TIME MACHINE: THE 1990s

Also this month, we travel aboard the Time Machine.

The year 1990 is marked by events engraved in the collective memory. On October  3^rd,  the Democratic Republic of Germany is dissolved and annexed to the Federal Republic of Germany, creating a single state. It was the symbolic end of the Cold War, which had been previewed, also symbolically, by the collapse of the Berlin Wall a year earlier. The 1990s also opened under the umbrella of the arts. This is particularly true of the cinema with masterpieces by Bernardo Bertolucci (The Sheltering Sky), Luc Besson (Nikita) and David Lynch (Wild at Heart).

In tennis, however, 1990 was the year of Boris Becker. The former German champion, who occupies a prominent place in the FILA tradition, is still one of the most loved sportsmen, even years after his retirement. Mostly because he is the man who broke records. Born in 1967 in Leimen, Germany, Becker is the youngest athlete in history to have won Wimbledon. In 1985, his elegant and powerful game foiled all his opponents in the tournament, from Jimmy Connors to John McEnroe and Kevin Curren, who was defeated in the final. Becker was only 17 years old and just starting out as a professional. To this day, his victory is still hard to beat.

In the following seasons, the German went on to worldwide fame and garnered the nickname ‘Bum Bum’, which was a tribute to the strength of the shots he served from his six-foot frame. What makes him great, however, is his innate grace, his talent at the net, and his versatility in singles and doubles. As Luca Capponi summed up in Contrasts; There are good players and there are icons: here, Becker occupies a place of honour in the second category. He, who convinced the headmaster of his school to grant him a leave of absence for Wimbledon, and then became an honorary speaker at Oxford and Cambridge universities. He, who in 2000 challenged Garry Kasparov, then the world’s number one chess player, live on CNN, holding him until the eighteenth move (only to be checkmated, it must be said). In 1990 Boris Becker was at the peak of a career that counted, in total, six Slam titles, the old Grand Slam Cup, two Davis Cups and an Olympic gold medal in doubles.

For FILA, Boris Becker was much more than a sponsored athlete, he was a true muse. His uniforms, worn in the late eighties and early nineties, still stand out today for their bright colours, dynamic geometries, and the initials ‘BB’ embroidered alongside the F-Box logo. Perhaps the best closure for this article is in the words of Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney, author of the docuseries Bum Bum’: The World vs. Boris Becker (2023): ‘He is a brilliant, charismatic, super-famous and somewhat naive man. He lives the way he plays tennis: he runs to the net, takes risks and plays it all.’