‘He hasn’t killed anyone’: Germans react to Boris Becker’s imprisonment

The imprisonment in London of the tennis legend Boris Becker for bankruptcy offences has triggered an outpouring of shock and disappointment in his native Germany, where he was once hailed as a national hero.

One former fan spoke for many when he said: “He made mistakes for which he’s rightly being punished. But maybe he’ll get up again one day, just like Becker, the tennis player, so often did.”

The writer Till Jecke, a sports reporter with the tabloid Bild, offered one of many recollections in Sunday’s newspapers of the day in July 1985 when the 17-year-old German became the youngest player to win the Wimbledon men’s singles title and “catapulted the somewhat stuffy ‘white sport’ into sheer galactic heights”.

“Boom Boom Becker,” as he was nicknamed at home for the way he pounded the court, captured hearts in Germany and across the world. His “Becker fist” and the “Becker pike”, when he’d hurl himself horizontally across the court in an effort to get every ball, were all part of the unforgettable magic mix of his play, Jecke said.

Such a contrast, then, was the scene in Southwark crown court on Friday when the 54-year-old was jailed for two and a half years for hiding millions of pounds’ worth of assets after being made bankrupt in June 2017.

“What now awaits him is brutal,” wrote Stefanie Bolzen, the London correspondent of Die Welt. She had watched as Becker, dressed in a tie in the Wimbledon colours of purple and green, was “whisked from the dock and into the security wing – no last embrace, no chance to be comforted”.

The treatment of a convicted man in the UK is considerably harsher than in Germany, she and several German commentators have pointed out.

Becker was taken at speed in a white high-security van to