to many in France is synonymous with numbskull.

Old foes

A decades-long rivalry between two of France's most enduring female stars appears several times in the series, with the bickering silver fox duo Francoise Fabian and Line Renaud.

Why they're arguing draws on their contrasting reputations in real life and the opposing attractions of money and intellectual cred. Fabian the heavyweight film actress is known for cerebral classics such as “My Night at Maud's”, while Renaud the much-loved popular singer cozied up to rightwing president Jacques Chirac.

One word changes everything 

There is a world of difference in France between who you use the polite form of address “vous” to and the informal one, “tu”.

READ ALSO When to drop the vous and get friendly in France

 

The grammatical minefield can lead to all sorts of embarrassing faux-pas and unintended insults.

Its power to define the pecking order comes out in the affair between hot-shot agent Mathias and his secretary Noemie. Not even their years of secret bonking can apparently break down the formal manner in which they address each other.

The critical moment comes at the end of series three when Noemie, clutching a bunch of folders after fleeing the office, is asked by Mathias if she will join him in his new agency.

“Oh, are we using the tu now?” she replies, taken aback, that after working their way through the “Kama Sutra” together they were now finally getting grammatically intimate.

What's in a name 

Jean Gabin, the dog, has been in the series from the beginning, at the feet or in the arms of Arlette, the matriarch of the ASK agency who walks the corridors doing minimal work but making razor-sharp comments about the lives of her younger colleagues.

For the series, Arlette is the spirit of golden age cinema, and so her dog is named after one of its great French male stars.

But Gabin was no heartthrob, and her growly dog sounds very much like the gnarled Gabin, whose most famous role was the brute train engineer of “The Human Beast”.

So there you have it – slumping in front of the TV is educational. There are also lots of great external shots so people know Paris can also have fun spotting famous landmarks or even their own neighbourhoods.

 

Originally shown on French terrestrial TV, all four series are now available on Netflix as Dix pour cent in French or Call My Agent in English.

SHOW COMMENTS