TENNIS star Boris Becker has revealed how he feared for his life after a terrifying run-in with a murderer behind bars.
The former Wimbledon champ, 57, served eight months in British prisons after being jailed for hiding millions from creditors.
Becker – once worth a whopping £38million – was locked up at HMP Wandsworth and then Huntercombe, an Oxfordshire jail for foreign inmates, before being deported to Germany in December 2022.
And he has now lifted the lid on the grim reality of his time inside, where he was left cold, hungry and in constant fear.
In a book being serialised for the Daily Mail, Becker revealed how a simple game of poker nearly landed him in serious danger.
Having once blown fortunes flying Concorde just to watch basketball in New York, the German ace suddenly found himself at the mercy of prison gamblers.
“I was told that I owed them £500,” Becker said. “It was a shock. That would have been nothing to me on the outside. But inside it was a lot of money – your weekly allowance for about eight months.
“When I didn’t pay up, I could feel them staring at me, circling around me. Then, one afternoon, two of them came to my cell. A simple message: when are you going to pay?”
The threat came into sharp focus when a notorious Romanian inmate, jailed for killing two men, warned him the gang’s leader was “a little crazy”.
“Otherwise you’re going to see how crazy he can be,” Becker recalled. He eventually arranged a bank transfer to settle his debt.
But worse was to come. Becker told how he was later confronted by a killer inmate named Zac – who threatened to slit his throat.
“One day, I was coming back from lunch with my tray of food,” Becker said. “As I passed Ike’s cell, Zac was in there.
“‘Hey. What are you doing in Ike’s cell?’ I said. He came straight at me. ‘Who the f*** are you? I’m going to f*** you up. I’m going to break your head. I’m going to slit your throat. I’m going to kill you.’”
The row only ended when other inmates stepped in to protect Becker.
Days later, Zac bizarrely knelt before him in the prison laundry and begged forgiveness.
“He started kissing my hand and saying sorry,” Becker said. “He wasn’t just apologising to me but to Ike, who was the boss on our wing.
Becker described prison as “a dangerous place” where survival depended on alliances.
He became close with Ike, a major drug dealer who ruled his wing, and Shuggy, a Sri Lankan gang member jailed for murder, who even cut Becker’s hair with a smuggled blade.
Prison, he said, was “an institution run by the prisoners”.
Despite the threats, Becker was stunned when fellow lags rallied around to give him a birthday he would never forget – with not one, but three homemade cakes.
“I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “Never in my life had I ever received three birthday cakes on the same day.”
Becker had previously mentioned to the media of the painful and unbearable conditions of prison where was starved and left frozen most of the time.
He said: “You quickly realise that prisons are actually controlled by prisoners. Talking to my wife on the phone was my lifeline and the only way I could be myself.
“By October, I was sleeping in my tracksuit and socks. Some nights it was so cold in my cell that I slept in two jackets and two pairs of socks, wrapping a towel around my head.
“I lost seven kilos in the first four weeks. There were several reasons for this: emotional stress, little food, no alcohol, no sweets.”
The tennis ace was finally freed on December 14, 2022 – sneaking out of the UK on a private jet to Stuttgart in a secret deportation.
“I waited in a small departure room until I heard Lilian’s footsteps coming down the corridor,” he said. “We held each other and cried.”
But freedom brought little peace. The glare of paparazzi in Germany forced him and wife Lilian, 57, to start a new life in Milan.
Now Becker insists his brush with jail has left him determined to turn things around.
“I knew I had to start again from zero and just begin building again,” he said.
“It had taken my insolvency, the embarrassment of it, my imprisonment, the global humiliation – it had taken all of that to understand I had to change completely.
“When I met Lilian, I saw a light I didn’t believe existed any more. Last year, we were married on the Italian Riviera. I cried a little. And then we looked out over the Mediterranean and felt the future welcoming us in.”
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