Boris Becker: A biopic in RTL tells his career – media

Memory of the tennis coach Günther Bosch, who promoted and challenged the tennis player Boris Becker and finally made him the 1985 Wimbledon winner. Bosch was also a star back then, as a miracle worker even a kind of Sepp Herberger of the racket-wielding trade, but barely two years later the two separated, not exactly in peace. And Bosch, now 84, a friendly, committed man, born in the Kingdom of Romania, only saw his Boris from a distance from now on.

So reminiscent of Günther Bosch in the 1990s, when he wrote a tennis column and had a regular seat in the press centers at major tournaments, among journalists who used to run off their feet, according to an interview with him. But now that he was only her colleague, he was no longer important to her. Bosch carried it calmly, and whenever Becker was seen on one of the screens in one of the press centers, he looked at him, interested and always a little melancholy. And when Becker made a mistake, even a double mistake, Bosch gently shook his head on the screen in the press room. And sometimes he would say, with an unmistakable tone of voice, resigned and indulgent at the same time: “Oh, Borrriss.”

Becker had become number one without Bosch. But maybe, with Bosch, he would have stayed at number one longer.

This Thursday comes the long-awaited biopic about Boris Becker’s early career years on RTL. “The Rebel – From Leimen to Wimbledon” by Hannu Salonen (book: Richard Kropf and Marcus Schuster) describes Becker at the time of his becoming an idol. Wimbledon victory 1985, Wimbledon victory 1986, finally the early break in Australia in 1987 with the subsequent separation and certainly also liberation from the coaching father. Fortunately, the Becker film also turned out to be a Bosch film, which gives it a little depth. Because Samuel Finzi is terrific as Bosch, who even stayed in youth hostels with Boris in the early years when money was tight. Even every frown is correct, Finzi has grasped all the inner and outer peculiarities of the strict and at the same time gentle man he plays. While Mišel Matičević turns tennis manager Ion Țiriac into a walrus-bearded cash register, a cliché figure that barks into a shoebox-sized handset: “One point five million Deutschmark from Puma.” The real Țiriac is still best as a Țiriac.

The film has nothing new to tell. But it enlivens – and thus it fits into the current television phase of nostalgia – the eighties, which, viewed from the leaden Corona present, may be considered warm and homely. Although at that time the Chernobyl reactor also blew up, for example. But man is ready for transfiguration, that keeps him alive. And, as far as the sports heroes are concerned, the present-day audience can indeed become wistful, as they are only offered figures in front of advertising walls, whose personality you can’t even recognize, that’s how they are delivered by image consultants. Who is the man who has been the best goalkeeper on the planet for a decade and calls himself Manuel Neuer?

Man is ready for transfiguration, that keeps him alive

That was different in Becker’s time, who could or would afford to exhibit his innermost being. Sometimes he looked like Westernhagen, sometimes like the young van Gogh. Sometimes he gave the womanizer, sometimes the left-wing sympathizer. Everyone in Germany even knew the names of their parents, Elvira and Karl-Heinz. You had to behave somehow towards Becker, and you often came into contact with him. Tennis was a television sport, and Becker took the fan base with him to the red sand of Paris, to the trimmed grass of Wimbledon, and later also to various Love nestsas it was always called in the tabloids. Becker was more daring than the quiet and reigning tennis queen Steffi Graf. He was a public figure whose divorce battle with wife Barbara was eventually broadcast from America to Germany. There was someone like that in Germany, at least in sport, not before and certainly not afterwards.

The eccentric is already inherent in the young Boris, the one in the biopic of Bruno Alexander is embodied, with Becker fist and Becker pike as well as with the tongue tip resting in the corner of the mouth when it is hit. The movement technology fits everything 1: 1 in the film. But the rebel that Becker is jazzed up about in the film title, the system sprinkler downright – that was more of a pose with Becker. The romance of the harbor streets back then was quickly gone. Actual revolutionaries offer more exciting material for a biopic. In the movie “Borg / McEnroe” Shia LaBeouf is the unadjusted, questioning rebel John McEnroe, in “The Damned United” Michael Sheen is the ardently ambitious coach Brian Clough. But these are older men too.

The film becomes a musical as soon as an important game is won

The young Becker on RTL sometimes speaks with his mouth full or fumbles ice cubes out of the glass, which then illustrates his alleged revolutionary spirit. And elsewhere, a woman who sees him playing for the first time says: “Tennis is such a boring sport, but this guy is so exciting.” But it wasn’t like that, Germans like to claim that Becker roused tennis as such. But Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert and Tracy Austin and Borg and Connors and Gerulaitis were stars long before Mr. Bumm Bumm taught the Germans to stop confusing Wimbledon with Wembley.

Above all, the film is an easily consumable sentimental journey, which is unfortunately completely blocked with the expected playlist of those years. This turns the film into a musical, because as soon as an important game is won, “Heroes” by Bowie is embedded in the scenery, and “The Way It Is” by Bruce Hornsby and “Runaway” by Bon Jovi can be incorporated at any time according to the topic. Even when Günther Bosch, the secret star of this film, returns home to his wife and daughter after separating from Becker, they naturally put Lionel Richie’s “Hello” over it, and that’s all very pathetic.

And does not do justice to the dignity and also the tragedy of history. Because Becker and Bosch, two real heroes of their time, have had nothing to say to each other since then.

The Rebel – From Leimen to Wimbledon, Thursday, RTL, 8.15 p.m., online on RTL +