No, it wasn’t in a cupboard. In Alex Gibney’s new two-part Apple TV+ documentary Boom! Boom!, The World vs Boris Becker (the first part of which screened as a Berlinale Special this week), tennis star Becker gives his side of one of the most notorious tabloid stories about him. In 1999, after tumbling out of Wimbledon, he had a sexual encounter with a waitress in a cupboard at upmarket restaurant, Nobu.
In the documentary, Becker speaks openly about this incident.
“I wouldn’t like to go in all the details but I can tell you, we went to the back room. And, no, it wasn’t a cupboard. The cupboard is way too small…it is impossible have any sort of physical activity in the cupboard,” he explains why the story is only half true.
Becker is equally frank about (if still slightly mystified by) the mind-boggling financial problems and bankruptcy which landed him with an eight-month prison sentence in the UK last year. The German, who won his first Wimbledon at the age of 17, has lived a turbulent life in the full glare of the media.
The soap opera elements of Becker’s life aren’t ignored in the documentary but as Oscar-winning producer John Battsek (Ventureland) points out, he and Gibney were far more interested in what happened on the tennis court.
“I was introduced to Boris five years ago. I’m a massive sports fan and a huge tennis fan. I got to know him quite well,” says Battsek. “Talking to Boris, I got a real sense of a life lived achieving incredible things; not least six majors, an Olympic Gold, coaching Novak and being a brilliant commentator.”
Becker’s achievements, Battsek felt, were too often taken for granted. The public didn’t “begin to understand” what it had taken for the small-town German boy to achieve such prodigious feats.
“If you had asked somebody on the street about Boris Becker five years ago, they would have had things to say about him but it would have had nothing to do with his accomplishments,” the producer reflects. “There was a frustration with Boris that he had never truly been really acknowledged for his incredible achievements. On top of that, he had almost been driven out of Germany when he married a mixed race woman. It seemed like this shadow followed him through his whole life.”
Battsek had been working with Gibney on their 2019 feature documentary Citizen K, about Russian businessman and anti-Putin activist Mikhail Khodorkovsky, when the Becker doc was hatched. He knew Gibney was an ardent tennis fan who still played the game several times every week. Battsek pitched Gibney and moments later received a return email saying: “You had me at Boris.”
They agreed to join forces to make the film. Battsek approached Julian Bird at Lorton Entertainment for financing which was quickly forthcoming. Apple TV+ soon stepped up too. “Their team are amazing. We are extremely well looked after by them and we were in very capable hands.”
Much of the film, and several interviews with Becker, were done in 2019. The pandemic intervened and they then returned to interview him again last year, two days before he was sent to prison.
“He’s charming and funny and incredibly likeable. He feels like a really decent guy. He’s humble, he’s honest, he admits his faults,” Battsek enthuses about the German. “I was really taken by him when I met him…obviously he has flaws and he acknowledges them, but fundamentally Boris Becker is a really good guy.”
Bjorn Borg, Mats Wilander, John McEnroe, Michael Stich and Novak Djokovic are among the tennis luminaries (presented in the film as if they’re gunslingers) featured in the documentary. Their liking for Becker is apparent. The tennis authorities hold him in high esteem too. “They charged us to license their footage but there have been no obstacles at any point…there is goodwill to Boris from everyone in every corner of tennis, even the people who back in the day were his arch-rivals,” says Battsek.
One of the most colourful interviewees in the documentary is the bluntly spoken Romanian, Ion Tiriac, who was a coach and mentor to Becker – but whose hard-headed advice Becker sometimes ignored.
“No, not even close,” Tiriac responds when asked if Becker fulfilled his potential as a sportsman. That’s one of the nagging frustrations about the tennis star. Becker had an insatiable desire to win and yet, for one reason or another, ended up with far fewer Grand Slam titles than Djokovic, who credits his coaching with giving him the edge that made him into arguably the greatest player of all time.
“He [Becker] still thinks of Ion as a father figure but what I love about Ion is that he’s a straight shooter as well,” says Battsek. “He doesn’t pull his punches. He’s critical of Boris but not in such a way that it makes their relationship disintegrate. I think it’s reflective of Boris that he is still so close and tight with someone he split from and had his disagreements with but who he recognises is a very wise man.”
Battsek marvels at Becker’s “willingness to talk about everything.” Many celebrities and sporting idols in his position are “very cautious and very closed,” very careful about what they say. Becker, though, never hides anything. In one poignant moment, just before going off to prison, he is shown breaking down on camera as he talks about hitting “rock bottom” in his life.
It’s typical of Becker that he has bounced back up yet again. He makes a perfect subject for a sports film which combines triumph and disaster. Tasking his cue from the Rudyard Kipling poem of which he is an unlikely fan, Becker treats “those two impostors just the same.”
As for Battsek, he remains on the lookout for further sporting sagas which can match this one for glory, pathos and scandal.
“It’s a canvas for big stories. It always has been, it always will be. The scope to make them bigger and bigger is there these days,” Battsek says of top level sport as a subject matter for documentary. “I’m inextricably drawn to it because it’s so dramatic. The personalities and the characters are normally larger than life, often great talkers, and have incredible stories to tell. I love it and am fascinated by it,” adds the “sports mad” producer who is currently at work on a Netflix series about football star, David Beckham.
Boom! Boom!, The World vs Boris Becker is expected to launch on AppleTV+ in the spring.
