As a fan of the sport, I can well remember Boris Becker bursting onto the tennis scene in 1985, winning Wimbledon at the first attempt as a callow 17 year old. With his youthful athleticism and boundless energy he made his opponents look suddenly slow and old, throwing himself all over the court to great effect.
Flung into the spotlight at such a tender age, it's probably no surprise that he struggled with the attendant fame and fortune, especially in his native Germany where he became at once a national hero but also instant tabloid fodder especially in his high-profile romantic entanglements with a succession of young, beautiful women. It all ended up rather sordidly and sadly with the embattled superstar being the subject of lurid, sniggering news stories about his private life, the most notorious of which concerned him having sex in an office cupboard and more seriously, his later bankruptcy and imprisonment for tax avoidance. Perhaps his lowest point of ridicule was when he fell for a scam appointment as a diplomat to the Central African Republic as an obvious means of avoiding prosecution through diplomatic immunity.
This two-part documentary covering his spectacular rise and fall is definitely more "News of the World" than "The Times" in its approach to Becker's turbulent life. Made without any active participation by Becker himself or his immediate family, it gives a lot of coverage instead to some of his ex-partners which of course makes for good if sensationalist copy.
Unsurprisingly, the real Boris struggles to emerge from behind the headlines as the programme basically rehashes and reheats much of what we already knew about him without adding any particularly insightful or meaningful analysis into what makes him tick.
Becker history working relationships with a number of broadcasters probably has a good degree of media savvy, has recently published a ghost written autobiography to try to tell his side of the story but one suspects this rather thinly biased account is one which will hold sway with the general public. In the meantime this slight and often over-the-top account of an exceptional young sporting talent unprepared for the attendant celebrity lifestyle which went along with it, only rarely seemed to clear the net culminating, if I can complete the metaphor, in something of a straight-sets defeat as a would-be deep and probing documentary.