Parenting & Family Quote by Boris Becker

The power of Becker's questions is that they refuse the tidy sports-memoir arc of redemption and instead sit in the mess: biology arriving faster than intimacy. He isn't asking for advice so much as staging a public cross-examination of fatherhood itself, where the usual milestones - dating, commitment, shared history - are skipped, and he's left with the blunt fact of a child and the thin reality of absence.

The repetition of "How do you..". functions like a heartbeat of panic. It's not rhetorical flourish; it's a man discovering that paternity is a legal status and a headline long before it becomes an emotional bond. In a celebrity-athlete life, the private gets flattened into the transactional: custody schedules, lawyers, tabloids, the expectation that a famous father should instantly access some prepackaged love. Becker pushes back against that cultural script. He's admitting what rarely gets said out loud, especially by men who are supposed to project control: attachment is not automatic, and love can be delayed without being fake.

The most revealing line is "When does she become your daughter?" It's a moral question disguised as a timeline question. He's grappling with whether "daughter" is conferred by DNA, by time spent, by care, by being there when it matters - or by the child's recognition. The subtext is guilt, but also a plea for permission to learn the role after missing the opening chapters, to earn the relationship rather than merely claim it.