Word: becker
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...complete coincidence that baseball's strike was short-lived. Over an amazing prestrike weekend, baseball's Rod Carew, Tom Seaver and Dwight Gooden, football's Joe Namath, O.J. Simpson and Roger Staubach, a runner named Steve Cram, a tennis player named Boris Becker and an amateur golfer named Scott Verplank had got in the first word, not for the players or the owners but for the games: excellence. On dark occasions in sports, the President and both houses of Congress can vouch for this inessential industry as an essential reverie, and still the public may have a little difficulty recalling...
...what the future holds for Becker? No question about it, he is an authentic phenomenon on at least three indisputable counts. He is, at 17, the youngest man ever to win Wimbledon, which may be media frazzled but is still by irrational common consent the world's premier tennis tournament. He is also the first unseeded player to do so and the first from Germany. Other unheralded players have used this great stage to announce their arrival at the threshold of greatness (Bjorn Borg, who reached the quarter finals in 1973 at 17; John McEnroe, who gained the semis...
There you have a capsule description of Becker, the tangle-footed teenager whose room is often a mess, who forgets to carry money in his pocket and who boogies through life to rock tunes pumped directly brain ward by his stereo headset. His was a Wimbledon of tie breakers, comebacks and an injured ankle, all blithely handled. In the finals, it was Kevin Curren, a decade Becker's senior, who was a bundle of nerves as his percentage of successful first serves (47%) proved. He also seemed befuddled by an opponent who could go all out for everything because...
...dickschädel, " his coach Günther Bosch calls him, meaning he is, not to put too fine a point on it, pigheaded. That imparts to his game its never-say-die spirit, but may also interfere with improving it physically and tactically. Ion Tiriac, his other mentor, insists Becker is too slow afoot but has trouble imposing on him a corrective training regimen. "He's very stubborn. You have to convince him of everything." In fact, it took Tiriac and Bosch three months just to change the mechanics of Becker's serve so he could follow it more quickly...
...Becker's lunacy is a sign of authentic genius, not just a teenage hormonal fire storm, he could find his way to that imaginary land where Borg plays Tilden, and Laver goes against Budge, in the dream draws of endlessly fantasizing fans. For now, though, he is just a gaudy note in the annals of a game that delights in its overnight successes, then makes up its mind about authentic greatness with becoming, almost anachronistic, slowness. --By Richard Schickel. Reported by Steven Holmes/London and John Kohan/Leimen