Mr Nastase: The Autobiography

‘How good’s your mum?’

‘She’s number 2 in India,’ he replied.

‘OK,’ I said. Then I saw her shuffling onto court, a vision in a wonderful pink sari. ‘What’s happening, can you run? Will your sari be OK?’ I asked, worried.

‘Oh yes, no problem, no problem, no problem,’ she replied, smiling calmly.

But it was a problem, a problem, a problem, because I was the only one who ran that day. I don’t know what she was number 2 of, but it can’t have been of India. I swear she didn’t run once for the ball and, sure enough, her sari stayed firmly on.

In another mixed doubles match, this time a final, Tiriac was on the other side of the net. I had broken the strings on all my rackets by this stage of the week, and, in those days, there were no stringers at tournaments. There was not much you could do in such a situation, other than ask to borrow someone else’s racket. So Tiriac lent me his last spare racket. At one point, he broke a couple of strings on his own racket and asked me for his last good racket back. So I took his broken racket and proceeded to beat him with it. He was not amused. Things got worse when, in the men’s final, later that day, I borrowed a terrible Indian racket—it did have strings but it was a really odd shape—and beat him again. Then he really was mad with me.

Along with Egypt and Italy, India remains one of the countries that I remember with most affection. Not only did we enjoy the hospitality of the people when we played there, but we also managed to get a sense of what those countries were like beyond just the tennis. Normally, when I played tournaments, I was so busy playing singles, doubles, and mixed doubles that I had no time or energy to go visiting the sights. But I spent so many weeks in these countries in the early years that I felt I actually had time to get to know them a bit.

Our Davis Cup encounter with France in 1966 led to another lucky development in my career. The referee for the tie was Signor Martini, who was high up in the Italian Tennis Federation. As with the Musketeers René Lacoste and Toto Brugnon, I obviously impressed him enough for him to recommend me to his Federation, and this secured me an invitation the following year to come and play a series of tournaments in southern Italy plus, best of all, the Italian Open at the famous Foro Italico in May. This was fantastic for me and, for the next few years, I spent April and May playing in places such as Catania and Palermo in Sicily, Reggio Calabria and Naples, before heading up to Rome. The Sicilians and the southern Italians really adopted Tiriac and me, because we quickly picked up the language. We made a good friend in Sicily, who owned an orange plantation, and he used to invite us over for dinner every night and bring us basketfuls of oranges.

The rest of the time, Tiriac and I would often buy pizza and eat it on the nearest beach before heading back to whichever low-cost hotel we were staying in that week. As anyone who has been to Italy knows, the country is full of these pizza shops where you can buy pizza by the weight. There are only four flavours, and the pizzas themselves are incredibly cheap but totally delicious if you are ravenously hungry and have little money.

In Rome, we stayed with a guy who became a close friend, Francesco d’Alessio. His father was very rich and owned racehorses. He even named a couple after Tiriac and me in the end, though I don’t think my horse could run much because he never won a race in his life. Francesco used to take us out to Trastevere, the old and bohemian part of Rome near the Vatican. In typical Italian fashion, we always seemed to be about twenty noisy people for dinner—tennis players, friends of his, anyone he picked up along the way. Most of the time, I had no idea who half of them were and where they came from, but we always had a great time. At the end of the evening, we would simply call for ‘il conto’, divide it up, and go our separate ways until maybe the next evening.

On other occasions, Tiriac and I would take a bus up to the Via Veneto, the most glamorous street in Rome at the time. We’d first of all go to the cinema, then we’d sit at Doney’s café, the best café to be seen at, and ogle the girls. We didn’t chat any up because we still had no money. No fame, no money, no action, as far as the girls were concerned. They simply weren’t interested.

In the spring of 1967, Ion and I returned to Bucharest for a Davis Cup tie against Spain. We were in Lugano, Switzerland the week before and we must have overspent our allowance, because we no longer had enough money for the plane trip back. So we took the train instead. This was no ordinary journey, though. It took something like twenty-eight hours, involved God knows how many changes in God knows how many countries, and sitting on backside-numbing wooden benches for most of the trip. We managed not to let anyone into our compartment, and we took it in turns to sleep, three hours each, in the luggage net above our heads.

When I eventually staggered off the train in Bucharest, I was not in the best shape to pit myself against Manolo Santana, the player who, along with Roy Emerson, was one of my all-time idols. He was the number 1 clay-courter at the time, a winner of the French and US Opens, the reigning Wimbledon champion, and the guy who really invented the topspin lob, which I was later to make one of my trademark shots. Manolo could lob on both sides, so, after watching him practise it and even getting to hit with him for a bit (it was unusual to be asked to practise with an opponent), I went away and practised it myself for hours and hours, because no matter who you are you only learn to do those shots by practising them really hard. I still assumed I was going to get wiped off court, so I thought I don’t care, I’m just going to try to copy exactly what he does. If he drop-shots me, I’ll drop-shot him back; if he lobs, I’ll lob.

So the match starts. I break him first game. ‘Jesus, good start,’ I thought. Next thing I know, I’ve stretched out an easy 6-0 3-0 lead. The crowd are going wild because this is the best clay-court player in the world and I’ve got him totally bewildered. The Spanish captain, Jaime Bartroli, turns round to his players: ‘Have you ever seen this fucking guy play?’ They all shake their heads. Mystery. Manolo was playing with Tretorn rackets, which he was testing because he was trying to sign up with them, but in his bag he still had his old Slazenger ones. I can tell you, after that he switched pretty quickly back to Slazenger ones and finished me off in four sets.

We eventually lost the tie 3-2 (Tiriac and I won our doubles and I beat Gisbert in one of the singles). At the traditional post-match dinner, I made sure I went up to Santana and said: ‘You know where I learned that shot? Watching you. And practising.’ He laughed and very kindly signed his photo for me ‘para un futuro campion del tennis’. I still have it to this day. It meant a lot to me that a player of his reputation should be so nice to me. At tournaments afterwards, he would always smile, say ‘hello’, chat to me, and this is an attitude that I always tried to adopt with young players when I became successful, and I hope I carried it through.

Although we were technically amateur sportsmen, there was still a gap between the sort of money I was subsisting on and what the top amateurs, such as Santana and Newcombe, were making. It was commonly accepted that they would be paid appearance money for every tournament and, in those days, they could easily make $500-$1,000 per week—good money, in other words. The player restaurants at grand slam events such as Wimbledon were the best places for tournament directors to get together ‘informally’ with players and secure what was really under-the-table money. The game’s governing body, the International Lawn Tennis Federation (ILTF), turned a blind eye, and everyone was happy with what was clearly a very hypocritical situation.

At that time, I was never in the category of those paid large appearance fees, but Ion, by 1967, did manage to get some tournaments to pay us small amounts to turn up and play. Otherwise, the only payment I received was from my Federation, who gave me a weekly allowance to cover my expenses and my hotel accommodation. They would also pay for flights and for me to play in the Davis Cup. They insisted that Tiriac and I practised for a week before the actual week of the tie, so every Davis Cup tie took up two weeks of our schedule. The various ties added up to ten to fourteen weeks a year, because we usually reached the later rounds of the competition. Tiriac and I took the view that this was a small price to pay for total freedom to travel the rest of the time. Later on, when we both turned pro, our Federation’s only requirement in terms of prize money was that we played the Davis Cup for free. We were allowed to keep all the rest of our income—a huge favour for a Communist country to grant to two of its sportsmen.

The following year, 1968, brought earth-shattering changes, not just to various parts of Europe but also to the world of tennis. Czechoslovakia tried to distance itself from the Soviet Union that spring, and all of us who came from Communist countries watched developments carefully. Nicolae CeauŸescu, who had become president of the State Council in Romania the year before, was determined to pursue an anti-Soviet policy from the start, so he resisted the USSR’s pressure to support them militarily, which of course made him very popular in the West.

Tennis, meanwhile, had increasingly developed two parallel worlds, the amateur and the professional. Great players such as Laver, Rosewall and Emerson had established their reputation on the former tour and then turned pro to improve their bank balance. Finally, in 1968, those who ran the game, including people such as Herman David, the Chairman of the All England Club, decided that this crazy situation had gone on long enough and they announced that some previously amateur tournaments would be open to all. This allowed us to play each other in some tournaments at least and to measure, truly, who were the best players in the world. It was another couple of years, however, before the distinction between amateur and professional players finally ended.

The first open major, the French Open, was in May ’68. At the same time, there was chaos in the streets of Paris, and the whole country ground to a halt as it fell victim to a general strike and to student and workers’ demonstrations. Public transport no longer worked, airports were closed, and in Paris the streets were piled high with litter bags, because the dustmen were on strike as well. The tournament organizers were determined that the French Open should still go ahead, so they were forced to lay on coaches to come and get us in Belgium. As a result, the crowds that year were huge, probably because people were not at work, and the atmosphere was like that of a happy siege, if such a thing can exist. It was made all the better because players were at long last reunited with those who had turned pro some years before, so for many it was like finding long-lost friends. I loved the way so many of them played—Laver, Rosewall, Gonzales—but my favourite was still Emerson. He served and volleyed on every point, and he was also having fun and still winning. I used to think, why aren’t I winning, because I’m joking as well?

One evening, Tiriac and I had gone to a bar near our hotel. Because it was close to the Bois de Boulogne, an area used a lot by prostitutes, most of the girls in there were actually on the game (by then, I had worked out why they were continually going up and down the stairs). We got talking to one who told us her life story, and, by the end of the evening, I felt so guilty about not paying for her services that I emptied my pockets, gave her the money I had on me, and gave her the tracksuit top I was wearing. Tiriac thought I was completely crazy, but she had a kid at home, she was a young girl, and business was obviously not good in those troubled times, so I figured maybe this could allow her to buy some food for her baby. Maybe I was naïve and she just went and spent all the money on herself, but that’s what I’m like. I’m very trusting and a bit of a soft touch, which, of course, has sometimes counted against me.

That year, Tiriac and I reached the semifinal of the men’s doubles at Roland Garros, where we were beaten in four sets by the legendary Laver and Emerson. So, on the whole, we were pleased with our first tournament with the pros, even though I had lost in the 2nd round of the singles to the Australian Dick Crealy.

We got ready to move on to Lugano, full of hope for the summer months ahead. That night, however, I started to feel a sharp pain in one side of my lower back, and by the morning I was writhing and moaning in agony. As I was still sharing a bed with Tiriac, he eventually got fed up and began to kick and shove me to stay quiet, because he thought, in his semi-comatose state of sleep, that I was having some bad dreams. It was only when I woke him up completely with my screams that he realized something was seriously wrong. He immediately called a doctor, who told me I had developed a kidney stone and confirmed that, until it passed, I would continue to be in agony. Great. He gave me some strong painkillers, which helped. The stone obviously dislodged itself later that day into another part of my kidney, and I was able to breathe again. Still shaken from the ordeal and worried about the doctor’s prediction that my problem would return and probably need an operation at some stage, I set off with Ion for Switzerland.

For the first few days, I seemed OK, but then, the night before my quarterfinal against the Indian Mukerjea, the pain started again. It felt as if I had a knife in me. Kidney stones are known to give pain that is excruciating and, apparently, worse than many women experience in childbirth. I was barely conscious, such was the agony. If Ion had not been there, I honestly don’t know what I would have done. It was clear that I needed to be repatriated to Romania very quickly. Ion had to stay behind because he was still in the tournament (which he went on to win), so he arranged for a doctor to come at once while he set to work organizing my journey back. The only way—and to this day I don’t know how I managed—was for me to take a train to Zurich, fly from Zurich to Budapest, wait six hours, change planes, and finally fly on to Bucharest, arriving at midnight. I thought I was going to die. I do remember, though, that the doctor had given me a massive painkilling injection before I left Lugano and that I was swallowing painkillers during the whole of the journey as if they were M&Ms.

As soon as I arrived home, I was admitted to a military hospital and operated on at once. But although I felt relief no longer to be doubled up in pain, I was soon very depressed to realize that I was going to be out of action for weeks, if not months. I spent a month recovering in hospital from what, in those days, was quite a complicated and serious operation. I lost so much weight in the three months I was off that, at 65 kg, I really looked like a skeleton by the time I re-emerged fully on the circuit late that autumn. In the meantime, I had missed the whole of the summer, including Wimbledon and the US Open—which I had still not played—and was worried that I would find it difficult to get back to the level I had reached.

To cheer myself up while I was convalescing and practising, I started driving around Bucharest in my new car, a green Fiat 125 that I had bought the year before in Germany (cheaper than buying it in Italy). I was so proud of it that I used to drive around town whenever I could, even though for the first year or so I did not actually have my licence. Well, I figured the best way to learn was to practise. Of course, one day I got caught, so I went straight to pass my test and get a licence.

The year 1969 was another breakthrough one for me. After my traditional visit to India, where I won three tournaments, I headed to the USA for my first trip to the other side of the pond. My first stop was Philadelphia, where Ed and Marilyn Fernberger had run a big tournament for years, at the Spectrum Stadium. They had this huge ten-bedroom house where they put up a lot of the players, like Newcombe, Roche and all the Australians—plus me. Marilyn had told me to take a cab from the airport to her house. That was fine, but what she didn’t know was that I had no money and I was arriving at one in the morning. The house itself turned out to be miles from the airport, so the cab fare was really expensive, something like $7. So here we were, the cab driver and I, crawling around the neighbourhood looking for this house in the middle of the night. On his wing mirror, the cab driver had this huge light that faced sideways and that allowed him to look at the door numbers, like a sort of searchlight. I remember being impressed by what I took to be a clever American invention, because normally when you’re looking for a house number in the dark, the car’s headlights are pointing straight ahead and you can’t see a thing. Eventually we found where the Fernbergers lived. It was 2 a.m. by now, and I woke up the entire household. I then had to explain in bad English that I had no money for the cab fare. ‘Here, give him $10,’ said Marilyn generously, whilst I, of course, felt like keeping the $3 change. It was an embarrassing start to my stay.

After Philadelphia, I had been signed by Bill Riordan, who organized one of the first pro tours in the USA and who was in direct competition with Jack Kramer, who ran one of the others. Bill looked after me in those early years; he was like an agent but also a friend. He put me up in his house in Salisbury, Maryland and lent me an old car to drive around the first week, until, that is, the engine caught fire one day outside the stadium. Firemen had to rush to put out the flames, while I was standing there helplessly, worrying about who would pay for all this. I have to say that, although cosmopolitan Washington DC was not far away, the good people of Salisbury clearly thought I was a real oddity and were fascinated by this Communist alien who had landed among them. They asked me all sorts of questions. What was life in Budapest really like (like many people, they were convinced the Hungarian capital was in fact in Romania), did we have electricity, cars, that sort of thing. Were we still in the Middle Ages, in other words. I always answered politely and even showed them that I could use a knife and fork. Still, the people were very nice, and the tournament was well organized, so I could not complain.

I was still technically amateur at the time, as far as the Romanian Tennis Federation were concerned, so I was not formally earning prize money. Instead Bill paid me a guaranteed weekly sum, about $50 a week, if I remember rightly, and reimbursed my expenses on top. Later, I would receive as much as $250, as Bill worked out that not only did I entertain the crowds but I would also sign for another pro tour, Lamar Hunt’s World Championship Tennis (WCT), if he did not take good care of me.

This was a limbo period for the sport, because, whilst many tournaments were now open, the Davis Cup was still reserved for amateurs. As this was what my Federation cared most about, I myself was not allowed to turn fully professional until a couple of years later, when the Davis Cup finally became open.

Bill’s tournaments took me to a few more small American towns on my introductory tour of the USA, towns like Macon, Georgia, deep in the south of the country, and Omaha, Nebraska, where Tiriac and I, in another of his crazy money-saving schemes that lasted a week, slept in a $1-a-night mobile home. Other than noticing that the food portions were pretty big, and the cars and the people even bigger, I did not have too much time to make comparisons between the American and European way of life. I was living and breathing tennis, to the exclusion of almost everything else.

Even when it came to girls, although I was now able to chat them up and get them into bed pretty easily, I have to say that, until I got beaten in the singles, and often even the doubles, I was a good boy. But once I was out of a tournament, assuming I did not win it, which was still often the case, I went out looking for girls. Tennis is a sport where there is no shortage of girls willing to sleep with a player, just for the sheer hell of it. They’re tennis groupies. Many of the girls at that time were not interested in anything more than being able to tell their friends what they had done. I honestly don’t think they planned for anything more than that. The notion of kiss-and-tell to the newspapers certainly did not exist, nor, thank God, did the idea of using the media to extract money from a man if she became pregnant. Usually, the most they might want was to hang around with you for the week, or maybe travel around with you for a little, not that I ever allowed the latter. When you visit a different beach every week, why take a bucketful of sand with you from the previous week? This was the late Sixties, and sex was on tap. For those who could get it, sex with no strings attached was quite common. For tennis players, let’s just say it was the norm.

So, having finally got rid of my inhibitions a couple of years before, and now that I was earning a little bit and had more confidence, I would usually find myself a girl before the week was out. If I was staying in someone’s house, such as the house of a volunteer at the tournament, it could be a bit tricky to smuggle the girl in and out, though sometimes they had a suitably willing and attractive daughter so I didn’t need to worry.

The last tournament on that winter American tour of 1969 took me to Colombia, and the coastal town of Barranquilla. Colombia was not the drug capital of the world in those days, and good players used to turn up for this event. My week in Colombia was one of my most successful so far, and I won the tournament, even though it was the windiest place I have every played in. I beat two highly rated players, first Mark Cox, then my old adversary Jan Kodes in the five-set final. That gave me a huge boost of confidence, because I realized that I was able to keep up with the top guys. As I headed back to Europe, I felt I had taken another step up in terms of the level I had reached.

Most of the matches back then, both singles and doubles, were played as best of five sets, unlike now where they are mostly best of three, other than in grand slam tournaments. Also, tournaments usually had men’s and women’s draws, because the women had not yet developed their own separate tour (this happened in the early Seventies). In any given week, I would play singles and doubles as best of five sets, plus mixed doubles. That is why, when I am asked if I practised a lot during tournaments, I answer that, once I started passing a few rounds, I did a minimal amount of practice—usually about half an hour a day—because I got all the practice I needed by simply playing matches. The doubles were my practice sessions. Fortunately, Tiriac recognized this and let me do as I wanted most of the time. By contrast, Guillermo Vilas, who Tiriac coached and managed in the Seventies, had the capacity to work like a mad dog (and, I should add, was happy to practise for hours every day). My game would have been neutered if I had been on a similar treadmill. I needed to stay fresh mentally in order to play my game that relied on inventiveness, instinct, and speed. Slogging away on a practice court for hours before a match would not have been the way to make me perform at my best.

That said, I remember one year, at Queen’s Club, when I was challenged by Roy Emerson, who loved to stay superfit.

‘Come on, Ilie, I’m going to jump the net, twenty-five to thirty times with both feet. Can you do that?’

‘Sure, that’s boring,’ I reply dismissively.

‘No, come on, try.’

So I start to jump. I quickly get to twenty-five, thirty. Then I just carry on. Fifty, sixty, seventy, no problem. Emerson’s just staring at me, really surprised. After jumping it one hundred times, I announce: ‘I’m bored, can I stop now?’

He got the point. I suppose I was just lucky that I was both naturally fit and did not need to practise much once I reached a certain level.

Also, I was very sensible when it came to smoking and drinking. I have never smoked in my life, and I never drank alcohol until I was well into my twenties. I would always drink Coca-Cola, Orangina, or Fanta. I still do. My first alcoholic drink was beer, which I’m afraid to say I liked very much from the moment I drank it, and I do now drink a bit of red wine. But that’s it. I’m very careful about how much alcohol I drink.

This was sometimes a problem when we went out with the Aussies, especially John Newcombe and Tony Roche, who Tiriac and I got on very well with. In Paris in 1969, the traditional players’ party was held in Montmartre, and the one area where I could not keep up with John and Tony was drink. They really liked the beers, non-stop beers. They never got drunk, they just had this huge capacity for drinking them. That night, I had to stay until 4 a.m., until they’d finished drinking. Looking back, I’m not sure why I didn’t just get up and leave, but maybe I was still too shy or needed to share the cab fare back to the hotel. I just remember having to wait hours for them to finally call it a day with the beers before we all headed home.

My relationship with Tiriac remained incredibly close. Usually, wherever he went, I went too. The only difference now was that I was getting results in singles and doubles, whereas his were mainly in doubles. But he was still an enormous influence on me, even though in many ways he is very different from me. It reminds me of the film The Odd Couple, with Jack Lemmon and Walther Matthau, because we were such a contrast, both in terms of physique and character. For example, Tiriac stays cool always, he doesn’t show his emotions, and his temper doesn’t flare up like mine. I have seen him upset on court, but he never reacts like me. He never loses control. Of course, we’d argue on court and off, but never badly, and, in the beginning, he was right because he knew much more than I did. I like to have fun and have never had to force myself to work at my game, whereas he has worked incredibly hard for everything that he has achieved. He has an incredibly dry sense of humour, though, and he stays very deadpan when he makes a joke, not like me. I’ll tell a joke and then roar with laughter at it myself.

Tiriac also knew about business, because he is very shrewd and streetwise, though totally honest and generous. He’d talk to people to get the right contracts for me, at a time when I had no sponsors. He got me my contract with Dunlop for my rackets and negotiated appearance money for us in the early days. He was in advance of his time. He was one of the first people to see that tennis was about to become a business, it was going to become more than a sport, so he started to represent players and, later on, to promote tournaments. Despite his limited tennis talents, Ion became a major figure in tennis through his intelligence and foresight.

In other areas of my life, he also influenced me. As soon as we had a bit of money, he taught me to stay in the best hotels and eat in the best restaurants. I remember distinctly the first time I stayed in a good hotel. It was the Cavendish Hotel in Jermyn Street, London, opposite Tramp’s nightclub, during our Davis Cup semifinal against Great Britain in summer ’69. ‘This is the life’, I thought, ‘I wouldn’t mind more of this.’ We weren’t throwing money away, we just wanted to live a normal life, like the other good players. Tiriac was like a best friend, an older brother, a confidant, a father figure, all those things—in fact, my relationship with him was like a marriage without the sex, and I owe him a lot.

My results were steadily improving, partly because I was no longer just playing on clay but also on the faster hard courts around the world. They suited me well, because I was fast. I was starting to hit with more power, to serve-volley when required, whilst still drop-shotting and lobbing my opponents. I reached the 3rd round at Wimbledon, beating one of the top young Americans, Tom Gorman, on the way, so I was quietly working my way up, not the rankings because they still did not exist but the unofficial list of leading players.

The real advantage of winning a few matches at Wimbledon was that I now felt I had a better idea of how to play grass-court tennis by the time the Romanian team lined up next to Great Britain to play our Davis Cup semifinal on court 1, in mid-August 1969. Britain were favoured to win, simply because, in Mark Cox and Graham Stilwell, they had two experienced grass-court players. A lot depended on how Cox would play and, fortunately for us, he blew it.

He got really nervous. He collapsed against Tiriac in the first match, losing in straight sets. Afterwards, some people thought that Ion’s habit of varying the number of times he bounced the ball before serving may have distracted Cox, because he could never tell when Ion was about to serve. Who knows? Stilwell beat Tiriac in straight sets two days later, so it can’t have been that bad. My match against Stilwell did not go in my favour, and I lost it in four sets. The score was 1-1 after the first day. Everything to play for, as they say.

The next day’s doubles were crucial, and Ion and I were really on form. Whilst Tiriac created openings, I was jumping around the net like a mountain goat, sending angled volleys to all corners of the court, and we both lobbed the British pair the whole time. We were confident, and we worked well as a team, whereas our opponents Cox and Stilwell, being left-handers, were both left-court players with Stilwell having to play on the right. They did not work together well, and we beat them without too much trouble in four sets.