Mr Nastase: The Autobiography

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.