Boris Becker was asked by a prison doctor if he had been self-harming during his time in a UK jail.<\/p>\n
The tennis icon, 57, was sentenced to two years and six months in the jail in April 2022 after being found guilty in a London court of removing money from his bankruptcy estate without the permission of the trustee in bankruptcy \u2013 and served eight months before being released in December 2022.<\/p>\n
In his upcoming autobiography Inside, the youngest ever Wimbledon singles champion describes how he went from being applauded as one of the greatest players of all time, to a prisoner serving time as a guest of the Crown.<\/p>\n
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By continuing you agree to our Terms<\/a> and Privacy Policy<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cTrying to shave with the stubby little razor they had given me, I ended up with nicks on my cheeks and stabby slashes under my chin and down my neck,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n \u201cSoon after, I was summoned to a medical with the doctor who asked if I was self-harming. Why would I? My mind was only focused on doing things to protect myself.\u201d<\/p>\n Becker adds in his memoir, an extract of which has been published in the Daily Mail, drugs were commonplace within the prison walls.<\/p>\n \u201cAs the days went by, I learned that you could get anything you wanted in prison. Alcohol was easy. People made it themselves with sugar, fruit and other things you could buy legitimately with your allowance from the canteen \u2026 then there were the drugs,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cWeed, pills, heroin. Sometimes they came in the prison version of internal mail. Up the back passage. Sometimes it was the wardens \u2013 someone taking a cut, someone with a weakness or a problem left vulnerable to a bribe.\u201d<\/p>\n He also recalled the physical hardship of daily life in London\u2019s Wandsworth Prison.<\/p>\n \u201cSome days those showers would be icy cold. You never knew why. It was just another unpleasant fact in a day you don\u2019t control.<\/p>\n \u201cDirt all over the floor, on the tiles. I was lent a pair of flip-flops. Boris, wear them, because we don\u2019t know who was there before. The first time in my life I ever showered in flip-flops.\u201d<\/p>\n The book recounts in graphic detail the routines and survival strategies he relied upon during his sentence, including finding distraction in teaching classes, reading and regular phone calls with his partner Lilian de Carvalho Monteiro.<\/p>\n Inside by Boris Becker will be published on September 25.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Boris Becker was asked by a prison doctor if he had been self-harming during his time in a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":141401,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,2331,588,85,747],"class_list":{"0":"post-141400","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-culture","11":"tag-sport","12":"tag-sports","13":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141400\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/141401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}