Consider for a moment, if you will, being Boris Becker on April 29, 2022. Historically, you are the Wimbledon Wunderkind, a member of the Tennis Hall of Fame who won six Grand Slams, 49 singles titles, an Olympic gold, and $25 million in prize money alone. Yet here you are at Wandsworth, Her Majesty’s Victorian-era prison, with a rubber-gloved guard touching and examining, as you describe, “Balls, penis, rectum. You almost laugh. Not quite, but almost. What exactly are you looking for?”

Inmate A2923EV would spend the next eight months inside two British penitentiaries. He tells the somewhat harrowing tale of his incarceration in a new memoir, Inside: Winning, Losing and Starting Again. Released in the U.K. in September, it can be found through online booksellers for the Boris Franz Becker completists on your Christmas list.

Becker’s misdeeds are convoluted and uninteresting, dumb rich-guy shit that can be traced back to his dumb rich-guy plan to sell a luxury estate in Mallorca for a vastly inflated price. It led to him declaring bankruptcy in London in 2017 and, five years later, a conviction for the financial malfeasance of hiding assets from creditors and trustees. 

It’s unclear whether Becker knew specifically what was going on—at various times in Inside he comes across as both dupe and dope—but the conviction itself is interesting because it’s the ultimate self-own. Judge Deborah Taylor made it clear that a “significant aggravating factor” as to why she dropped the Boom-Boom on his head was because he skated on doing time for a previous 2002 German tax evasion conviction. She twisted the knife into Becker’s boundless ego, adding, “While I accept your humiliation as part of the proceedings, there has been no humility.” 

So this is how a former No. 1-ranked player in the world ends up with some nonplussed prison guard rummaging around his undercarriage. It’s one of many killer anecdotes Becker spills in the intriguing, enlightening, and entertaining 200-page book. Too bad it’s trapped inside the tedious 338-page book that was actually published. 

There are so many repetitive pontifications on both obvious things about prison life we know from movies—the food sucks; it’s boring, unless there’s fighting; playing chess kills time—and from the self-help-y pop psychology of what it all means, one wonders if Becker got paid by the word. 

There are two other Inside editorial oddities that pad the book out while adding little of value. The first is the inexcusable decision to include chapter-beginning letters from Becker supporters. Here are three lines, plucked from three randos, that I would say are taken out of context, except there was no context in the first place:

“I found an interesting book called The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. He is famous for saying, ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change!’”

“I have a nine-year-old pug called Boris named after you, not the Prime Minister.”

“I’ve got nothing to say really, I just want to say hello and hopefully make you smile.”

Let’s hope Becker did smile, and that the notes lifted his spirits, because they drag the prose down. As do the “Cell Dreams,” which are haphazardly placed throughout the book but, apologies for the pedanticism, should be called “Things I Happen to Remember Remembering While in Prison.” The passages aren’t dreams; they’re specific moments from his past. All the way to the granular level of Becker, as a 17-year-old in 1985, recalling a ham-and-cheese sandwich he ate before going out and beating Kevin Curren in four sets for his first Wimbledon title. 

Some of these non–dream sequences are intriguing, like his utter jealousy when the hot new young “golden boy” Andre Agassi came on the scene, which might have added to his isolation had it been woven into his day-to-day life behind bars. Instead, these interludes are presented on the page as italicized set-aparts and end up becoming a distraction. (Also, discussing mental hang-ups around Agassi is a stark reminder that Inside ain’t Open.)

It’s unfortunate that the book has all this unnecessary obfuscation, because when Becker focuses on what his actual prison experience was, it’s fantastic stuff. It’s wild, at least by American jurisprudence standards, that a white-collar criminal even went to prison, let alone a nightmarish Dickensian-age stone-walled one that formerly housed “Ronnie Biggs, the Krays and Gary Glitter, Pete Doherty and Oscar Wilde.” It’s inspiring that within Wandsworth there’s an earned position, a “Listener,” for experienced, respected prisoners who “serve as link between inmates and wardens,” “your local guides” and “your guardian angel in tattoo sleeves.” 

His time in prison isn’t hard compared with, say, the pedophile who gets beaten senseless by Becker’s workout buddy Baby Hulk, but it’s no country-club joke, either. At his second prison, HMP Huntercombe—an upgrade, but only by the lowest of “British prison” standards—Becker learns how to maintain his sanity in unexpected ways, including an intensive monthlong stoicism class he aces and takes to heart. This leads to a jailhouse meeting between Becker and former tennis rival Pat Cash, a fellow practitioner of the stoic arts and a member of the Aurelius Foundation, the group of ancient-Greek followers who run the prison course.

Many of the Inside details are mind-boggling in the best kind of way (especially considering a 2022 Forbes story reported Becker’s peak fortune as $150 million), like when Becker stopped hanging around an inmate named Giovanni after learning his fellow financial fraudster had been close to Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic and a business partner of the notorious war criminal Arkan. 

Inside gets better and better as Becker’s sentence goes along. He begins opening up about how close he got to his prison pals, all of whom, like Becker, ended up back in their home country because extradition shortened sentences. I started narrating them sitting around a London pub in the Henry Hill Goodfellas voice: “There was Shuggy from Sri Lanka, Paulo from Naples—his pasta and sauce was better than the finest hotel—and Baby Hulk from Lithuania, he’s training to be a UFC fighter now, and then there was my best friend and mentor Andy Two Times, I called him that because he preached everything twice like ‘Boris, you should read the Stoics, read the Stoics…’”

There are a couple of truly affecting scenes near the end of Inside, both centered on Becker’s birthday. One in Huntercombe involves multiple cakes, the other comes on the outside, in Germany, with a beautiful surprise that had me a bit teary-eyed in that holiday-with-loved-ones way. 

Becker is a flawed man, and it’s a flawed book, but by the end of Inside, he seems humbled. He’s 58, but as Charles Dickens showed us, come this time of year, when the air blows cold like it did through his prison cell window, a man is never too old to change. I’ll be rooting for Boris Becker to honor Christmas in his heart, to keep it all the year, and to hire a ruthless editor for Ghosts of Paperbacks Yet to Come.