Boris Becker about his marriage to Lilian: “I built up a small castle”

His time in the British prison is behind him. In the book “Inside”, the former Wimbledon winner will soon report in custody over the months. In advance, Boris Becker (57) now revealed how much he could rely on his wife Lilian de Carvalho Monteiro behind bars – and nobody else.

“When I was sitting in prison, she was my only caregiver. Otherwise nobody was there. My children were still too young, my father dead, my mother a little too old. No more. Nobody. Nobody. Only Lilian,” Becker explains openly in the conversation. In the greatest crisis of his life, his future wife told him: “We are a team. I’m waiting for you.”

Today, said Becker, he “rebuilt something again, a small castle, and nobody comes on it at first”. His wife Lilian is in this arrangement “The Castle. She has the key. She decides who will come in”.

In the same conversation, Becker describes his third marriage with the risk analyst as “maybe the first partnership at eye level. Nobody is more important than the other. I need Lilian, and I hope that she also needs me”. The couple would have met at a time when he was “as never before in my life” when he was working, privately and physically. He never met a woman like Monteiro who is interested in him, even though he had nothing to offer.

Becker also speaks about many aspects of his great tennis career and their effects on his private life in the detailed interview. After his first Wimbledon victory in 1985 at the age of only 17, all of Germany “hugged him. That was certainly meant nicely, but I was almost crushed and took my breath to breathe”. He was always “a freedom -loving person”, but at that moment he lost his freedom.

With the nickname “Bobbele”, which is widespread in his active career, Becker never got warm. “I could still live with ‘our boris’. But ‘Bobbele’? You make a person unnecessarily small,” said Becker literally.

In retrospect, he should have ended his tennis career in his mid -twenties, Becker explains. At the time of his lost Wimbledon final in 1991 against Michael Stich (56) he was “done with the tennis, I had won every Grand Slam tournament except for Paris. What else should come? I was empty, I had no goals anymore. Everything was just a repeat.