Nearly 12 years later a more refined version of it is standing him in awesome stead as

Nearly 12 years later a more refined version of it is standing him in awesome stead as he showed with his annihilation of Goran Ivanisevic in the Compaq Grand Slam Cup final here yesterday. Becker's 6-3, 6-4, 6-4 victory, his first in this six-year-old event, took him only an hour and 23 minutes, won him $1.5m, and represented one of the most complete performances even this colossus of the game has given At 29, Becker is not just making light of defying the years He actually seems to be getting better. "Considering the circumstances, playing against the best server in the game on a pretty quick court, that was as good as I could play," he said. Three years ago, Becker was on the point of being written off He had slipped out of the top 10 in the world rankings. His last Grand Slam title, at the Australian Open in 1991, was fading from the memory. His game looked jaded and merely crude in comparison with the combination of touch and power of which Pete Sampras, for example, was capable.Since then this extraordinary competitor has virtually reinvented himself. He amazed everyone when he reached the Wimbledon final in 1995, and at the Australian Open at the start of this year he became a Grand Slam winner for the sixth time. At Wimbledon last summer he had to pull out in the third round with a ruptured tendon in his wrist when if he had stayed injury-free the failure of most of the other favourites would surely have put him in line for another title.He has overcome that setback to produce some stupendous tennis this autumn - at Hanover in the final of the ATP championship a fortnight ago, when he lost a five-setter to Sampras, and now here.This, however, was simply a no-contest.

Admittedly, Ivanisevic was shaking off the effects of his five-set semi-final against Yevgeny Kafelnikov on Saturday, while Becker's passage past Tim Henman had been relatively smooth. But that only partially explained why Becker was able to lose only 15 points in as many service games, and seven of those were double- faults.Ivanisevic, last year's winner, never got so much as a sniff of a break point. Only twice did he even get to 30 on the Becker serve, and one of them was in the last game of the match. Becker, meanwhile, broke in the eighth game of the first set, the first of the second and the fifth of the third to make victory a formality.It was also a good result for the organisers, who benefited from the credibility Becker brought to an event that suffered a spate of late withdrawals and stands accused of being merely about money. Eyebrows were raised when Richard Krajicek, the Wimbledon champion, lost his first-round match to MaliVai Washington 6-1, 6-2, and with $350,000 in his pocket - $100,000 for turning up, plus a $250,000 bonus for being a Grand Slam title holder - promptly went off for a knee operation."I don't see how the tournament can legislate for players who turn up and aren't fully fit," Brian Tobin, the president of the International Tennis Federation, said. Axel Meyer-Wolden, who is the chairman of the Grand Slam Cup as well as Becker's lawyer, referred to a "black sheep" among the players.

And this one got to do the fleecing himself.GRAND SLAM CUP (Munich) Semi-finals: B Becker (Ger) bt T Henman (GB) 7-6 6-3 6-1; G Ivanisevic (Croa) bt Y Kafelnikov (Rus) 6-7 2-6 6-3 6-2 6-4 Final: Becker bt Ivanisevic 6-3 6-4 6-4.. Tim Henman's first encounter with the might of Boris Becker may have gone somewhat disappointingly to form for the British No 1, but in overall terms his experience at last week's Compaq Grand Slam Cup has been invaluable in giving him a fresh injection of confidence as he sets out to make next year an even bigger one than he has had in 1996, writes Simon O'Hagan. Quite apart from the $431,250 (pounds 265,000) he earned - more than doubling his winnings from all his other tournaments this year put together - his victories over Michael Stich and MaliVai Washington in earlier rounds helped restore the lustre which had been dulled by the three successive first-round exits Henman had to end his season on the ATP Tour. And although he finished a comfortable second in losing 7-6, 6-3, 6-1 to Becker in Saturday's semi-final, his reputation certainly did not suffer and in some respects was enhanced. For a set and a half Henman competed with Becker on equal terms, matching him in all aspects of the game and showing that his calm temperament could withstand exposure even to this harshest of environments. To play Becker on his favourite indoor surface in his home town is about as tough as it gets in tennis, and although Henman was eventually ground down, it was much more by his opponent's overwhelming physicality than the pressures of the occasion.Henman came home believing that the difference between him and the very best players lies in the ability to sustain a high level of tennis over long periods "I think it's a consistency thing," he said "In the first set I was playing solidly I was able to stay with someone of his calibre.

He's probably able to continue playing like that for four or five sets. I think at the moment I probably couldn't do that.''Becker's shrewd assessment of Henman's game was instructive too. He was surprised by his challenger's reluctance to come in behind his first serve, especially on a fast surface like the one being used here, and Henman, who readily accepted the point, now needs to go away and work on a new strategy with his coach, David Felgate.These things take time, however, and it is almost certainly too much to expect Henman to maintain the rate of progress he has achieved over the last 12 months in which he has risen from outside the world's top 100 to No 29 on the ATP rankings. Players arriving on the scene have the advantage of their games being unfamiliar to most of their opponents, but as Henman becomes better known and meets more of the top men, he is not the only one learning from the experience.It is the lot of any opponent of Henman's to be asked how far they think he can go, and Becker's prediction ("I think he's got a good future") was encouraging without it suggesting that he is about to storm the ramparts. He still rates Mark Philippoussis of Australia as the world's best young prospect. Henman, though, knows he can get better, and we will begin to see how much when he returns to action for a tournament in Doha early in the new year, to be followed by Sydney and then the Australian Open..