Читать книгу Mr Nastase: The Autobiography - Ilie Nastase - Страница 9

That night, I picked up a girl who admitted that shehad a dog with her, and the dog had to come too.‘OK, the dog can come,’ I said, dubiously.

I had seen enough American films to have a picture of New York in my head, but nothing I had imagined prepared me for the real thing when I crossed over Brooklyn Bridge and arrived in Manhattan. The incredible skyscrapers, the complete mix of people there, the buzz about the city. I loved it from the start and have always felt very comfortable there. So I was not overawed when I first went to the West Side Tennis Club, Forest Hills, the venue for the 1969 US Open. In fact, the club was very sedate and traditional, and not at all like today’s Flushing Meadow venue for the tournament, which is as crazy and noisy as any tournament I know.

The US Open was played on grass in those days (as was the Australian Open), but the courts at Forest Hills were very different from Wimbledon’s carpet-like lawns. For a start, the American courts had a lot of bad bounces, but they were also much softer, which meant that, when you played a drop shot, it really sank. This favoured my game and was one of the reasons that I beat Stan Smith, who was already a highly regarded player, on my way to the quarterfinals, where it took Ken Rosewall to stop my progress. The tournament was memorable, because Rod Laver completed his second Grand Slam, winning all four majors in the same year. Don Budge, before the War, is the only other player ever to have done the Grand Slam, so Laver’s achievement was unbelievable, and I am sure it will never be equalled.

Soon after, we arrived in Cleveland, Ohio, for the Davis Cup final, the Challenge Round. Why Cleveland? Because, we were told, it had the biggest community of Romanians in the USA. Sure enough, we went to a lot of parties with our expatriate comrades, other Romanians came over especially, and the Romanian ambassador even flew down from Washington for the matches. The stadium itself was next to a school, so I remember finding it difficult to practise with the noise of hundreds of children, who came round to watch the whole time.

What was even less fine was the court. It was meant to be cement, like the majority of courts in the States, but this one had been covered with a sort of shiny paint. It was so shiny, in fact, that you could barely see the ball. When it rained, which it did quite a lot, preventing practice, it became really slippery. It was also a court that was even faster than grass, and this definitely favoured the Americans.

During the tie itself, we had to put up with left-wing and anti-Vietnam demonstrators, who regularly tried to interrupt play. Although they were kept away from us as much as possible, some still managed to get through, shouting from the stands and displaying banners with slogans such as: ‘Tennis for the rich, tenements for the poor’ and ‘Long live Ho Chi Minh, Long live the Vietcong’.

The tie was much closer than the score suggested. On day one, Arthur Ashe beat me in three close sets, 6-2, 15-13, 7-5 (tie-breaks had not yet been invented). My defeat was partly as a result of the US coach, Denis Ralston, having watched me beat Smith at Forest Hills and having then given Ashe a detailed picture of my game. Then, Ion did everything he could to gain an advantage in his match against Smith. He managed to lead by two sets to one, but eventually went down in five sets. That meant we were 0-2 down.

The doubles the next day was crucial. Ion and I had never yet lost a Davis Cup doubles match, but then neither had the experienced American pair Smith and Bob Lutz, so there was a lot at stake. Unfortunately for us, our opponents were too good that day. Although the match was closer than the score indicates, it was all over in straight sets, 8-6 6-1 11-9. The Americans had gone 3-0 up in rubbers and so had retained the Davis Cup. All we could do in the third day’s matches was to salvage some honour.

I was desperate to get at least one point for my country and fought as hard as I could in my match against Smith. I stretched out a two sets to love lead, but Smith was equally desperate to avenge his Forest Hills defeat, so he fought back to two sets all. The final set was long and hard. Four times I had match point, four times Smith managed to save it. Finally, he reached match point himself, and seconds later had won the set 11-9, to take the rubber. I walked off court, bitterly disappointed.

The length of my match against Smith meant that Tiriac’s match against Ashe, the last in the tie and an academic match in any case, began late in the afternoon and had to be halted when Ashe was on the verge of winning in the 4th set. The reason was that we had all been invited to meet President Nixon at the White House at ten o’clock sharp the following morning, and we absolutely had to catch our plane that evening. There would have been no question of postponing the meeting, because CeauŸescu was beginning to establish closer relations with America and I think Nixon had just been to Romania the month before. So it was politically important for us to go.

We all lined up on the lawn outside the White House, alongside the American team, and Nixon made his way along the line, shaking our hands. I remember he kept one hand in his pocket the whole time, which looked strange, as if he was hiding something in there. All the Americans were being very formal: ‘Hello, Mr President’, and all that, but when it came to Arthur’s turn he just said: ‘Hi, how are you.’ Arthur was not going to be overawed. I suspect it had something to do with Nixon being a Republican and Arthur a Democrat.

As for me, of course I was excited to meet Nixon and to go to the White House, but I was not tongue-tied. Not that there was an opportunity to say much, other than ‘hello’. I do remember that, as a souvenir, Nixon gave us each a golf ball with his face on it.

As 1969 came to a close, I returned to Bucharest to rest. I had played a record thirty-one tournaments (winning eight singles and six doubles titles), plus six rounds of Davis Cup, with each tie taking two weeks including the ten days’ practice we gave ourselves. This was a huge increase on what had gone on the two previous years, when I’d played only twenty tournaments, fewer Davis Cup ties, and won only three titles each year. That meant that in 1969 I had played more than forty weeks of tennis. I had hardly been home, and now I needed badly to reconnect with my family and friends. Home, by now, was a small apartment given to me by the army, which housed only military personnel. But it suited my needs perfectly and allowed me to come and go, at all hours of the day and night, without having to tip-toe past my parents’ bedroom.

At the start of the new decade, I set off more confident about the future after the good results of the previous year. In February 1970, I won the US Indoor Championships in Salisbury, Maryland, before moving back to Europe for my traditional southern Italian circuit of tournaments, where I won yet more titles. So I was full of anticipation when I arrived in Rome for the Italian Open at the end of April. Built by Mussolini and adorned with fascist-style marble statues of dubious taste, the Foro Italico is one of the most memorable stadiums on the circuit. It also has a great atmosphere, because the Italians are noisy supporters—they are noisy people anyway, like Romanians. As long as I was not playing one of their compatriots, or in the middle of one of my scenes, they always cheered for me.

I have never been the sort of player to predict boastfully that I am going to beat a guy. But I felt good all week, so I was not surprised to get through to the last four without too much difficulty. There, I got past the tough Yugoslav Nikki Pilic in five sets, and it was my fellow East-European Jan Kodes who awaited me in the final. Kodes went on to win at Roland Garros in Paris a few weeks later, but this time it was I who came out on top, beating him in four sets: 6-3, 1-6, 6-3, 8-6. I was exhausted but exhilarated. The Italian Open was the next biggest tournament after the four majors, so for me to win it was another confirmation that I was now among the best.

After the final, I had to go straight back on court with Tiriac to play our doubles final. He would always watch my singles matches, because he wanted to see what sort of mood I was in for the doubles, which were usually played later in the day. If I was tired, even if I’d won, he’d have to cajole me into playing: ‘Come on, do it for me, it’s important to win the doubles.’ For him, his main earnings were now coming from the doubles, so sometimes he really had to force me onto court. Once I started playing, I was usually OK. But after the singles final that year I was so exhausted and happy that we lost the 1st set of the doubles 6-0 to the Aussies Bowrey and Davidson before I had time to wake up and recover my senses. It took us five long sets finally to get the better of them, and by the end of the day I had played a total of nine sets. Importantly, though, I had won two big titles.

This called for a big celebration. Off I went with Ion to the Via Veneto, where we met up with the Italian player Nicola Pietrangeli and various friends of his. First of all, we all had dinner at one of our favourite restaurants, the nearby Taverna Flavia, run by a guy called Mimmo. He always came to see us play and would scream encouragement: ‘Come on, I give you nice food, you have to win.’

We then all moved on to the Jackie O nightclub, the only place to be seen in those Dolce Vita days in Rome. The club is still there, tucked away behind the Excelsior Hotel. Nicola got us in, because he was a member. A winner of successive French Opens in ’59 and ’60, Nicola was a giant of the game, and, at thirty-five, had just played his last Italian Open. He had an aura about him that made him a superstar in Italy—and still does. He’s like his friend, Claudia Cardinale, who I subsequently met a few times. They were both born in Tunis of Italian fathers. Nicola’s mother, though, is from Russia, and he happens to share the same birthday, the same year, as my brother, Constantin. Nicola knew everyone, and, as the years went by, we would hang out more and more together, and he would introduce me to many of the well-known friends that he seemed to accumulate around the world.

By the end of a very long night, I had, of course, found a beautiful girl to take back to my hotel. It wouldn’t have been a big celebration otherwise, would it? I had met her in the nightclub, and she said she was an actress. It wasn’t until a few days later, when she left a message for me when I was already at my next tournament, that I discovered she also had some fancy title, I think a contessa. I hadn’t yet realized that in Italy there are thousands of people with these meaningless titles. Anyway, I was curious, so I called her back and, by the following evening, she had joined me in Naples.

Picture the scene: the romantic bay of Naples, candle-lit dinners, a lot of exercise during the day, followed by more night-time action. Well, it was a bit like that, except that, however beautiful she was, and however much I liked her, I was a bit worried that this was going in a direction that I wasn’t quite ready to follow. When she mentioned that we might spend some time that summer at her parents’ estate in Tuscany, I thought briefly about saying ‘yes’. But when she let slip that her parents would also be there, I admitted: ‘I’m afraid, amore mio, that I have another tournament to go to, and I am very busy this summer, so that will be difficult.’

So on I moved, to the next town and the next girl. Actually, I did stay in touch with her on and off for about a year, but it was certainly never a proper, serious relationship. I really didn’t need one of those, to be honest. All my attention was on my tennis, and the women were just to have fun with, nothing more. I never broke any hearts, though, because I never promised anything. I never kept a girlfriend long enough for her to think that something more long-term might develop. That’s the secret, I think. Usually, it was more a question of coming up to a girl—because I liked to be the one to choose, I didn’t like it when they ran after me—and I’d ask them out to dinner, and after that it was easy. Then, other times, I’d make all that effort, invite them to the tournament and then nothing would happen. I didn’t have any particular chat-up lines, although I sometimes found it worked quite well if I said: ‘My problem starts if you say “yes” to me. Then I don’t know what to do to you. I get nervous.’ But it wasn’t a regular line, just something that, in the right situation, would make them laugh and keep them interested.

At Roland Garros in 1970, I found myself seeded number 1 in both the singles and the doubles. I was really proud about that, and I guess it was the reward for having had such a good spring. I reached the quarterfinals in the singles, where I was beaten by the tough American Cliff Richey, despite Richey suffering from cramp in his hand at one stage.

In doubles, Ion and I landed our first major title—it turned out to be Ion’s one and only—when we beat two more Americans, Arthur Ashe and Charlie Pasarell in the final. This was great for both of us, and for me it was yet another step up the ladder. People sometimes think that winning this sort of title brings total happiness, and that sportsmen should be able to express the depth of their emotion at such moments. Actually, at that time, what I really thought was: ‘Yes, this is good but it doesn’t blow my mind. I need to keep going.’ Of course I was happy, but that’s quite a hard feeling to describe. As winning was something that I was getting used to, winning the doubles title at Roland Garros gave me more the feeling that it was a step in the right direction.

I saw that I was finally catching up all the time I had lost by not playing junior tennis and not joining the circuit properly until I was nearly twenty. The idea, though, that I might one day become number 1 in the world, or that I might win a grand slam title, was not something I was consciously working up to. As for the majors, I thought I could maybe win one, Roland Garros being the most obvious one, because the other three were on grass and I did not think I could win one of those. But I didn’t know for sure that it was going to happen. After all, so many guys have that ambition too, and yet they never manage to win a major. So I feel lucky that I did.

I was always happy just to play tennis. Tennis for me was like the theatre, a performance. ‘Ce n’est pas du cinéma’, as the French say, meaning that something is not superficial but has to be taken more seriously. Even if I lose, I’m happy if I feel I have given a performance. Of course, I want to win. It’s not that I’m content to be second; I’m not. But winning has never been the highest priority. Life is more important, and it was also more important to be myself. Probably if I had been different—although I don’t think of myself as different, I’m just me—I might have won more titles. But I never thought like that and I really don’t think I could ever have changed, because for me it was very important to play the way I was feeling. Maybe it made for ugly scenes sometimes, but for me it was the only way I could play.

Speaking of temper, why have I not yet talked about it? In truth, although I had a temper as a child, it was not getting me into trouble at this stage of my career, maybe because I was doing better and better, and there was not yet any pressure on me. Also, I was not yet a big name. Although I was winning titles, until Rome they had not been in big tournaments, so nobody was paying any attention to me. If I lost unseeded, 1st or 2nd round, they might say there’s some guy on court 9 complaining, but that’s it. When I was number 1 seed, playing in a quarterfinal on Centre Court, then they noticed. Finally, there were no rules then about fines. It was up to the tournament what they decided to do with any player who misbehaved. The Code of Conduct that was drawn up to fix penalties for bad behaviour did not come in until the end of 1975, so I still had a few clear years of freedom ahead of me. That’s why I wasn’t yet hitting the headlines for my temper.

Wimbledon was also a good tournament for me that year. Seeded number 8, I had victories over Pasarell and Richey (avenging my Roland Garros defeat of a few weeks earlier). The American Clark Graebner—who I used to call Superman because of his first name and his Clark Kent-like glasses—finally saw me off in the 4th round. Meanwhile, Ion and I, despite being unseeded, made it through to the semis of the doubles, where the Aussies Rosewall and Stolle beat us in five close sets.

It was in the mixed doubles, however, that I won my second title in a major. Having played with a few different partners over the years, I finally settled on the tiny but powerful American Rosie Casals. Of Hispanic origin, she was a niece of the famous cellist Pablo Casals, and she, too, used her strings to great effect. I immediately got on well with her, and we had great fun that first year together, cutting through the draw, beating the number 2 seeds Bob Hewitt and Billie-Jean King along the way.

I remember the mixed doubles final, because, as is often the case at Wimbledon, the rain had caused delays in the doubles and mixed doubles programme. So, on finals day, we found ourselves playing our semi and final back-to-back on Centre Court, after the men’s singles final, which had been an emotional match, because Ken Rosewall had for the third time failed to win the title. He had gone down this time in five sets to the holder, John Newcombe. What was more incredible was that Rosewall’s previous two attempts had been in 1954, against the Czech Drobny and 1956 against Hoad—sixteen and fourteen years before!

After Rosie and I had beaten Judy Dalton and Frew McMillan, the number 3 seeds, in the semifinals, we were told to stay on Centre Court and await our opponents for the final, the Russian pair Alexander Metreveli and Olga Morozova. I knew them both well, of course: Alex I had known ever since I had first played him in a junior tournament in Estonia, and Olga I used to tease the whole time, because she’s got a good sense of humour: ‘Hey, Olga, it’s OK, I spoke to your government, and they give you permission to smile’, I used to joke to her. Anyway, that day my Russian comrades didn’t have too much to laugh about because Rosie and I beat them in three sets 6-3, 4-6, 9-7.

When it was our turn to climb up into the Royal Box to be presented with our trophy by the Duke and Duchess of Kent, I didn’t really know who exactly they were. I did know they were royal, so I dutifully bowed to them, but what I was really happy about was having one more important title. The mixed doubles may seem unimportant to the public, but for those of us who played them—and in those days most of the top players did—it mattered very much, and we were really pleased to have won.

I earned £250 for winning the mixed doubles title at Wimbledon that summer in 1970, £200 for being a semifinalist in the doubles, and £220 for getting to the 4th round of the singles, £670 in total. My prize to myself for doing so well was to buy myself my second car—a beautiful black and silver Ford Capri. Because my driving licence did not yet permit me to drive abroad, I had to get Tiriac to drive it all the way back to Bucharest from Wimbledon after the tournament. Not surprisingly, he wasn’t too pleased. Actually, it may have looked beautiful, but it was not a good car and kept breaking down.

Once, though, I was coming home at two in the morning from a party and found myself speeding round the Arc of Triumph that we have in Bucharest (an almost identical version of the one in Paris) when I suddenly saw this little group of people flagging me down. So I stopped, because I could tell they were dressed like Westerners, and I figured they needed help. Sure enough, they explained they’d come from a party but couldn’t find their way home. ‘Get in’, I said and in they clambered, pushing to one side all my tennis rackets and shoes that were lying on the back. ‘Tennis player?’ asked one of them. ‘Yes, and you?’ ‘Actors’. It turned out I had just picked up the French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo and two other well-known French actors, Pierre Brasseur (the father of Claude) and Marlène Jobert, who were in Romania shooting a film. They, meanwhile, hadn’t a clue who I was. ‘Where do you want me to take you?’ ‘Another bar?’ said Belmondo hopefully. I laughed: ‘No, no, they’re all closed now.’ ‘Then back to the Athenée Palace’ (it’s now the Hilton). So that’s where I left them. At that time, Belmondo was going out with Ursula Andress, and I remember she was coming out to Bucharest every week to see him. A few nights later, a friend of mine who knew him quite well invited me to a party where all the actors would be. They instantly recognized me: ‘Ah, the guy who gave us a lift!’ So that’s how I first met Belmondo who became a good friend. He is a huge tennis fan, and for years he attended Roland Garros every day in his private courtside box. One year, during a doubles match, I ran so hard to retrieve a ball that I ended up in his box. He always brought his little dog with him, so I took the dog back onto court with me, tied him to the umpire’s chair and played a couple of points with this dog jumping and yapping away like crazy. Everybody thought that was very funny except, obviously, the dog. That summer, I discovered that German girls are among the most relaxed and open when it comes to sex. I was playing a tournament in Munich and found myself chatting to a nice-looking blonde girl one evening. We were reaching the point where something either happens or it doesn’t, but, instead of leading her out into the night, I discovered that she wanted her friend to join us as well, her friend being a girl. I had to do some pretty fast thinking: did I want to try three in a bed or not? Was I still shy about that sort of thing or was I losing my inhibitions? I weighed up the pros and cons, and decided to say ‘no’. It’s just not my sort of thing. Still, I was bit more careful with German girls after that.

Actually, I’m dead straight when it comes to sex, and I’m not into anything that deviates from a normal one-man one-woman encounter. It’s like sex in a car. We’ve all seen the movies, and it seems like a great idea at the time, but, believe me, when you’ve played a long match, sex in a small place is not good. I remember trying it once—and we’re not talking about a car the size of a Mini, here, but a reasonably big American car—but I got cramp in one leg. I know, not very impressive for the girl. There I was, supposedly the great athlete, suddenly seizing up at the crucial moment. ‘Huh, so much for a performance,’ she must have thought. ‘He was good on the court, what happened to him now? He’s dead.’ I just about got through, but afterwards, as I recovered, I thought: ‘I must remember never to do that again after a long match.’

Similarly, the Spanish girl who decided she wanted to have sex on the hotel balcony—it was enclosed, I should explain—to see if those on the street below might hear, came closest to my limit of what I was prepared to do with a girl in public. It might seem like fun at the time, but I hate hearing other people having sex (sometimes thin hotel walls give you no choice), so I can’t stand the idea of others hearing me.

So really sex is best when you can spread yourselves out, you can both relax, and nobody can see or hear you. Mostly, I was still a good boy, and I’d wait until I was at least out of the singles before going to look for a girl. Sometimes, though, Tiriac would get annoyed because I’d ignored him and gone out, even though we had a doubles match the next day. He never actually locked me in for the night—despite rumours that he did—because he knew that this would not have stopped me disappearing through the window and out into the street. But I knew he found me quite difficult to control by this stage. The thing was, if I did sleep with a woman during a tournament—and I’m not talking about my wife, later on, where the situation was obviously different—I would always be conscious that I could not give 100 per cent. It’s scary to say, now, but I could not go full speed ahead with sex, because I was afraid I might not play as well as I could the next day. So I would always hold something back, I would not go on all night, much as I might want to, so that I did not exhaust myself completely. I’d call them ‘mon amour’ or ‘darling’ (most women understand those words and, that way, it doesn’t matter if you forget their name), but I’d also say: ‘I have a match tomorrow’ (even if I didn’t) ‘so it would be very nice if you could leave.’ I never threw them out but I would try to come up with an excuse that wasn’t too painful. Those were the ones I didn’t want to spend the night with. Of course, the good-looking ones sometimes left before I wanted them to. That also happens, so it works both ways. But I’m afraid to say that, for me, quite a lot of sex in those days was like taking a daily shower: you take one, it feels nice, then you forget it.

By the end of the Sixties, Romania was one of the most advanced Eastern bloc countries. We all had enough to eat, thanks to our agriculture, and everybody had a job and somewhere to live. But around this time, CeauŸescu embarked on his massive industrialization project for the country, and Bucharest started to become a building site. Bucharest had always had a reputation for being beautiful. It was called the Paris of the east because of its wide tree-lined avenues that resembled those of the French capital and also its Parisian-style pale stone buildings with their grey, slate roofs. We even have a theatre that is modelled inside on the Paris Opera House, with a sweeping double staircase and a frescoed ceiling inside the auditorium. But CeauŸescu did not care about all this. He was desperate to build factories, oil refineries, chemical plants, anything to get us away from the agricultural country we were. So he started to pull people off the land in order to build high-rise blocks of flats. Then he put people in those apartments to build the next lot of apartments, and so on. Finally he put people in the apartments who would work in the factories. This building work finished in the late Eighties, by which time there was nobody left on the land, and we suffered once again from massive food shortages. But, by the Seventies, whole areas where there had once been little houses were starting to be pulled down, and big grey apartment blocks were put in their place. Although I spent very little time at home, I knew that I was well off compared to many of my friends, although quite a lot of them were other sportsmen, especially soccer players, who lived a reasonably privileged life as well. I was still in my small apartment, though. I did not have three cars lined up outside my home (I had given my green Fiat to a friend), and I was not throwing lavish parties every night. If we went out, yes, I would pay for everyone but I have always thought that was normal. But when my friends insisted on paying their bit, or invited me round to their home, I would happily accept as well. I didn’t want my new life to make a difference. So I tried hard—and still do—to minimize the effect that my wealth had on those around me.

My parents were very simple people, so this helped. They would never ask me to buy things on my travels for them, other than small things maybe, like decent whisky and shaving foam for my father, or coffee and Toblerone chocolate for my mother. In 1970, things had not yet got very bad in Romania, and I was not yet earning the sort of money that I would later on, so the gap in wealth between me and those around me was easier to smooth over.

What was less easy to smooth over were the cracks in my relationship with Tiriac. Inevitably, as I became more successful, I gained confidence and turned to him much less for help and advice. I started to stand on my own two feet. I got my own friends, and I also liked to go out with women. We did still socialize a lot together, though, because we were part of a whole group of players who would play against each other during the day and then go out together for a meal in the evening. Sometimes, we would all then go on to a nightclub or bar.

There were two groups on the tour: the Romanians, Italians, French, and Spanish in one—the Latins, really—and the Anglo-Saxons and Americans in the other. Curiously, the Australians were with us. Maybe because they too liked to have a good time. Then, later, Borg came along, as did Vilas and other South Americans. We’d play each other, beat each other, and that evening we’d all be eating together. None of this happens today. Each player is an island, surrounded by his ‘team’, his coach, his masseur, his psychologist, his stringer, his girlfriend. You name it, they’re all there to protect him from, God forbid, some contact with another player.

Tiriac and I would still be together a lot, day and night (though we were no longer sharing a room), but I had distanced myself from him. I needed him less. Sometimes, he tried to stop this happening by attempting to control me, by telling me to play in a particular way, or to do a particular thing. I would just go and do the opposite, just to annoy him, because, as countless umpires and referees have discovered over the years, I have never liked being told what to do. Eventually he realized what I was doing, so he would tell me to do the opposite of what he really wanted me to do, knowing that I would then do the opposite, which would be what he had wanted me to do in the first place. A complicated way of controlling somebody, I think. I did not realize he was doing it at the time, but I discovered later when he told other people.

One of the last occasions when he influenced me strongly was in spring 1971. I was due to defend my title in Rome, but Ion called the director there and told him that we weren’t going to play because I wanted to have a guarantee on top of any prize money I might earn. The guy said that was not possible, they were not giving any guarantees. So we went to Madrid instead, and they paid me a lot of money to play.

At the end of that week, we both found ourselves in the final and it happened to be the day of his birthday, 9 May. So the night before the final, he suggested we both go out to dinner.

‘Ilie, come on, you’re much better than me’, he starts, ‘tomorrow, just give me a couple of games, you know, then that’ll be OK. I have the money anyway, so I’ll be happy. Just don’t kill me.’

So I say: ‘OK, I won’t wipe you off court.’

The next day, the 1st set goes 6-2 to Tiriac. I say to myself maybe I’m being a little bit too nice. So I try harder. The next set goes 2-2, 3-3, 4-4, 5-5—and he ends up beating me in straight sets. So much for his birthday treat. We then go out to dinner again, and I say to him:

‘Hey, what happened, I know it’s your birthday but I cannot be that nice.’

He looks me straight in the eyes and replies: ‘Nastase, that just shows how stupid you are.’

I was shocked: ‘You’re right, I am stupid because I let you win.’

‘That’s a lesson I’m teaching you now,’ he continues. ‘Not to be nice to anyone, not your friends, your brother, your sister, your parents.’

‘Yes, but why are you telling me that now, after the defeat? Why don’t you tell me that before the match? Then I could learn the lesson and win as well?’

‘Yes, but this way, that will teach you,’ he says.

And he was right. I had paid a high price for the week. I might have won $10,000 or whatever for playing the tournament, more than the winner’s cheque actually was, but I hadn’t won the title. And I hadn’t played in Rome either, which is where I had really wanted to play. I never let him influence me like that again.

Fortunately, this did not affect my form, and a month later I began a run of results that took me all the way to my first major singles final, at the 1971 French Open. On the basis of having won the big clay-court tournaments of Monte Carlo and Nice in April, I was seeded 3, behind Ashe at 2, and Kodes, the holder of the title, at 1.

The tournament began well. I was winning easily and having fun, helping to judge the Miss Roland Garros contest, along with fellow player and friend Pierre Barthès, and going to the players’ party that was held that year at the Paris Lido.

Then, in the quarterfinals, I came up against Stan Smith, the number 6 seed. Stan might not count clay as his best surface, but he was such a determined competitor that I knew I had to play well to beat him. The match started in fading daylight at 7.40 p.m., and by 8.30, the floodlights, which they used at Roland Garros in those days, were on. Within fifteen minutes, though, having adapted to them, we were taken off court. Smith must have been relieved, because, after just an hour’s play, I was already leading 6-1, 6-3.

The next morning, under sunny skies, he woke up, won the 3rd set 6-3 and went a break up in the 4th. It’s getting a bit tight for comfort, I thought. There’s no way I want this to go into a 5th set, with him having won two sets that day. I got the break back with three winning shots, including a backhand topspin lob that landed plum on the line. At 4-4, and serving, Stan had a point to go up 5-4. Instead, I hit a cross-court passing shot that helped me to break him again and, one game later, I won the set 6-4 and the match.

This win gave me a lot of confidence in the semis against another American, Frank Froehling, who played with a big topspin forehand, because of his unorthodox grip for the time. This style was very unusual for an American. Still, Froehling had managed to beat his compatriots Arthur Ashe and Marty Riessen on the way, so he was having a good run. Our semifinal was a strange match in which I won the first eight games very easily, to lead 6-0, 2-0, then Froehling had a spell when he won seven straight games to equalise at one set all. I don’t remember playing less well during the 2nd set, but Froehling, who was a player who blew hot and cold, was just making every shot. Sometimes that happens, and there’s not much you can do other than hope things change before you lose the match. In my case, they did, but I had to play really well, chase lots of drop shots, which Froehling liked to hit, and make lots of running passing shots to win in four sets. I was now through to the biggest match of my career so far and had a chance to win my first major.

The night before the final, I just had room service with Tiriac. We tried not to talk too much about the match—I’d played Jan Kodes, my opponent, so many times, there was no point trying to talk tactics—and I went to bed. I tried not to think too much about the importance of the day ahead. This was my routine before big matches, and it never really changed over the years. The only thing I liked to do was wash my socks out and wear the same pair as I had used in the semis. It wasn’t so much superstition as knowing that they were comfortable and, psychologically, that was always important. I never used the same shirt or shorts but, for some reason, I used to like to use the same socks and—even more inexplicably—the same sweat band. Don’t ask me why.

On the day of the final it was raining off and on. I had woken up with swollen eyes, and it was the first time I started to have an allergic reaction to pollen. I felt good, though, and arrived at the club about an hour before the match. I managed to practise for ten minutes, just enough to warm up, then went back to the dressing room to get a quick massage, to keep the muscles warm.

The final itself was close and tense right up to the end, 2 hours 40 minutes later. Both of us were playing well, which always makes for a good match, and I went a break up in the 1st set, after a wrong-footed Kodes was sent sprawling to the ground. I helped wipe him down with a towel, which made the spectators laugh. Jan never gave up though—that’s one of his strengths—and he broke, saving two set points at 4-5. At 6-7, I was serving to stay in the set when, on the first point, I contested a line call against me. This was enough to break my concentration and lose me the game and the set.

Of course, it’s easy to say that I should have stopped muttering about the line call, but I really felt it was an error. I did not want to disrupt Kodes so I did play on quite quickly, but my rhythm was broken and I lost the 2nd set 6-2 in half an hour.

The score and length of the 3rd set was an exact replica of the second, except that it was me who won it this time. In those days, players went off for a fifteen-minute break between the 3rd and 4th sets, and it was always psychologically important whether you were leading or losing by two sets to one. The break could also interrupt the impetus of a player who was playing well in the 3rd, so it was a big part of the mental battle that is always played out on a tennis court.

When we came back on for the 4th, I immediately went 2-0 and 3-1 up. We were both playing some really classic clay-court tennis, with lots of drop shots, passing shots, angled volleys, and, especially, lots of running. I remember we were playing with Tretorn balls, which were very soft, and because of the dampness of the weather they were very heavy and difficult to play with. The crowd were loving the match, and I was not so wrapped up in it that I did not notice some points where we got standing ovations. Kodes, though, stuck at his task and, after breaking me back to level at 3-3, he reached 6-5. I then had to serve to stay in the match. I reached 40-15 easily enough, but the game slipped away as Kodes strung together a series of winning shots. The match was over, and Kodes’s coach, Pavel Korda, jumped onto court to plant a kiss full on his mouth, just as Gheorghe Cobzuc had done to me two years earlier in the Davis Cup.

Of course, I was disappointed that I had not won. I certainly thought I could beat Kodes after my good results that spring. But I also knew I had played well, I had given a lot of pleasure to the crowd, and I felt for a first major final it had gone well and that I had other chances ahead of me. You can never be sure, but I was sufficiently confident of myself, by this stage in my career, to think that I would not be one of those players who only ever reached one big final, never to be heard of again.

I was therefore surprised not to do better at Wimbledon, where I was beaten in the 2nd round by Frenchman Georges Goven, who could at best be described as a bit of a journeyman pro. That night, in an attempt to drown my sorrows, I picked up a girl and was just fixing up to take her back to my hotel when she admitted that she had a dog with her, and the dog had to come too. ‘OK, the dog can come,’ I said, dubiously. I just wanted him to stay quietly in the bathroom. No chance. He was in the bathroom all right but he barked through the whole thing, because I’d insisted on closing the door to stop him jumping onto the bed. Eventually, he went to sleep, so I couldn’t use the bathroom. Not good but it was only when he decided to do his business at three in the morning that things really became a nightmare. There I was, mopping up the smelly mess in the middle of the night, half naked, wondering whether I had paid a rather high price for getting laid. All I can say is that I didn’t spend long with the woman the next morning.

In early October 1971, Romania reached the Challenge Round of the Davis Cup, just two years after our previous final. This was the last time the Challenge Round was played, when the holders of the Cup would simply go through to the final the following year. After that, they would have to fight their way through earlier rounds, like everybody else.

On the way to the final we had beaten India in New Delhi during what must have been the monsoon season. In any case, I have never seen so much rain in my life. The tie itself lasted about six days, instead of the usual three, and they had nothing but rags to cover the courts, which of course were not much use. Then they would spend hours just mopping up.

In the final, we were again due to meet the USA, this time in Charlotte, North Carolina. Surprisingly, our opponents decided to lay a clay court for the encounter. It was an American clay court, which looks like grey-green shale and is not as slow as the continental version. But, still, it was clay. Some people thought the Americans were crazy, because this certainly gave us more of a chance. Also surprisingly, Frank Froehling, who had been out in the cold just a few months before, got picked, because he’d shown what a fighter he was and had got good results that summer. Dependable Stan Smith was the other singles player and Stan teamed up with the up-and-coming Eric Van Dillen for the doubles.

Although we knew we had a better chance than in 1969, the Americans still had a massive advantage playing at home. The Davis Cup produces results that often bear little relation to tournament play. Although we won two rubbers (Ion and I won the doubles, and I beat Froehling in the fifth match), we still lost 3-2 because Smith beat both Ion and me. Froehling justified his selection by beating Tiriac on the first day, after coming back from two sets to love down in a really long, tense five-set match spread over two days.

We were getting huge coverage in the Romanian press by this stage in our careers, and it would make out my results were the best in the world. Communist media did not like to criticize its sporting heroes, not like now in Romania where they are as bad as any Western press in building up idols and knocking them down again. Even later on, when I was doing bad things on court, the papers would write about them in a way that covered up what had gone on, so they might say I had been disqualified but never why. They tried to hide the truth from the people, even though it was never a problem for me to say what had really happened.

Sportul, our national sports daily, belonged to the Ministry for Education and Sport. It was a state paper and was always putting me on the front page, especially when it came to the all-important Davis Cup. So we were very aware of the impact this defeat would have, which is why, this time, we were more disappointed to lose than in 1969, when nothing much had been expected of us. Fortunately, the ’71 final had also been played in America, which prevented the terrible pressure on us that came from playing at home—pressure that we would experience twelve months later when we reached our third Davis Cup final, against the Americans yet again, but had to play it in Bucharest.

I don’t know if it was the dog in the bedroom incident earlier that summer or simply the fact that I was getting so used to picking up girls almost whenever I wanted. Either way, I think subconsciously I might have been getting less satisfied every time the chase was successful. I was now twenty-five and had never actually had a long-term, serious girlfriend, so it was not surprising, looking back, that things suddenly changed. And fast.