Mr Nastase: The Autobiography
Ilie Nastase

with Debbie Beckerman

To Jean-Luc—you’ll be always in my heart

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE 1946-1959

CHAPTER TWO 1959-1966

CHAPTER THREE 1966-1969

CHAPTER FOUR 1969-1971

CHAPTER FIVE 1971-1972

CHAPTER SIX 1972-1973

CHAPTER SEVEN 1974-1975

CHAPTER EIGHT 1976

CHAPTER NINE 1977

CHAPTER TEN 1978-1980

CHAPTER ELEVEN 1980-1984

CHAPTER TWELVE 1984-1991

CHAPTER THIRTEEN 1992-1998

CHAPTER FOURTEEN 1999-2002

CHAPTER FIFTEEN 2003-2004

CHAPTER SIXTEEN 2004-2005

CAREER STATISTICS

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS from Ilie Nastase

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

‘Give me all those flowers, please,’ I asked the flower seller.

She wrapped the colourful mixture of red, white, and yellow roses up carefully, imagining the pleasure the lucky woman would have when she received them. I didn’t explain but handed over the money and ran back into the hotel dining room. I crept nervously up to the man they were intended for, trying to hide behind the huge bouquet as I did so. When I got to his table he turned round, saw the flowers, saw me, smiled, and then laughed. I was forgiven.

The night before, the man in question, Arthur Ashe, had been driven so crazy by me at the 1975 Commercial Union Masters tournament in Stockholm that he had walked off court, mid-match, screaming and shouting, something he had never been known to do. By leaving the court, he had been instantly disqualified. I knew I had gone too far this time in the lead-up to that incident, and, as I hate people to stay angry with me, I knew it was time to make up with Arthur. I had tried to apologize the evening before, but he had brushed me aside and refused to talk to me, so now I was trying again, hoping that this time we could be reconciled.

The scandal I had created was even bigger because Ashe was the most gentlemanly, composed player on the tour. He had never lost his temper and had recently been one of the main people involved in drawing up a Code of Conduct for the players. This outlined which offences were punishable by what fines and explained when a player should be disqualified. It was ironic therefore that he, of all people, should be the first to receive the ultimate punishment, because these rules had been written with players like me in mind, not him.

Arthur happened to be one of the players that I got on with best, even though he was so different from me. Years ago, I’d started to call him Negroni, explaining that in Romanian it doesn’t mean ‘nigger’ (as people often thought) but a little black kid, dressed nice. So he said: ‘I like that, I like that, but only you can call me that.’ He was also very different from the other players: he was involved in politics, in the fight against apartheid, and he was bright. He was the only one to read a book before a match. You never saw other players doing that. I liked him because he always talked sense; he would ask me questions about life in Romania, about politics there—we could have a proper discussion, not just about tennis.

The night before the match, I’d seen Arthur dining a couple of tables away from me with his blonde Canadian girlfriend, and I’d gently teased them: ‘You two look cute, you look like salt and pepper.’ At the bar, later on, I’d teased him a bit more, just to prepare him for the encounter. ‘Tomorrow night I do things to you that will make you turn white. Then you will be a white Negroni.’ Arthur laughed, because he knew what I was like. I wasn’t trying to needle him, like boxers before a fight. We both knew that if I did something in the match, I would upset him. But when it happened it was almost stupid.

I had won the 1st set 6-1, playing with ease and calm, then Ashe had fought back to win the 2nd set 7-5. The 3rd set, I’m still behaving really well but lose my serve and find myself 1-4 down. I’m serving at 15-40 down. Lose this game and it’s all over, Arthur just needs to serve out for the match.

I’d been heckled by this guy in the crowd during the game, and every time I tried to serve he’d start shouting at me. I just couldn’t ignore him, so I’d shout back. At last, I served, only for Ashe to catch the ball in his hand. Apparently, a ball was rolling between the two ball boys at my end during my serve, so Arthur said he had not been ready. The umpire told me I had two serves. I protested, arguing that Ashe hadn’t indicated he wasn’t ready. The crowd started to whistle and jeer, and the heckler behind me was carrying on. It was then that, for some reason, I thought I would slow up play. ‘Are you ready, Mr Ashe?’ I taunted, as I got ready to serve. I bounced the ball again a few more times, with the heckler still shouting out as I did so, then I asked Arthur again: ‘Are you ready, Mr Ashe?’ I don’t remember how many more times I said this, but it must have been quite a few. Suddenly, with no warning, he starts waving his arms in the air and marching to his chair. He’s screaming: ‘That’s it! I’ve had enough!’ and he just takes his rackets and leaves. I’m left standing there, really surprised because I’d never seen Ashe behaving like that. There was total chaos on court, and the public was getting really mad. Nobody knew what to do.

Normally, I should have been awarded the match because he had left the court, but I felt bad about winning like that. Back in the dressing room, I stayed out of Ashe’s way but I could hear him ranting in his corner at the officials. It turned out that the tournament referee, Horst Klosterkemper, was about to disqualify me anyway when Ashe walked off, so the tournament committee were now in a crazy situation where they had two disqualified players.

The end-of-season Masters tournament had gathered together the top eight players from the Grand Prix series of tournaments and had split them into two round-robin groups. The top two from each group then went on to the semifinals. By disqualifying us both from the match, we still had a chance of getting to the semis, if either of us won our two remaining matches in our group. So it seemed like a good solution at the time. But when Ashe was told of their decision, he went berserk. The tournament committee then met again at once. After more heated discussions, they decided, given Ashe’s reputation on the tour and the fact that he was president of the players’ union, the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), that he should be given the match after all and that only I should be disqualified.

The final decision was not reached until eleven o’clock that night, but when they told me I was not upset or surprised. I didn’t think that what I had been doing on court would get me into so much trouble—I certainly never wanted to be disqualified—but once it happened I was not angry. I accepted it and just thought, ‘OK, now I have to win two more matches to get to the semis’, which is exactly what I did.

I felt bad, though, about what I had done to Arthur because he was a good friend of mine. So it was natural for me to want to make it up to him afterwards. The flowers had been my idea alone. It was important that he forgave me; and Arthur of course was too great a man to let a tennis match get in the way of our friendship. It had never been my intention to drive him crazy, despite what some people thought, because my problems on court were hardly ever planned. Yes, I was often called Mr Nasty, but I could also be Mr Nice as well.

CHAPTER ONE 1946-1959

I could have been a Russian.

My story begins not in Bucharest, Romania, but beyond the mountains of Transylvania, in what is now the independent republic of Moldova, a country squeezed in between the Ukraine and Romania and that was formerly part of the Soviet Union.

My mother, Elena, was born there in 1907, but she and her younger sister were orphaned during the First World War. In fact, I have no further details of who they were brought up by because my mother never spoke about her childhood. I only discovered that she had lost both parents when her sister revealed this to me shortly before her death a couple of years ago, and, as my mother had long since passed away, I was unable to find out anything more about her early years.

My father, Gheorghe, was born in 1906 in Ramnicul-Sârat, which means Salty River, and is a town about 240 km from Bucharest in the mountainous Muntenia region of Romania. He met my mother in 1925, when he came to Moldova to work as a policeman for the national bank, the Banca Nationala a Romaniei (BNR). He worked all his life for this bank. Within a year, they were married and my eldest brother Volodia was born. By 1933, they had two more children, Ana born in 1930 and Constantin three years later. In those days, though, medicine was not as developed as it is today, and when Volodia fell ill, aged eight, nothing was available to help him. I don’t know what he died of but I think he had the sort of illness that today would simply have been cured with antibiotics.

I have no doubt that losing a child is the worst thing that can happen in life, so I can only imagine that losing their first-born child must have hit my parents hard. This may partly explain the nine-year gap between Constantin’s birth and the birth of their next two children, Cornelia in 1942 and Georgeta in 1944. Barely a few weeks after Georgeta’s birth, however, the Russians started making their way towards Moldova. It was then that my father decided to take the entire family back to his home town of Ramnicul-Sârat. He had found work in the BNR branch of the town and felt the family was safer there than in Moldova. Sure enough, within two weeks, the Russians had invaded and Moldova became part of the Soviet Union.

My parents did not stay long in Ramnicul-Sârat and, by 1945, my father had again managed to get himself transferred, this time to Bucharest. So I look back now and realize that, had he hesitated for a couple more weeks, my family would have had to stay in Moldova, I would have been born a Russian and tennis history would have been quite different. Too bad, eh?

By the end of the Second World War, Romania’s own pro-Nazi government was overthrown and Stalin had appointed a Communist government. Soon after, the king was deposed and my country became the People’s Republic of Romania. Communism had arrived. So it was against that background that my mother gave birth to me on 19 July 1946. I was an enormous 5 kg baby, and my father told me many years later that my mother had not actually wanted another child: she already had enough mouths to feed. But he insisted and insisted—poor woman—so it was agreed that I would definitely be their last child. Given how much I weighed at birth, she was hardly going to change her mind. So maybe because of this, and maybe because, having already lost one son, my mother was happy to have another baby boy, she may have indulged me a bit more than my brother and sisters. I won’t say any more than that because I can already hear the amateur psychologists exclaiming with excitement that this explains everything: I simply wasn’t disciplined enough as a child. All I can offer as a defence is that there wasn’t anything, such as toys, food or money, that my mother or father could spoil me with. We weren’t poor but we weren’t comfortably off either. But I think when you have so many children, you simply relax about discipline and attention by the time you get to the last one. As long as he is safe and healthy, you worry less about whether he has done all his homework perfectly or has gone to bed at the right time every night. So I don’t think I was spoiled so much as protected.

We lived in an idyllic setting for a child. My father had been given a house in the grounds of the Progresul Tennis Club, which belonged to the bank (it had originally been the king’s club as well), so, as well as being a policeman for the bank, he also took care of the grounds of the club. The tennis club happened to be the main national club, where tournaments and Davis Cup ties were played. It is in beautiful grounds, the size of Roland Garros in the old days, and the courts are situated among alleys bordered by huge old plane trees and great big expanses of grass.

Our house itself was a cream-coloured bungalow at one end of the club, next to the football club that also belonged to the BNR bank, and I shared a bedroom with Cornelia and Georgeta, who everyone called Gigi, though we used to spend as much time as we could outdoors. As a family, we owned very little other than the basic items of clothing and furniture, but that was not unusual in Romania in those days.

You have to consider that there was no television until the mid Fifties, and we did not own one until I bought our first one ten years later. In any case, in the early days of television, they only showed Russian and Romanian stuff and the odd very bad American film. Nothing that you would want to watch, in other words. So until we got a TV, we would listen to our enormous Russian radio, which my father used to hit regularly to get it going again when it decided to stop working, which was very often. We didn’t own things such as a camera, either, which is why I do not have a single photograph of me as a child, something I am very sad about because I can’t show my kids what I looked like when I was little. So all the material goods that we now take for granted were absent in our household during my childhood. But as any person will tell you who has grown up in this way, what you don’t know you don’t miss.

What I did have, though, was freedom. We lived in an enclosed environment—and the grounds were guarded by police because the club belonged to the national bank—so I could run around all day in total safety. I would climb, and fall out of, the many fruit trees in the grounds, and would chase my sisters endlessly and get up to all sorts of stupid games. I remember, when I was five or six, falling over during one of our chases, and a piece of wood piercing my knee from front to back. Screaming and in pain, I was carried home, where a friend of my mother’s just removed the wood with one sharp movement. With my sister Gigi, we would practise jumping off the flat roof of this building that was about 3-4 m above the ground. One day, when I wasn’t looking, my sister thought it would be funny to push me off and see what happened. Instead of landing on all fours, like a cat, as I usually did, I landed flat on my face and flattened my nose completely. My mother beat her up after that.

But my earliest memory was when I must have been about three years old. The seating around the main stadium court just consisted of open wooden benches, rising up above the court. I remember I used to run around naked a lot—it was summer and hot—and I liked to clamber up to the top corner of the stadium’s seats and watch the tennis, naked. On this occasion, Romania was playing a Davis Cup tie against France, and the ground was full. People were excited to be able to see great names like Benny Berthet playing. So there I was, happily watching the action when I realized I badly needed to go to the toilet. Unable to hold myself, I started to pee and everything started to dribble between the stands. At first, people below thought it was raining until they realized what it was that was dripping on to their heads. Some guy came running up and started to scream and beat me up, and my mother rushed up and beat the hell out of me too. That was my first court-side scene. And, even then, the punishment didn’t put me off.

When I was four, my brother hired me as his sidekick to help sell Turkish delight to the fans who went to the nearby soccer stadium to watch matches. Constantin has always been one to spot an opportunity to make a bit of extra money, so he’d buy this Turkish delight and sell it at a profit to the captive audience. I’d have to nip over the busy tram lines that separated the Progresul Club from the soccer stadium, carrying not only the sweets but also big jugs of cold water—we’d offer a glassful as well to offset the cloying taste. I suspect we weren’t really allowed to engage in this sort of entrepreneurship as it did not really fit in with Communist thinking.

By the Fifties, food shortages were severe in Romania and, even though Ana and Constantin were also working, we only had just about enough food for us all. I remember my father queuing for basic foods such as bread and, although we never actually went hungry, others certainly did. The one thing we were most lucky about was that the authorities allowed us to keep a cow and a goat in the grounds of the club, which meant we always had enough milk. My mother would regularly get me to hand bowlfuls of milk to children on the other side of the fence separating the club from the street, and I have to say that the image of these hungry children has stuck with me to this day.

But it was because we had these animals that this absurd legend began to circulate when I first joined the tennis circuit, that I had once been a shepherd boy, although God knows how I could have kept sheep in a city-centre club. Even so, I lost count of the number of articles about me in the early years that stated this ‘fact’ as the Gospel truth. The intention, I guess, was to make out that I had only just emerged from a cave and that my story literally was a rags to riches tale.

By the time I was five or six, I had started at the nearby kindergarten, where I was allowed to go by myself, although the grass was so tall that you could not see me walking through it. I also used to spend a lot of time watching tennis but had yet to pick up a racket. My brother, who is thirteen years older than me, was a good tennis player who went on to play tournaments abroad and Davis Cup for Romania. I would admire his rackets, although they were still too heavy for me to pick up, but there was never any question that I might start to play. Actually, I think that was the best thing for me because, if I had started when I was three or four, as so many kids now do, I would probably have got bored with tennis by the time I was a little older and would have moved on to something else. My mother never said: ‘Go and watch them in the Davis Cup, try to learn from them.’ I would just run up over the little grassy hill that separated our house from the courts and watch the players for hours on end, subconsciously taking in all their movements, simply because I enjoyed watching. I never thought of it as a learning process.

I was extremely skinny when I was young, largely because I was unable to stay still for very long. When I was six, I was very ill with bronchitis and pneumonia, and my father—fearing that I might suffer the same fate as Volodia—scooped me up, took me to the governor of the bank, put me on his desk and pleaded with him to get me some medicines. This had the desired effect because the guy signed at once to allow me to be prescribed some antibiotics. But even so, I remained scrawny right through childhood and adolescence. Even in 1970, aged twenty-four, I still only weighed 70 kg, which is not very much for my height of 1.85 m.

Around the age of six, I started to play tennis a bit, not with a real racket but with a sort of wooden bat. I would hit endlessly against a wall that was directly below a chocolate factory that backed onto the club, and occasionally the women who worked there would throw sweets out to me. Needless to say, that encouraged me to go there more regularly and to play for hours on end. I would still watch the club members whenever I could, but I remember thinking, even at that age, that I could probably beat most of them if I was given a chance. Because the grounds were also next to the soccer club, I would often wander onto the pitch, juggling a ball at my feet and the bat and a tennis ball in my hand. The soccer ball was sometimes just made of old pieces of material tied up and stuffed into a sock and I would kick it around until basically it disintegrated. Still, I loved running around doing both things at once. It was all just one big game.

Unfortunately, my huge, safe playground was taken away from me when I was eight: my two eldest siblings had left home, so we had to move house to make way for others. Our new home was a ground-floor, two-bedroomed apartment in a small, grey block of flats nearer the city centre. I had to share a room with Gigi and Cornelia. With its windows that were barely above street level and no garden, the apartment was bleak compared to our bungalow, and I hated it at first.

The street became my playground, and my main pastime with my friends was to play soccer for hours on end. We also liked to run over to the US ambassador’s residence, which was not too far away, and rummage through the bins, picking out anything that was American or that smelt good. What we were really looking for was Coca-Cola bottle tops, which we would then place on the tram tracks. When they had been well flattened by the trams, we would retrieve them and play a game of chance. This involved flipping the tops like coins and the one whose top came out with the Coca-Cola sign on top would win both coins. You could, if you were lucky, accumulate quite a lot of these prized symbols of Western decadence.

My current wife, Amalia, tells me that, thirty years later, under CeauŸescu, with the country in massive debt and food shortages a daily occurrence, she and her friends used to play an almost identical game. They would collect Pepsi bottle tops (by then, for some reason, Pepsi had overtaken Coca-Cola in appeal) and the one who had the most tops was the most important. So nothing had changed, and, either way, it goes to show that if you deprive kids of these sorts of things, they will just come to want them even more.

The only good thing going for our new apartment was that it was literally over the road from the school that I went to from the age of eight to seventeen. So I used to jump over the fence at lunchtime, grab a piece of bread with sugar on it for lunch, which was sometimes all we had to eat, then run back and spend the rest of the breaktime playing soccer with my friends.

The school was mixed and had about 1,000 pupils. Until we were eleven, there was no school uniform so I used to wear the same blue tracksuit every day. My mother would wash it every three days in our huge bath, because we did not have a washing machine. She would then hang it up to dry and hope that it was dry the next morning for school, which was not always the case. The tracksuit was like wearing jeans and a sweat shirt now for kids. Similarly, the only shoes I had as a child were tennis shoes. But then, what other shoes would I have needed at that age? I wasn’t exactly going to parties.

School was something that I put up with. In primary school I was constantly being punished, sometimes for things that I did not even do. Because I was so shy and never dared look the teacher in the eye, I always looked guilty. The teacher would then pull my ear, which made me mad, or hit me round the head, which made me madder. But one of her favourite punishments was to get me to kneel in a corner, for hours on end, on upturned walnut shells. Weird, I know. And painful, too, I can tell you. By the end, my mother would be summoned in almost every day to see this mean old teacher, and she would try to tell me to behave, but somehow no amount of threats or punishments seemed to work. Do you detect a pattern for the future?

In secondary school I continued to be uncommitted to work. I’d get by—no more. We studied French, which I hated at the time, because we had a teacher who spat all the time when he spoke and who was never satisfied if you didn’t say the word exactly right. He was Romanian, by the way. Anyway, he managed to put me off that language, which is a shame because if I’d known I would marry a French woman I might have paid more attention.

We were also forced to study Russian, and, as a result, it was universally the number one most hated subject. In fact, we hated anything to do with Russia and any influence it had over our country. I will say, in his favour, that one good thing CeauŸescu did was to remove Russian from the list of obligatory subjects to study at school. We were also the only Eastern bloc country never to have Russian soldiers on our soil, so somehow, in these small ways, we managed to keep our independence just a little bit. But our leader at the time, Gheorghiu-Dej, headed up a Stalinist regime and was more friendly with the Russians than CeauŸescu ever was. In fact, I remember vividly the day that Stalin died: sirens went off all over the city; trams, trains and buses came to a halt and everything stopped while we had a minute’s silence and we all pretended we were very upset. They used to make us chant a slogan at school that said: ‘Stalin and the people of Russia bring us liberty.’ It rhymes in Romanian (Stalin Ÿi poporul rus, Libertate ne-a adus), so it was meant to be a nice, catchy thing to chant. But no one was fooled. My parents, my brother and elder sister remembered life before Communism and they knew this current regime did not mean liberty. This wasn’t the right way to live. So even at a young age I knew this chant was not true.

I was still getting into trouble at school, not for anything really bad, but for just making a nuisance of myself, pulling the girls’ hair—that sort of thing. Then one day, something happened. I must have been eleven or twelve, and the teacher was about to punish me for whatever it was I was supposed to have done, when the guy who’d actually done it owned up. The teacher was about to hand out the punishment to him, but I said: ‘No, it’s OK, punish me anyway.’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘you haven’t done it.’ ‘Yes but it’s OK, punish me, it’s always me anyway.’ I was so used to it by then that any punishment didn’t mean anything any more. I treated it as a joke. Maybe if tournament directors and tennis officials had realized this, they would have not bothered to go through all those later fines and suspensions, and spared everyone a lot of problems.

Because we no longer lived at the Progresul Club, I was having to play tennis and soccer at the Steaua Club, about twenty minutes’ walk away from where we lived. The Steaua Club (which means Star) is the Army Club in Romania, and my brother played tennis for them. I was obsessed with soccer and tennis, and so I happily went down every single day, after school, to play both for hours and hours, practising tennis wherever and whenever I could, ball-boying for anyone who wanted me and generally hanging around as much as possible. Sometimes I would get up at 6 a.m. to ball-boy for members of the club. Nothing else mattered but those two sports and, between the ages of ten and thirteen, I played both nonstop.

With soccer, however, I used to come home battered and bruised all over (I played inside right, the number 8 shirt), and my mother was getting more and more unhappy about the state of my legs, which were usually a nice mixture of red and blue cuts and bruises. Tennis at least had the advantage of not risking broken bones every time I played a match. On the other hand, soccer was very good for my tennis because it helped with the coordination, the speed around the court, the footwork, and the balance.

So, until I was in my teens, I could not decide whether to be a footballer or to devote myself to tennis. It was not a question of a career or money because, in those days, it was clear that there was no money in tennis. My brother, despite being a Davis Cup player and despite bringing back exciting tales of foreign travels and the odd packet of chewing gum, was still having to work as an electrician to make ends meet.

From the age of eleven, I had a coach, Colonel Constantin Chivaru, who was an ex-tour player himself, a Davis Cup team member with my brother, and it was he who persuaded me to devote my time to tennis. He never changed my technique, though, because he could see that it was very instinctive and natural, and he realized that it would do more harm than good to give me formal coaching. Because he didn’t want me going off to play soccer, he would bribe me with chocolates and encourage me to keep practising—not that I needed much encouragement. So, for a while, there was quite a lot of friction between him and the Steaua soccer coach as each fought for my loyalty and commitment.

During this whole period, my parents never once pushed me in one direction or the other. They had never done a stroke of sport in their lives and they never showed the slightest interest in my sporting career, so they were the least likely to know what to advise. All they worried about was where on earth my future lay, because it was clear that I was never going to do more than the absolute minimum amount of school work. Frankly, they didn’t even know what I was up to in sport. My father used to tease me. He’d say: ‘What are going around with that guitar for? You’re not going to do like your brother?’ He didn’t actively discourage me, but probably if he’d encouraged me to play I would have done the opposite, because it always upset me—and, yes, it still does at times—when someone told me I had to go and do something. So I can definitely say that my parents were the total opposite of pushy tennis parents. They never went near a court. But, in my mind, I knew that I wanted to do sport. I didn’t care what it led to—I just knew I could not imagine doing anything else. It was just a question of which one I was going to choose, tennis or soccer.

In the end, tennis won because I just enjoyed it more and I knew deep down that I was better at it. And when you are good at something, you get emotionally involved in it. I suppose I stopped being emotionally involved in soccer. Also, in tennis, I could get noticed more: if I won it was all down to me, and if I lost it wasn’t because ten other players had let me down. I could play the match my own way, unlike soccer where there is a team to consider. Although, I have to admit, I did tend to do as I wanted a bit too much on the soccer pitch as well: I’d hog the ball, to the extent that some players would shout: ‘Hey, did your mum give you the ball? Is that why you won’t let it out of your sight?’

My first tennis tournament was when I was eleven or twelve, and it was not a success. I played this kid who quickly beat me 6-0 in the 1st set. That was too much to bear, so I put my racket down and started to chase after him round the court until I caught him. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ he said. I immediately started to cry and then screamed back: ‘Nobody’s going to beat me 6-0,’ and promptly started to hit him on the head. He still beat me 6-2 in the next set, but it had started already: my first on-court tantrum. And it was not the last time I cried after a match, either.

My brother and my coach could see I had a lot of talent but they did not know whether that was going to be enough because I was so skinny. At that age, I used to run like a rabbit, chasing balls all over the place, whether they were in or out, and would return absolutely everything, using big, loopy shots. It used to drive my opponents crazy. But, with no television, I’d never seen top-level tennis, other than the odd Davis Cup tie, so I did not know how else tennis could be played, especially not when I was twelve or thirteen. The notion of clay-court tennis versus, say, grass-court tennis, or serve-volley versus back-of-the-court play had never even entered my mind. All I had was a treasured photograph of Roy Emerson that I had cut out of a tennis magazine brought back by my brother from one of his trips abroad. In it, Emerson was hitting a high backhand volley, so for years I only had that to go on when trying to work out how to hit that shot. But really, I didn’t have a clue, I just played instinctively, because my technique was never taught to me.

When people look back at their lives, they realize that certain events along the way were crucial to the direction that life eventually took. Some are down to good luck—and I believe that to be successful we all need a bit of luck—others to conscious decisions. In my case, the first key event that shaped my life occurred when, aged thirteen, I won the National Championships for my age category. Held in a city called Cluj, this was a big win for me but, best of all, I was given my first ever new racket—a beautiful Slazenger. I was unbelievably excited. That decided it. I realized tennis could be good for me and, from then on, I worked hard and was determined to get better.

The other thing that happened to me that week was that I saw, for the first time, the man who was to become the biggest influence in my life for the next ten years, Ion Tiriac. Aged twenty, he was seven years older than me and he had just created a big upset by beating the longstanding Romanian number 1, Gheorghe Viziru, to become National Champion, a title he retained until I took it from him eight years later, in 1967. Because I was so keen to stay on after my win and soak in the atmosphere of the tournament, I asked to ball-boy the senior final. Ion of course does not remember seeing me run around the court retrieving balls for him. Frankly, why should he, I was a mere bean-pole ball boy. But watching the National Champion play was a big thing for me, and it showed me, once again, what I should be aiming for.

That was when I realized that tennis was going to be my life.

CHAPTER TWO 1959-1966

Paris in 1966 was good to me.

Despite winning in Cluj, my life did not change much for the next few years. Nowadays, a kid who wins a national title starts to travel to as many junior tournaments as possible. He is ranked from the age of eight or nine, and he has agents looking to sign him up before you can say ‘match point’. Instead, I went back to the Steaua Club, practised hard, and played a few tournaments here and there.

One of my biggest regrets today is that I was not able to play junior tournaments around the world, because I am sure that I would have learned to compete earlier and to handle the pressure of matches better if I had been playing the juniors. And this would have improved my subsequent results. It used to really hurt me when I read in the papers that players such as the Czech Jan Kodes or the Russian Alexander Metreveli, who I played in tournaments when we were teenagers, were regularly touring abroad, getting valuable experience. The Australian players also used to go travelling for weeks at a time from the age of about sixteen, learning how to compete.

I, meanwhile, was stuck at home, the Romanian Tennis Federation being unable to send me overseas to get experience, through lack of money. Strangely, although I knew I wanted to keep playing tennis, I never had a grand master plan that I was going to build a career from it, even when I was fifteen or sixteen. I loved the sport. I was passionate about it. I knew I wanted to keep playing it, but I never thought further than that. Planning in fact has never been my strong point, and there was nobody around me who could help me to plan. I certainly had no idea that I might actually live from my winnings. Tennis in those days was strictly an amateur sport, certainly for people who came from Communist countries, so there was no notion of playing yourself into money.

On court, during practice, I used to like to have fun but I also had a temper because I hated to lose. My temper, I think, is something to do with the Romanian temperament. Contrary to what most people think, we are not Slavs but Latins. Our language closely resembles Italian (and is now the closest living language to Latin), and we get into heated arguments very easily. But although I lost my temper and cried and screamed regularly during practice matches, I did not cheat. Anyone who thinks that I may have grown up in an environment where this was common is wrong. There was no point in cheating, because you’d just get found out by parents and coaches who were watching and beaten up by your opponent.

I did, however, like to complicate things by playing drop shots, lobs, finishing the point the way I would like. I wanted constantly to make the ideal, perfect, point. So if I missed a drop shot once or twice, I would keep playing it until I made it. It used to drive my coach, Colonel Chivaru, absolutely crazy. Later, it drove Ion Tiriac even more crazy, because I would insist on doing this in real matches. Ion would sometimes try to talk tactics with me the day before a match, saying: ‘Don’t try to drop-shot that guy too much, he’s very fast.’ That was dangerous because I didn’t like being told how to play. I liked to play the game my way—that’s what made me happy. So I’d go out, do the opposite of what he’d said, and drop-shot the guy for the hell of it, just to see how many times I could beat him. I’d then go back to Ion ‘You see how much I made him run? He ran like a yo-yo!’ ‘But you lost three sets to love,’ he’d growl, tearing his hair out. ‘Yes, but God I made him run for his win,’ I’d reply, beaming.

Finally, aged seventeen, I left school and entered the Army, the only choice for someone in my situation. Normally, military service would have lasted sixteen months, but luckily, because I was already playing for the Army Club, it was reduced down to a couple of nights in barracks and a ceremony where I had to swear allegiance to the colonel of the regiment. I had to be given the words to read because I had no idea what I was swearing to. After that I was free to keep playing tennis all day, every day. I am happy to say that a rifle never passed through my hands, although this did not prevent me from being immediately promoted to the rank of lieutenant (obviously not because of my good soldiering skills). I was also given a nice uniform and, even better, a pay rise.

I used that extra money to buy my first bicycle. I was thrilled, because now I could get around town much faster. I would cycle to the club, practise, then cycle off to a canteen-style restaurant where sportsmen were able to go. The Ministry of Sports gave us vouchers so that we did not have to pay. On any given day, there would be a great mix of different sportsmen—cyclists, soccer players, gymnasts. Tiriac and I would usually have lunch there, and he would often have breakfast there in the morning as well. He would think nothing of demolishing twelve or fourteen eggs. He would eat like an animal, just like his future protégé, Guillermo Vilas. Neither of them put on any weight, though, because they were doing so much training. After a few days with my brand-new bike, which had cost me almost one month’s salary, I pedalled up to the restaurant, left it against the railings, did not lock it, and never saw it again. It was stolen from under my nose.

The only downside to my life as a so-called soldier was that my hair was cut to within 1/2 cm of its life. So it was as a shaven-headed recruit that I was packed off for my first trip abroad, to play a tournament in Sofia, Bulgaria. I was unbelievably excited. Far too excited in fact to be worried by the bumpy plane ride in the old twin prop Ilyushin that took me there. Nowadays, turbulence in planes frightens me a lot. It’s the one thing that panics me in a plane, far more than the supposedly more dangerous takeoff and landing. But, back then, I barely noticed. My head was, literally, above the clouds.

Tiriac was also on that trip, and he had obviously been asked by the Federation to keep an eye on me. He had this incredible aura about him, and for the first few days he barely even looked in my direction. He’d turn up to watch my matches, but I could tell he wasn’t very interested in what else I was up to. After all, I was an unbelievably shy and naïve seventeen year-old, whereas he was an established twenty-four-year-old international player. It must have been embarrassing to drag me around with him.

After the tournament in Sofia, I was able to travel to a few other tournaments in Communist countries such as Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Estonia. But mainly I practised a lot, and, when the weather got too cold and snowy (Bucharest is covered in snow for at least two months every winter), Tiriac and I would get sent to training camps high up in the Transylvanian mountains to get fit and, in my case, to fill out. That I hated. Unlike Tiriac, I have always been bored by physical training and gym work, so I just could not take all those exercises seriously. These camps were like army camps. They’d be full of athletes from every sport: some were huge great boxers and weightlifters, who only showed up my scrawny body even more. I hated the whole time I was there, particularly as nothing I could do seemed to fill me out and I’d come home as thin as ever. Tiriac used to say that I looked as though I was walking on my hands, because my legs were as thin as my arms. He’d then poke my ribs and wonder where on earth my muscles were. Obviously none of this did much good for my confidence.

In 1965, aged nearly nineteen, I was finally allowed to travel to the West. The Federation had obviously realized that it was worth sending me abroad, and, from the start, they gave me total freedom to go wherever I wanted (or, at least, to wherever I could get invited). This really was a gift from God. I was always aware of how fortunate I was to be granted such freedom, which was not available to other sportsmen from Romania—and from other Communist countries—who were very restricted in their travel. Of course, I was also aware that this freedom could be taken away. But, by being able to travel and do my sport to a high level, I had access to a better life and to one that my countrymen could never hope to have. Being a promising tennis player, though, did not make much difference to my everyday life in Romania. I still lived at home, and, although we did not have the diversity of food of the West, we did not have the food shortages that we had suffered in the Fifties. So apart from receiving a bit of extra food and regular amounts of chocolate, the main advantage was that, in that Cold War period, I was suddenly gaining the freedom to come and go as I pleased outside the Iron Curtain.

The first few trips I made were to countries such as Egypt and India. Hardly places that symbolized the glamorous Western lifestyle, but, in the beginning, the only thing I thought about was tennis. I had no time or money to go exploring very much beyond the club. In Egypt, Tiriac and I would play for several weeks in a row, going from one tournament to another. I loved Egypt, the people were so kind, and the club in Cairo—the Gezira Club—was a beautiful English club with a great tradition going back a hundred years. The tournament there was the start of the European circuit, and good players would come and play.

That first year, I played the Australian Ken Fletcher. He was an excellent doubles player who won the Wimbledon men’s and mixed doubles titles. In my match with him, my shoes were so bad that I had no grip at all, and I was slipping and sliding all over the place, like I was on ice. There was only one thing for it: off went the shoes. After that, it was easy. Game, set, and match to me. Fletcher couldn’t believe it. He’d been beaten, not only by some skinny unknown Romanian but also by one who was wearing socks as well. I’m sure he drowned his sorrows with a few beers that night.

We would get two Egyptian pounds (20p) a day in pocket money, enough to buy two pairs of shoes. OK, so they were Egyptian shoes but they were still shoes. We would be given one free meal a day at the club, and we would supplement that by buying all the exotic fruit, such as oranges (for us these were exotic), which cost so little out there. We would usually stay in small, very basic hotels or with English families, who took good care of us. But once or twice, because we had basically run out of money, Ion decided it would be good to sleep on the beach. It was hot, he figured, so we washed at the club, bought food and ate dinner on the beach and settled down to sleep outdoors. Why not? Well, actually, it was terrible, that’s why not, with sand getting everywhere inside our clothes, so luckily he soon went off that idea.

My game around that time was unorthodox and relied heavily on my speed and anticipation around the court. I had a very loopy forehand, no serve, and no power in my shots. I just used to run everything down. This made my opponents mad, but there was not much else I could do. I also loved to drop-shot, lob, and try out crazy shots that my opponents were not expecting.

Because I’d never been shown how to hold a racket, my grips were not perfect, particularly the backhand grip, and this did not give me the ideal backhand, like Laver’s or Emerson’s. I also held (and still do) the racket so that the end was in the palm of my hand, rather than emerging beyond. If you look at photos of other players, you can usually see the tip of the racket handle, whereas with me you cannot. The advantage was that I could play with much more wrist, and, throughout my career, this enabled me to get shots back with the much heavier wooden rackets that everyone used—shots that other players could not return. Consequently, I developed both a very strong wrist and great touch.

As for the anticipation, you cannot teach that to anyone. All I knew was that I had a sixth sense, particularly at the net, about where the ball would go. If you put me with my back to the net and hit ten balls, eight times out of ten I would turn the right way to hit the ball. Martina Hingis was the same, and that’s partly what made her such a great player. Nowadays, players so rarely come to the net that they cannot have that anticipation. They will stay in the middle and wait for the shot to be hit before moving, whereas I would start to move as the shot was being hit—and sometimes even before—because I was usually right about which direction it was going in.

Slowly, my experience grew and I began to win a few matches and to do well with Tiriac in doubles. At first, he told me he would have preferred to play doubles with other players—even my brother who was closer in age to him than I was—because I was not helping his results, but gradually we started to improve on court and to get closer off court. His influence over me began to grow and, at that time, I used to lap up everything he said and copy everything he did. He would look after our spending money and give me just enough to buy something to eat—another great way to stay skinny—although if I really wanted to buy myself a T-shirt or something, and we had enough money at the end of the week, he would allow me to do so. Usually, though, he made very sure that I did not spend all my money at once and that I saved what I could, not that there was usually much left over. But it was advice that I have carried with me to this day. He’d say it was better to put the money in the bank, where it would grow slowly but surely, than to invest it in something crazy which might or might not work.

When it came to tennis, Ion was also the first to recognize that his success was down not so much to talent as to sheer hard work and determination. This was fine, except that he was sometimes so determined to win at all cost that it became very well known on the tour that he would use various tricks to obtain an advantage over an opponent. Tricks such as staring long and hard at him when he’d won a good rally, or breaking up his rhythm either by slowing down or speeding up play between points. Gamesmanship was a word that Ion knew well, and many people think that he deliberately taught me all the tricks in his book. I suppose in some cases he did, but in others I just watched and learned. If it worked for him, then I might use it on a later occasion, though I was not always conscious that I’d seen Ion use it first.

In those early years, I was happy to work hard and practise for hours. I did not see it as ‘work’, just as total enjoyment. If ever Tiriac had to go rushing off court during a practice session to make a phone call or whatever, he would return a quarter of an hour later to find that, to amuse myself, I had been hitting lobs to myself, jumping over the net to retrieve them, then hitting another lob back over, jumping the net again, and so on, trying to see how long I could keep the rally going without the ball bouncing twice. It was all just a game.

Although I was totally at ease on the tennis court, I was still hopelessly shy off it and didn’t say much to anyone. I took the view that no-one was interested in what little I had to say. Winning gives you confidence in yourself as a person, and as I was not winning anything I was not confident. As for women, I was physically incapable of looking any of them in the eye, still less to lay a finger on them. God knows I was interested and I liked looking at them, but I was still not able to go any further. In Romania, I had had a few fumbles with one or two girls but that had never led to anything, partly because I was away a lot and partly because I felt so unattractive. Skinny and with no muscles to speak of, who on earth would want to go to bed with me, I thought? I avoided what I assumed would be a humiliating refusal by never putting myself in the situation of asking.

My two trips to Roland Garros in Paris, in spring 1966, proved to be a breakthrough for me, both professionally and personally. As a child brought up to play clay-court tennis, Roland Garros was my Mecca. It was the biggest tournament for Europeans, and the one that I had dreamed of playing and occasionally that I had even dared to dream of winning. Walking through those historic gates, seeing the distinctive grey concrete stadium, knowing that those French Musketeers had won here so many times, thrilling the crowds for years, all this was unbelievably exciting. Unlike today’s players, I have always been fascinated by the history of tennis, by the great champions of the past and how they managed to play. Even when I first started to travel—and maybe because as a child I had been starved of information about tennis—I had nothing but respect and admiration for everything these past champions had achieved, even though their style of play and equipment were totally different. Despite that, they played fantastic tennis. When you think that, not only were players such as René Lacoste playing in long trousers, but also their rackets did not even have leather on the grip. They played with just wooden shafts. Incredible. I don’t know how they held the racket. That’s why a visit to the Roland Garros museum, which opened in 2003, is a trip all tennis fans should make, to appreciate how exceptional these champions were.

So when I was selected to play Davis Cup for Romania against France in Paris, I could not wait. As anyone from a Communist country will tell you, it was always made clear that representing your country in any sport was the highest honour for any citizen and what really mattered to the country was not what you achieved as individuals but what you achieved as a team, in our case in the Davis Cup. Nothing else really received the same amount of recognition.

The Davis Cup tie itself went by in a blur, but the best bit about the three days was that René Lacoste kindly gave me some matching Lacoste outfits. Never before had I been in matching clothes. I would usually play in whatever clothes I could lay my hands on, even though these were not always in a small enough size for me. The days of my big Adidas sponsorship deal were still far away. Usually, I was a mismatch of Fred Perry and Lacoste shorts and shirts. This time, though, I was in gleaming new all-white Lacoste and this made me very proud. I had also been given four new Slazenger rackets, which again for me was a lot. I felt I was finally joining the big time.

There was a big crowd—or, at least it felt big because I was not used to playing in front of so many people—and the stadium itself felt enormous as well. The only courtside ad was a small sign for Coca-Cola, in contrast to the year I won the French Open, in 1973, when the new sponsors, the Banque Nationale de Paris (BNP), put up their signs in all corners of the court. In 1966, I remember feeling very scared when I walked out onto the Court Central for the first rubber. Although I lost both my matches (and we lost the tie 4-1), I won a couple of sets in one of my singles and Tiriac and I lost the doubles only in five sets. I must have played reasonably well because I impressed both René Lacoste and Toto Brugnon, one of the other Musketeers. So much so that they encouraged me after the tie was over and said they would put in a good word for me so that I would be invited to play the French Open the following month. They were as good as their word, and, sure enough, the invitation came through shortly after. I was eternally grateful that they gave me a chance, because in those days young players relied on such acts of kindness to get them into tournaments.

One month later, I was back at Roland Garros, this time playing my first grand slam tournament. This is a huge step for any player, anyway, but for me it was an even bigger one because I had never even played a junior grand slam event. I was going into the experience totally cold. Yet, I was just one month short of my twentieth birthday. More incredibly, I did not play my first US Open until 1969, when I was already twenty-three. Compare that to today’s players, who have usually peaked by that age, and you get an idea of quite how late I started my proper career.

In those days, the Romanian Tennis Federation organized all our travel and hotels. During the two weeks of the French Open, Tiriac and I were checked into a small hotel, called Le Petit Murat, near the Porte d’Auteuil and the Bois de Boulogne, where the Stade Roland Garros is situated. Despite having to share a double bed with Ion and having to tramp down the corridor to the bathroom, I thought this hotel was great. Opposite was a restaurant, Chez André, where we would have dinner every night. The owner was a typical Frenchman with a yellow, unfiltered Gauloise permanently hanging out of the corner of his mouth. His set menu never changed: we’d have either tête de veau pressée (a sort of terrine made from veal’s head) or oeuf mayonnaise, followed by steak frites or poulet frites. And all for a few francs. Also near the hotel was a cinema, and if we weren’t playing we’d go twice a day to the movies. Tiriac and I used to love going to watch films, usually action ones because it was less important to understand all the words. We have been to cinemas all over the world, from Bombay to Philadelphia. This is one of the main ways we learnt our English, though some might argue, given my English, that I can’t have been paying too much attention to the dialogue.

I managed to pass two rounds in the singles, which was not bad, before being beaten by the South African-born Cliff Drysdale, who by then was a naturalized American. But really I was just so happy to be playing that I wasn’t all that disappointed. For the first time, I was seeing some of the great names of tennis, such as the Spaniard Manolo Santana and the Italian Nicola Pietrangeli. I also shared the same changing rooms as them, practised on adjoining courts, and ate at a nearby table. Some of them, like my hero Roy Emerson, even said ‘hello’ to me, although usually I was barely able to mumble ‘hello’ back because my English was so bad.

In the doubles, Tiriac and I began a run of victories that, against everyone’s expectations and certainly ours, brought us to the men’s doubles final. For a first grand slam tournament, I couldn’t believe it. I managed to get a call through to my parents in Romania to tell them my exciting news, but, as was typical of them, they were very low key about it all. Throughout my career, they never showed the slightest interest in what I was up to. Even at my peak, my father would sometimes casually say: ‘Someone told me you won a tournament,’ but he wouldn’t actually ask what I’d won. They never came once to watch me, even when we played our Davis Cup final in Bucharest in 1972. Occasionally, they’d see me on television but more by accident than by intention. It’s strange, I know, but they simply weren’t interested. They were pleased with what I did, of course, but they never thought of supporting me by coming to see me. I understood what they were like, though, and maybe it would have put more pressure on me if I’d had to worry about them at tournaments.

Because we were not even seeded, Tiriac and I would be scheduled on the farthest outside courts at Roland Garros. We would stand at the back door of the changing rooms, which looked out onto those courts, and we could see the matches finishing and work out when we were due on. Then we’d trot out and play in front of a handful of people. So suddenly to be in the doubles final, on Centre Court, was a big difference. Thank God I’d played the Davis Cup tie the month before, or I would probably have died of nerves. Our opponents were the American Davis Cup pair Clark Graebner and Denis Ralston, and they were too strong for us, beating us in straight sets, 6-3, 6-3, 6-0, but I was so happy to have made this big step that I didn’t care too much about the score.

Getting to the men’s doubles final called for a celebration, but our small daily allowance would not stretch to what we did next. We had a Romanian friend called Gheorghe, who lived in Paris and who had supported us throughout the tournament by buying us dinner and things. So that evening he and Tiriac decided to take me to Les Halles.

‘Come on, there’s a good bar there, we meet some nice girls, there’s a nice hotel above.’

Fine, I thought, as long as I don’t have to pay for the drinks. So off we go. Sure enough, the bar’s fine and the girls are beautiful.

‘Which one do you like?’ asks Ion.

‘Well, all of them,’ I reply, innocently.

‘No, stupid, which one do you want to sleep with? What did you think they were all doing here, going up and down the stairs like that?’

Gheorghe is falling about laughing by this time, and I’m in total shock.

‘Who’s going to pay?’ I worry.

‘It’s OK, Gheorghe has everything sorted,’ answers Ion, irritated that I was even thinking about this.

So eventually I pick out a pretty girl. She has long dark hair, typical Sixties’ make-up, with lots of black eyeliner. And up we go. I’m so nervous I can hardly swallow. She asks how I am (‘How do you think I am?’ I feel like saying), but as I don’t speak much French I barely answer back. I start to get undressed…and try not to think of what I would have done with the money if Gheorghe had just given it to me. I can tell you that the going rate here was worth about a week’s room rate at Le Petit Murat.

I’m not going to say any more about my first experience with a woman—not surprising, surely?—except to say that I was out before Ion. When he eventually padded back down, he looked at me, raised his thick eyebrows expectantly, and all I did was smile like hell and raise my thumb.

So that’s how I got laid first time. Not original, I know, but, hey, quite common in those days when nice girls did not always do as much as you would like them to. Anyway, I can think of worse ways to lose one’s virginity. Plus, as I have already said, I was so shy, I was having problems even getting physically close enough to a girl to look her in the eye. Usually, I’d look somewhere over her left shoulder. The truth is, when you have no money, your looks aren’t great, your body’s too thin and you don’t speak the local language, let’s face it, you’re not a great catch. Even I could see that. And Ion was getting to a stage of despair seeing me eye up the girls and never make a move. So I think he did us both a favour by getting that hurdle out the way in a pretty painless fashion. After that, it’s fair to say that I quickly started making up for lost time.

All in all, Paris in 1966 was good to me. I’d taken two huge steps forward in my life, one professional, one personal, and both had been fantastic. It’s no wonder that, from that moment on, Paris became my favourite city in the world and the one, after Bucharest, in which I feel the most at home.

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