Germany Shows a Pair of Aces

By Tom Callahan

Eleven years ago, when he was eight and she was turning seven, they practiced together, two West German children from the neighboring towns of Leimen and Bruehl, near Heidelberg. Playing tennis with a girl, and a younger girl at that, might have caused him the usual, expected, masculine, chauvinistic, German amount of embarrassment, except for one thing. "She could hit it," he whistles. "I was not as good as the good boys, and so I had to practice with the best girls. She was the best girl." Smiles come easily to Boris Becker, especially when the discussion includes Wimbledon. But he glows like a pumpkin at the recollection of those early rallies with Steffi Graf. Now they are both on the last ledge before the peak. "Two kids," he says, "from the same area, who practiced together at twelve . . . ten . . . eight. Isn't it a little incredible?"

Wimbledon rolls around again this week at the All England Lawn Tennis Club, where Becker will try to become the third-youngest singles champion of the century. Already the first and second youngest ever to do it, he points out, "I was born there, you know." Two summers ago, unseeded and 17, not to mention "very slow and fat," Becker dispatched one eminent adult after another with a crashing service and a somersaulting exuberance. They all left the grounds, Henri Leconte after Tim Mayotte, predicting two things: that Becker would be a fine player one day and that he would lose in the next round.

"I didn't know what I was doing," he admits. "In my mind, I was playing a little tennis tournament back in Leimen." But he won his second Wimbledon last year with full knowledge of the benefits and the costs. "It's no pressure coming back for the third. I can't promise I will win again, but I can promise I will enjoy it. I don't think a bad memory is possible for me there anymore. Years from now, I think I'll walk onto the property and smile."

When he won the first time, Becker was a playful puppy with huge paws. Since then he has grown 2 in. in height, to 6 ft. 3 in., and a regimen of running has slimmed his legs and streamlined his carriage. "I have become an athlete," he says, resembling a basketball guard. "I'm not Dr. J, but I can dunk a basketball, just barely dunk it. Picking up a ball, any kind of ball, I always had a feeling for it. I knew how to handle it. I liked it." As Becker has grown physically, a part of his original appeal has diminished. Last week, vaulting the net after winning the Stella Artois at Queens Club, he placed his arm about Jimmy Connors' shoulders and positively dwarfed him. On tough points in the past, Becker has been inclined to rear up in celebration like a frisky and defiant Connors, but the effect is somehow unseemly now for the most powerful stallion in the herd.

Emotionally, Becker has grown too. When longtime Coach Gunther Bosch resisted this, he was cashiered last January. Baleful Rumanian Ion Tiriac, 48, who saw something special in Becker when better juniors were around, and who has skillfully steered the two of them into the multimillions, reluctantly assumed Bosch's role as well. "He has learned me life," Becker says colloquially, a frightening thought. "Above his mouth," wrote John McPhee of Tiriac, "is a mustache that somehow suggests that this man has been to places most people do not imagine exist," closing deals "in a backroom behind a backroom." Becker says, "What other young men may ask their parents, I ask him. He has taught me everything. How to dress, how to handle women."

Putting aside the dangers of learning woman-handling from Tiriac, their partnership has been inspired. "He just doesn't want to be a machine," Tiriac says. "He wants to take charge of himself and make his own mistakes. Nobody has ever come so fast in the rankings to tenth, fifth, second, while his own generation of player is still hustling to get into tournaments. Is there another human being who gives 250 press conferences a year? There are six books out on him at the moment. Especially in Germany, where he is a god when he wins and a catastrophe when he loses, the pressure is inhuman."

In West Germany, where headline writers were delighted to displace Bitburg and Mengele with Becker in 1985, his name recognition is second to Volkswagen and well ahead of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who regards him as a grandchild. Becker is sometimes chagrined by his international celebrity. "I came back from the White House one time," he says, slapping his forehead like a gong, "and sat up in bed and thought, 'Hey, you were just talking with the most important man in the world. What's going on here? You're only a teenager.' " In Leimen, "Suddenly all my friends saw me as the Wimbledon champion, so I lost them. 'Hey, wake up,' I'd try to say. 'I'm the one you sat in school with.' But they kept on being too nice to me for the wrong reasons. Strangers always ask if I've changed, but I think everyone else changed. It's sad."

The exaggerated store Becker's countrymen place in his fortunes, their fixed expressions in the grandstands at the Davis Cup, have showed him "what happened to us a long time ago in Nuremberg." He told TIME Correspondent William McWhirter last year, "It's very, very difficult to be German sometimes. Because of their guilt, the Germans feel they have to do something special. I have to behave better than my opponents." At the Australian Open early this year, he smashed racquets on the ground, spat water at the umpire's chair and for all the world behaved like three-time Wimbledon Champion John McEnroe, who, both infirm and unsure at 28, is passing up his second straight Fortnight. "There aren't a whole lot of guys who win Wimbledon at 17," McEnroe once observed cagily. "Becker didn't realize at the time what he was getting into. In five years, he will begin to understand."

Even in this regard, Becker defines precocity. "I'm sorry about Australia," he says, "but who behaves well all the time? I've learned I can only live my life for me, I can't live it for everyone in the country, or else I'm alone in my room and I'm crying, you know?" Becker is not alone in his room: for a year he has had the company of Benedicte Courtin, 24. She is from Monaco, his tax haven, both sore subjects in the West German press. "I cannot love a woman?" Becker asks.

Though top-seeded at grassy Wimbledon, he is still second-ranked to Ivan Lendl, 27, still fundamentally living by the serve. "If I had not won / Wimbledon, I might be a little further along as a player now, able to control where I play and when I practice a bit more." To illustrate his breathless itinerary, Becker has in his time won tournaments on consecutive weekends in Sydney, Tokyo and Paris. "I'm by far not as good as I can be; I have to get better. But I could not care any more than now. I'm very emotional on the court; my heart's in it, you know? I love tennis very much, but also I love to win. I don't mean to throw myself on the ground all the time; it just comes." Becker says his perpetually barked elbows and knees complain only late at night, "under the cool sheets." He winces at that.

When he arrived so abruptly, the reaction of the leading players was colder still. "I took a big part of the cake away," he says, "but they came to know me a little better. Maybe they saw I wasn't a bad guy. They realize I can play tennis." Becker admires the only man ranked above him now, Lendl. "For me, McEnroe in 1984 was the best, but I don't think he ever had to work incredibly hard. Everything Lendl made, he worked for. He said, 'I'm going to sacrifice more than anyone,' and did it. He deserves to be No. 1."

Lendl is seeded second at Wimbledon. "I don't know the man," he said of Becker after losing last year's final. "I mean the young man, the boy . . . the champion."

Martina Navratilova, the women's top seed, covets her sixth straight Wimbledon crown and eighth singles championship overall. But the bulletin is that she has not won a tournament of any kind in seven months, during which period Steffi Graf has not lost a match. "The pressure will be on her next time," Chris Evert decreed after Graf's first pro tournament victory just 14 months ago. But by March of this year Graf was trimming Evert, 32, and Navratilova, 30, on the same bill. "Today she was the best player in the world," Navratilova said archly after losing the Lipton International in Florida, "and she will be until I play her again." They played again three weeks ago on French clay, where Navratilova's second serves had a case of the nerves and Graf won her first Grand Slam event, her seventh consecutive tournament and 39th straight match. "I used to be a little bit scared of Chris and Martina," she said even before that 6-4, 4-6, 8-6 passage. "Now it's their turn to be scared of me."

Eighteen as of June 14, Graf says, "I was never somebody who watched tennis, women's tennis -- no way." She loved only to play, from infancy almost. "Every day," Peter Graf says, "there she was, waiting for me at the door. 'Please play with me, Papa.' Not four years old." Amazed that she had enough wrist strength for a real grip, Graf gave her a few pointers and then set her loose on the house. "One or two days later," he says, "all the lamps were gone."

A string was strung between surviving sticks of furniture, and they began to play tennis. "We played for ice cream," she says, "ice cream with hot raspberries. There was music too. It was fun." Graf is a lean, athletic man, 48, not much taller than his daughter, who can seem smaller than 5 ft. 8. in., sometimes quite delicate. A latecomer to tennis, he was a soccer player of local note, given to working so excessively hard that he routinely ripped his muscles and powdered his bones. Of all the world's Little League parents, tennis may produce the most virulent specimens, and Graf is considered the reigning scourge by officials and journalists alike, but not by his daughter. Without too much vanity, she says, "You can push a good player to become better, but it is not possible to push a great player to do anything. When I'm on the court, I don't play for my father. I'm responsible for myself."

In fact, remembering broken-down prodigies like Tracy Austin and Andrea Jaeger, her father has required her to rest every year from late November to mid-January, and to the dismay of tournament promoters, has kept her schedule reasonable. "Sometimes I have to be Mr. Graf," he says. "It's no fun." But the results have been as sweet as hot raspberries. "She is a champion from within. All from within," he says. "But her extra advantage may be the circle around her -- her mother and brother too." (A practice partner, Czech Pro Pavel Slozil, takes care to coach in whispers and cast a short shadow.) "It is not important who is called coach," says Peter Graf, "but she looks to me." Meanwhile, Navratilova's slump has coincided with several shufflings of the complicated cast of characters around her.

Last year a viral infection stayed Steffi from Wimbledon, and while nobody concedes her a pre-eminent place yet on grass (she's seeded second), everyone seems sure the true heir to Evert-Navratilova has been found. And glamorous Argentine Gabriela Sabatini, 17, may be her baseliner-in-waiting. They are doubles partners and friends but could start a Centre Court rivalry next week in the quarterfinals. Evert says, "I can't believe how hard Steffi hits the ball." Her forehand especially. "She's wonderful," says Billie Jean King, who spotted Graf early. "Steffi always had better footwork than the other kids, more discipline, and she quite frankly liked the pressure. Becker is another one. They love pressure -- they thrive on it."

Graf professes also to "love quiet," and is grateful to Becker for deflecting so much of the glare at crucial times. "The German press has been playing us off in a little war, one against the other," Becker says, "but I can read the stories and tell how careful and generous she has been about it. She's a very nice person." Her single-mindedness might be overrated. Away from the court, she acts about as young as she is; Smokey Robinson and Bruce Springsteen hold her affection. "Someday I might like to own a hotel," she says, "try to manage it. I know what's nice about them." She does have a happy smile, though something has to seem faintly sad about an 18-year-old girl whose everyday expertise is hotels.

Becker's plans for the future are open. "I just know I don't want to be a 42-year-old ex-tennis player who won Wimbledon." For the moment, he looks forward to the Olympics next year in Seoul. Graf understands his excitement; she won the gold medal in Los Angeles. "It was the best tournament I ever played, I can tell you." Pros are welcome again, and Becker says, "I'm definitely going. Just to participate in something like that. I want to circle the stadium with the teams, sleep in the crowded rooms of the Olympic Village, eat the same food as the other athletes." Millionaires who dropped out of high school have sweet ambitions.