Mr Nastase: The Autobiography

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.