Читать книгу Mr Nastase: The Autobiography - Ilie Nastase - Страница 10

We were passing each other nervously on our wayto and from the bathroom until eventually theycalled us into the little anteroom just before wewalked out onto Centre Court.

My US Open tournament in 1971 got off to a bad start, when I was beaten in the 3rd round of the singles by the Aussie Bob ‘Nailbags’ Carmichael (so-called because he used to be a carpenter before joining the tour). In the doubles, though, I did better, and by the end of the first week Tiriac and I were through to the quarterfinals to play Bob Hewitt and Frew McMillan, one of tennis’s all-time great doubles teams. We were scheduled on the Grandstand Court, near the main stadium.

The match got under way to a half-empty gallery. Down by the courtside, however, were three spectators who were cheering and clapping for us so hard that I thought they must be Romanian. One was a teenage girl, one was, I assumed, her mother, and the third was an unbelievably beautiful young woman, with shoulder-length dark hair and huge brown eyes. I tried hard to concentrate on the match, rather than on her, but we still lost quite easily and, before I knew it, she was gone.

Later that day, I was back on court with Rosie Casals to play a mixed doubles match. I spotted the young daughter and her mother at once—they were courtside again. This time, the stands were full, and it took me a few more minutes during the warm-up, with only one eye on the ball, to pick out the young woman who was now sitting about twenty rows up at the top of the stadium. Determined not to let her out of my sight this time, I asked a friend of mine to get a note to her saying that, when the match was over, could she possibly wait because Mr Nastase would like to meet her.

As soon as the match was over (we won, by the way), I was over like a flash, in case she decided to make a run for it. She spoke French, which I barely did, and, although I spoke broken English, hers was terrible. Somehow, though, we just about managed to talk long enough for her to tell me she was called Dominique Grazia, she was twenty-one, she lived in Brussels with her French father and her Belgian mother, and she was in New York for a week’s holiday. Soon, her mother arrived with her younger daughter, Nathalie, and I asked Madame Grazia if I could possibly take Dominique out to dinner that evening. ‘No, no,’ she replied with charm and tact in perfect English, ‘it is I who would like to invite you to dinner with the three of us.’ I knew enough about manners not to insist, and later that evening we all met up at a French restaurant called l’Escargot, near their hotel off Madison Avenue.

I remember her mother doing most of the talking, while I tried to answer the questions that she fired at me. Dominique, like me, was quite shy, so she listened but did not say very much. As for Nathalie, who was fourteen, she was tongue-tied with happiness. I discovered she was such a big fan of mine that she kept detailed scrapbooks about me at home; and the reason they were in New York in the first place was because she had been promised a trip to see me play after getting good school exam results that year. Dominique had simply tagged along for the shopping and sightseeing. She admitted she had no interest in tennis at all, and none in me either. Well, at least I knew.

At the end of the evening, I asked Madame Grazia if I could take Dominique out the following evening on her own, and I must I have behaved OK during dinner because she graciously accepted. So the next night we went out for dinner, then on to the Hippopotamus discotheque, one of the best in Manhattan at the time. I remember several players were also there, including Arthur Ashe. Although I don’t like to dance—I get very self-conscious and think everyone is looking at me—I forced myself so that I could at last get a bit closer to Dominique.

She told me she had had a very strict and sheltered upbringing and had not been allowed to date boys until she turned eighteen. Then, she got engaged to the first boy she went out with—who was barely older than her—and stayed with him for two years until she had called it off the previous year. A rather different path from the one I had taken these last few years, I thought. Although we kissed, nothing more happened that night. For the rest of the week, I never once took her back to my hotel—I’m sure her mother would not have allowed it. I either had dinner with her, or the four of us would dine out or meet up at the tennis club when I was playing.

By the time they were due to leave New York, I was through to the mixed doubles semifinals and frantically trying to work out a way of seeing Dominique after the tournament, because I knew I was in love with her. I decided there was only one thing for it: I told Rosie Casals that I was going to have to pull out of our match and follow Dominique back to Brussels. Rosie, understandably, got mad at me, screaming that this was typical of me, chasing women as usual. It did no good; I changed my flights and hopped on the plane with the three of them. Madame Grazia had obviously warned her husband that there was a change of plan and that Dominique had a certain Ilie Nastase in tow with her, because he was not at all surprised to see me when he came to meet us at the airport.

There was no way I would be allowed to stay with them, so I slept at the nearby Hilton Hotel and spent my days at their home, which was an enormous house built in the Twenties, with huge grounds and a tennis court. Nathalie took dozens of photographs of my few days with them—she probably felt as if she had died and gone to heaven—and I continued to get to know Dominique. However, with my reputation preceding me—which she knew all about, thanks to her sister—I resisted trying to get her back to the hotel and decided to take things slowly, because no woman had ever had this effect on me. I remember I had on a pale aubergine-coloured suit that I thought was quite nice (this was the Seventies), but, as a mark of how much I was already under her spell, Dominique managed to explain that she wasn’t too keen on it and to suggest which clothes of mine she preferred.

When I had first met Dominique I had no idea what sort of family she came from, but I quickly learned all about their past. Her maternal great-grandfather had become very wealthy through various business projects, including building the Cairo metro, and had been made the First Baron Empain. As a result, Dominique’s mother was the Baronne Empain, the half-sister of the current baron, who in 1975 was kidnapped and had his little finger famously sawn off to force the payment of a ransom. The baron also headed up the Schneider industrial group, a huge company based in France that makes all types of electrical goods. Dominique’s father was also an industrialist whose family came from Italy originally, and she had three older brothers—Daniel, Bernard, and Jean—as well as her sister Nathalie.

After three days, it was time for me to jet off again, back to the USA, for the Pacific Southwest tournament in Los Angeles. For the first time ever, I wanted a woman to accompany me on tour, but ironically she was not able nor willing to do so. This was partly because her parents would never have allowed their daughter’s reputation to be compromised in this way by a strange Romanian they barely knew and partly because Dominique herself was a bit scared by the idea of travelling with me. She resisted me every time I asked her if she wanted to accompany me to a tournament. So the Davis Cup final in Charlotte came and went, the Embassy British Indoors in London came and went (I beat both Newcombe and Laver on my way to the title), and we continued our relationship by speaking on the phone a lot and me hopping over to Brussels for a day or two whenever I had a spare gap in my schedule, which was not often. Very frustrating.

Eventually, I invited her to a tournament in Stockholm in November, and she said her parents would let her come, as long as they accompanied her. What a choice! ‘No problem, sure, come with your parents,’ I heard myself say enthusiastically. So, after making sure my room was well away from theirs, I arranged for them to stay in the same hotel. Surprise, surprise, I was so happy and relaxed that week that I won the tournament. I also finally made love to Dominique after weeks of waiting, and realized that I was serious about the relationship and wanted her to start travelling with me as soon as possible. I couldn’t believe what had happened to me in the space of a few weeks, but it was not just my usual impetuousness that made me act like this. I had been around long enough to know that this was very special and that I was very much in love.

Unfortunately, when we went our separate ways again at the end of the week, Dominique had other ideas. She felt things were starting to get too serious too quickly and that, unlike me, it was time to put the brakes on. She also wanted to explore life a bit before getting into yet another big relationship. I had really hoped she would join me in Paris where I’d be playing in the end-of-year Masters tournament. Instead, she told me during yet another of our long phone conversations that she thought it would be better if we had a bit of a break from each other. In fact, she had decided to improve her English and join her brother Jean in Cambridge for an indeterminate amount of time. Stunned, I did manage to point out the obvious, that she could improve her English on the tour as well, but that was clearly not the main reason. She wanted to cool things down before we got much more involved. The problem with my life was that it was all or nothing. I could not date women like everybody else, seeing them once or twice a week. It was either a case of travel with me or see me once every three months. Not very good for developing a relationship.

So I had no choice but to agree to her request and went off to Paris on my own. Just to show her what she was missing, I made sure I won the tournament. This was a really big win for me, because the Masters gathered together the eight top-ranking men from the fourteen Grand Prix series of tournaments held during the year. We all had to play each other in a round-robin format, and I played so well that week that I ended up winning every single match, beating players such as Stan Smith and Jan Kodes (who that year had won the US Open and French Open, respectively) on my way to the £6,000 first prize. I had also come second in the Grand Prix rankings of points accumulated during the fourteen tournaments, and this qualified me for a $17,000 share of the $150,000 bonus pool. The end of the year, for tennis, had brought me a lot of success and money. It was personally that I was now hurting.

After a rather sad Christmas with my family in Bucharest, I set off again for the USA in the new year, winning tournaments in Baltimore and Omaha. I did not speak to Dominique for weeks because the whole separation had been her idea, and I did not want to annoy her by phoning the whole time. I figured she’d either fall in love with an Englishman or she’d come to her senses and realize what an amazing guy I was!

After a great spring, when I retained my clay-court titles in Nice and Monte Carlo and won in Madrid, I was feeling confident for the French Open in May. Unfortunately, I had a bad tournament: within two days, I had lost to the young Roman Adriano Panatta in the 1st round of the singles. Adriano was already a good player, but as last year’s finalist I would have been expected to beat him, so I was not pleased to go out in this way. In the doubles, Tiriac and I also lost in the 2nd round to the Belgians Mignot and Holmbergen, hardly a top-class combination, so I was feeling down about my results when I returned to my hotel that evening. There, I was immediately handed an urgent telegram. ‘Bravo for your brilliant defeat’, it said, teasingly. It was from Dominique, just when I thought I would never see her again. I called her straight away in Brussels, where she was now living again and invited her to Paris. To my surprise, she accepted at once, and within twenty-four hours I was waiting impatiently at the Gare du Nord for her train to pull into the station. This time, her parents did not accompany her. At long last, we were alone.

By the end of a wonderful week, I had decided I wanted to spend my life with her, so one evening we went out to a really nice restaurant in the Latin Quarter. I started telling her how much I had missed her and was she planning to stay for a while. ‘Yes’, was the answer, ‘I think so.’ I didn’t quite go down on bended knee—luckily, as it turned out—but when I did finally ask her to marry me, she just said: ‘No’. Nicely, but firmly, ‘No’. She wasn’t ready yet. Fine, I thought, no problem, I’ll just keep trying. And over the next couple of weeks, I asked her twice more. I’m someone who is very tactile, very romantic, so each time I set it up so that the atmosphere was right, the conversation was right, she couldn’t possibly refuse me. But, however hard I tried, still the answer was ‘No’, she wasn’t ready yet. OK, forget it, I thought, I’ll just wait. Maybe after Wimbledon.

No sooner had she returned, though, than she was off again, this time on a long-planned family holiday to Sorrento, in Italy, for the whole two weeks of Wimbledon. I tried to persuade her to skip it and stay with me in London, but her family was very traditional about these things, and the holiday was not something she could miss. So again I waved her off, reluctantly, and flew over to London.

At Wimbledon, I was seeded number 2, behind Stan Smith at number 1. One journalist said I was too high but I didn’t care, even though he was probably right because I had never yet got past the 4th round. In the end, though, compared to Stan—or ‘Godzilla’ as I always used to call him because of his 1.9 m height and enormous reach—I had a harder path through to the final, because I had to beat some good grass-court players on the way. In fact, it’s better to have a tough draw and to have to beat good players on the way, because then you feel you deserve to win the tournament and you are full of confidence. If you haven’t had to beat anyone much, you don’t know what you are capable of when you finally get to a big or tough match.

My first test came in the 2nd round when I faced Clark Graebner, who I had had a few on-court arguments with in the past (he had a temper, like me). He had also beaten me at Wimbledon in 1969 and 1970. This time, I beat him easily enough in four sets, and we never exchanged a word. This was a good win for me so early in the tournament, although I must have been so excited at beating him that I did not bother to lock away the £45 I had kept in my racket cover, and when I got back from having a bath I discovered it had been stolen. This, added to the $300 I had had stolen from Roland Garros the previous month, and in a similar way, made changing in the locker rooms of Paris and London an expensive privilege.

After getting past the German Jurgen Fassbender in straight sets in the next round, I faced Tom Gorman, from the USA, in the 4th round. Tom was my pigeon: in the twenty-one matches we played, I beat him eighteen times, so I was confident. The match was scheduled on Centre Court, and I knew that a win here would take me into the second week of the tournament for the first time ever. I had already noticed that the British public definitely fell into two camps when it came to supporting me. Some of them obviously liked me, particularly the girls and the women, but others definitely hated me. In my behaviour, I represented all that was un-British: I did not have a stiff upper lip, I hadn’t been to the right school, and I dared to question authority. In that match with Gorman, I remember one military-looking man, with dark glasses (resembling a member of Russia’s secret police), clapping one of my double faults for a very long time. Still, he didn’t get any satisfaction, because I beat Tom in four sets.

After this win, I could see the draw was looking good for me. I had Jimmy Connors in the next round, and either Spain’s Manuel Orantes or the Aussie Colin Dibley in the semis. At the time, I was beating them all a lot. I thought if I could pass these guys, I could make it to the final and win it. Even better, the press weren’t yet taking much notice of me.

In the quarterfinals I played the nineteen-year-old Connors on Centre Court. He, too, was a crowd favourite, but Jimmy, who was later to become one of my best friends on the circuit, was playing his first Wimbledon. He was so pumped up for this match that he was spraying his shots all over the place and trying to hit harder and harder. I, meanwhile, was playing my usual touch game, which Jimmy found very difficult, because he hated it when he wasn’t given pace to hit against, as Ashe understood when he beat him in their notorious 1975 Wimbledon final. Everything I did seemed to work for me that day, and I beat Connors easily 6-4, 6-4, 6-1.

By the time I reached the semis, the press was waking up to my chances, especially because, out of the four semifinalists, only Stan had a track record on grass. The other two, Jan Kodes and Manuel Orantes, were like me relatively inexperienced. I was drawn against Manuel, who was the 3rd seed and who had beaten me on our previous encounter indoors in Washington. I, however, was playing much better than him on fast courts, like cement and grass.

This time, despite my initial nerves, I was playing so well that I shot off to a quick 3-0 lead before Manuel had time to work out where he was. I just tried to stay the way I normally am on court, talking to myself, walking around a lot, playing my usual non-percentage tennis. I won the first two sets 6-3, 6-4, and at 5-4 in the 3rd I reached match point with a service ace winner. At that stage, I remember trying hard to concentrate on staying in the point, letting him take the chances, and not to think about the importance of where we had got to in the match. I missed the first serve. My second went in, and Manuel advanced to the net. I whipped up a high ball to his forehand side, and he put the volley into the net. I had won, I was through to the final, and I threw my racket high into the air, knowing that I was the first Romanian ever to appear in a men’s singles final at Wimbledon. I never thought it would have been possible. The crowd cheered loudly, I remembered to bow to the Royal Box, and I left the court a happy man.