Motivation Quote by Boris Becker

Becker isn’t describing rowdy sports passion; he’s describing a vacancy. The detail that does the work is “no light” paired with “fixed emotions” - a face stuck on one setting, like a mask. In a stadium built for entertainment, he’s clocking something closer to trance: “blind worship” that doesn’t actually see the person on court. The scare isn’t that fans care too much. It’s that their caring has curdled into a rigid identity performance, the kind that demands obedience from its idols and punishment when they fail.

The Davis Cup context matters: national teams, flags, anthems, the whole story of “us” versus “them.” Becker came up as West Germany’s teenage miracle in the mid-80s, when sporting triumph was routinely drafted into national mythmaking. So when he says it “makes me think of what happened to us long ago,” he’s gesturing at Germany’s historical muscle memory: mass spectacle, collective fervor, the ways crowds can be trained to feel on command. He’s careful not to name it, but the unease is unmistakable.

There’s also athlete subtext: a player’s most intimate fear is not losing, but being dehumanized - turned into a vessel for other people’s grievances and fantasies. “Horror” lands because it’s disproportionate to tennis, and that’s the point. Becker is warning that the boundary between spirited fandom and coercive devotion is thinner than we like to admit, especially when nationalism gives the crowd a script.