Last weekend’s Telegraph interview with Boris Becker, the tennis champion who won Wimbledon at seventeen, includes a line that lands with more weight than he seems to intend.
Asked what remained of his friendships after bankruptcy, criminal charges, and eight months in a British prison, he answers plainly: “Ninety per cent of my former circle is gone. Probably even ninety-five.”
There’s no anger in it. Just recognition.
For years, Becker moved through a rare orbit. Six grand slam titles. Heads of state, actors, sporting icons. Then came the concealed assets, the hidden accounts, the undeclared shares. When the scrutiny intensified, the crowd around him thinned. He talks about the people who left.
He says less about the obligations he abandoned long before any of them walked away.
“In prison, you lose everything,” he says. “All that’s left is your personality, your character. You have to ask, ‘Who am I? Will this break me or make me stronger?'”
His account echoes something quieter and more common. We all have fair-weather friends, and most of us have been one. Most of us have stepped back from someone whose life grew heavy. A colleague’s business failed and we meant to check in. A friend’s reputation took a hit and we let distance form. Not out of cruelty, but discomfort. The erosion is slow, almost polite, and easy to justify.
Someone’s name is probably already in mind. Someone you once meant to call.
We like to think loyalty is a trait we carry, but it’s a record of behavior, kept over years, shaped by moments when showing up required effort rather than convenience.
In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle described three kinds of friendship: pleasure, usefulness, and virtue. The first two shift with circumstance. Only the third endures. He also noted that people with status often struggle to find the third kind, surrounded as they are by the first two. Becker learned that dramatically. Most people learn it in smaller, quieter ways.
Modern life complicates the picture. Visibility creates a sense of connection that doesn’t hold up under strain. We treat relationships like services we renew only while they’re delivering something. The numbers grow. Real friendship thins.
Loyalty isn’t measured by who stayed with you. It’s measured by the moments you chose not to step away.
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