What's making Becker's heart go boom boom these days is his fiancée, Barbara Feltus, 26, a model and actress who, since joining her beau on the tour more than a year ago, can now add cheerleader to her résumé. "Babs," Becker has said, "was the first person who said to me, 'I want to see you win again.' Through her I have regained my spiritual balance."
Maintaining that equilibrium hasn't been easy. Feltus, while praised by Becker's friends as strong and genuine—"She likes him for himself, not his fame," says one—also happens to be German-American and black. In a nation roiled by rising racial tension and neo-Nazism, this mixed-doubles match has hit a raw nerve. And that was even before a recent cover of the German newsmagazine Stern on which the couple, in an intended protest against racism, posed artily nude for Feltus's father, Ross, a Dusseldorf designer and photographer.
Becker has been a national hero in Germany since 1985, when he won the first of his three Wimbledon championships, but recently he and Feltus have become the target of hate mail and ugly taunts. At an outing last fall, one onlooker shouted, "Black witch, you only want Boris's money!" As a result, the couple spend most of their time in Becker's rented luxury apartment in the tax haven of Monaco while house hunting in London and Paris. "Sometimes within 15 minutes [in Germany] I am someone who cannot gel served because I'm black," Feltus told Stern. "The next minute I'm Frau Becker, treated like a queen. Sometimes I find both awful."
Although they didn't meet until the fall of '91 at Harry's New York Bar in Munich, the lovers grew up only five minutes apart near Heidelberg. Becker, son of architect Karl-Heinz Becker and his homemaker wife, Elvira, was a loner who left school at 16 to play professional tennis. Feltus. the elder daughter of a German mother whose privacy she protects and the Los Angeles native she met when he was a G.I. in Heidelberg, experienced a different kind of isolation because of her color.
Pre-Feltus, Becker had a reputation as a ladies' man whose former flames reportedly included East German ice queen Katarina Witt. But he had never been engaged before popping the question to Feltus on March 5 during a romantic dinner at a Munich restaurant. After slipping a diamond ring in her whiskey sour while she was in the ladies' room, Becker told Stern, he proposed as the pianist played "our song"—Gershwin's "Summertime."
But the living hasn't been easy during their time together. Feltus has faced suggestions that she is using the relationship to advance her fledgling acting career. (Her biggest role: the slinky female lead in a German TV-movie called Heart in Hand.) "If I was going with Julia Roberts, no one would say anything," parried Becker before Roberts's recent marriage. "And I don't want Barbara to give up her career for me." As for his career, Becker, whose fortune is estimated at more than $30 million, skidded all the way from No. 1 in the world in early 1991 to No. 10 in October '92. (He is currently No. 4.) Feltus wasn't the only distraction, though. A man of many other interests—jazz, poétry and ecology among them—he made no secret of the fact that "tennis was never my whole life and it never will be."
Now, though Becker advanced to the semifinals at Wimbledon (losing to eventual champion Pete Sampras) arid says he has discovered "a new joy" in the game, his priorities may not permit him to reach the very top once again. "My life is like a big puzzle," the athlete-aesthete-lover recently observed. "When I win a tournament, the puzzle is complete. But when Barbara's not there, there's a big hole."
PAM LAMBERT
JOEL STRATTE-McCLURE in Monaco
- Contributors:
- Joel Stratte-McClure.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
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