Boris Becker has spoken of his “brutal” prison experience in UK, The Guardian reports.
The three-times Wimbledon men’s singles champion served eight months of his two-and-a-half-year sentence for hiding £2.5m of assets and loans in a bankruptcy fraud case. He was released from prison in December and deported from the UK.
According to The Guardian, Becker told BBC Radio 5 Live Breakfast: “Whoever says that prison life isn’t hard and isn’t difficult, I think is lying.”
“It was a very brutal … a very, very different experience to what you see in the movies, what you’ve heard from stories.”
He said, according to the report, inmates had to “fight every day” for survival and that being a famous tennis player meant nothing in prison, where he had been surrounded by “murderers, by drug dealers, by rapists, by people smugglers, by dangerous criminals”.
“You fight every day for survival. Quickly, you have to surround yourself with the tough boys, as I would call it, because you need protection.”
His incarceration “humbled” him, he said, adding: “I’m a survivor; I’m a tough cookie. I’ve taken the incarceration, but I’ve also taken the glory and if anything this made me a stronger, better man.”
He is now building his life’s “third chapter”, he said.
Speaking before the release of a new TV documentary about his life and career, he said he had learned lessons from his time in jail, including finding out “who’s with you and who’s not with you”.
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