‘She Has No Idea How Much She Helped Me’ – Boris Becker Shares Intricate Details About His Lesser-Known Friendship With Steffi Graf

Boris Becker and Steffi Graf dominated the racket sport in the 1980s and 90s. Both of them left the Baden provinces in the mid-1980s to put Germany on the maps of the tennis world. Becker and Graf won multiple Grand Slam titles in their career. But if asked to single out one, their triumph at the 1989 Wimbledon Championships stands tall in the history of German sports. But do you know how Steffi Graf once helped Boris Becker at the darkest point in his career?

Let’s have a closer look at the Boris Becker-Steffi Graf friendship through the pages of “Boris Becker. The Player” (autobiography of Boris Becker). Here he shared the lesser-known facts about his bonding with the German women’s tennis star.

‘As a woman, she fascinated me’ -Boris Becker on Steffi Graf

Becker wrote about the enormous pressure both of them had during the early stages of their career. He revealed how they used to take the same boat to travel from Bruhl and Leimen to Wimbledon and back. Becker wrote about his fascination with Graf. He explained the curiosities he had to know about the secrets of her success. “As a woman, she fascinated me. It wasn’t the infantile falling in love of a teenager that made me want to get to know Steffi better. It was a deep feeling of affection, an unexpressed understanding between like-minded people who shared the same fate,” Becker

Recalling an instance from his second-round loss to Peter Dohan at Wimbledon in 1987 he revealed how Steffi Graf stood beside him when others called his defeat ‘I saw it coming.‘ He added, “Steffi, good soul, had watched parts of the first and second set before her match against Laura Gildemeister.“