Boris Becker: UK prison sentence was ‘brutal’ experience

Boris Becker has spoken of his “brutal” prison experience in the UK, adding that during his incarceration he had to surround himself with “tough boys” for protection.

The three-times Wimbledon men’s singles champion served eight months of his two-and-a-half-year sentence for hiding £2.5m of assets and loans in a bankruptcy fraud case. He was released from prison in December and deported from the UK.

Becker told BBC Radio 5 Live Breakfast: “Whoever says that prison life isn’t hard and isn’t difficult, I think is lying.

“It was a very brutal … a very, very different experience to what you see in the movies, what you’ve heard from stories.”

He said inmates had to “fight every day” for survival and that being a famous tennis player meant nothing in prison, where he was surrounded by “murderers, by drug dealers, by rapists, by people smugglers, by dangerous criminals”.

“You fight every day for survival. Quickly, you have to surround yourself with the tough boys, as I would call it, because you need protection.”

His incarceration “humbled” him, adding: “I’m a survivor; I’m a tough cookie. I’ve taken the incarceration, but I’ve also taken the glory and if anything this made me a stronger, better man.”

He is now building his life’s “third chapter”, he said.

Reflecting on his tennis career and becoming the youngest ever Wimbledon men’s singles champion in 1985, at 17, Becker said there was no “handbook” for how a teenager in such a situation should behave. The fame and fortune had been, he said, “very new”.

He said he had not studied business or finance, and after his tennis career he made decisions that were “probably badly advised”, but added: “It was my decision”.

Becker, 55, spent the first weeks of his detention at