Less than a week after former Grand Slam tennis champion Boris Becker was released after seven-and-a-half months in a UK prison, he has opened up about his loneliness, his fears and the lessons he’s learned behind bars.
In a long and sometimes emotional German TV interview, he revealed that he had learned a hard, painful and very expensive lesson and rediscovered the person he once was: “But the whole experience Taught me something important and good too. And some things happen for a good reason.”
Baker, 55, was jailed for two-and-a-half years last April for hiding £2.5m (€2.9m;$3m) of his assets and debts to avoid paying his creditors. He was declared bankrupt in 2017 with debts of around £50m due to unpaid debts of more than £3m on his Spanish estate in Majorca.
The first weeks of his detention were at Wandsworth Prison in south-west London, but most of the sentence was spent at Hunter Combe Prison near Henley in Oxfordshire. As a Category C prison, it is more secure than an open prison and one of the two facilities is reserved for foreign nationals.
Dressed in black for the interview, Baker immediately cut a slimmer figure than when she was jailed in April. His hair was also distinctly black. He said that in jail you are nobody, you are just a number. His was A2923EV.
“For the first time in my life I was hungry – that is, I went to bed hungry,” he said, noting that he weighed 97 kg when he arrived in prison and lost 7 kg over the next few months, although he After that he gained more weight. “Jail was good for my health. They had alcohol but I didn’t.”
He said he was given a cell at Wandsworth because of his name. But when the door closed for the first time, it was the loneliest moment for him. He remembered being unable to sleep because of the screams of his fellow prisoners, who could be thought of as criminals of all sorts.
There was no mirror in his cell as it could have been used as a weapon and he admitted to being shocked when he discovered how he had changed.
Although he was afraid to take a shower because of the attacks he saw in the movies, there was enough privacy in reality so “you don’t see anybody naked”. He also talked about an inmate at Wandsworth who tried to blackmail him into giving him money.
Prison life was clearly a challenge and Baker did not hold back in his descriptions of death threats, extremely dirty cells and extremely dangerous inmates. “My biggest worry was being double-celled. Your cellmate could attack or threaten you.”
For the first three weeks, she said, she tried not to be outside and wore only gray. He learned to avoid looking at other prisoners and kept his eyes on the ground: “Just don’t look at another prisoner the wrong way.”
“I actually had an ‘argument’ once with an inmate who wanted to beat me up,” he said of an incident at Hunter Combe Prison in October.
“He tried to come after me, he told me all the things he was going to do to me,” Baker said. When he shouted for help, there were other inmates on the wing who had to come out to help. He said prison guards come slowly, or not at all.
The man had underestimated Baker’s status in prison, he believed, and later apologized to him and kissed his hand.
