Book of the Month June/July 2005

Book of the Month

Not so Nasty
by Andrew Begg
June/July 2005

Mr Nastase - The Autobiography by Ilie Nastase with Debbie Beckerman
384 pages, 2004, ISBN 0007181418, £13.29 (hardback) £3.99 (paperback), available at www.amazon.co.uk

The autobiography of Ilie Nastase is an engaging, entertaining account of how a boy with nothing but a prodigious natural talent rose from collecting Pepsi Cola bottle tops in Bucharest streets to become one of Romania’s very few household names.

Mr Nastase is first and foremost a sporting autobiography, so anyone expecting insights on life under Ceausescu might be disappointed. Communist regimes granted many privileges to their sports stars, and in this respect Romania did not differ. At the age of 17, Nastase managed to avoid compulsory national service by dint of his playing for the army club, Steaua. By the time he was an established player, Nastase could come and go freely from Romania on the condition that he remain at the beck and call of the Romanian Tennis Federation – which meant having to prepare and play for his country whenever a Davis Cup fixture loomed. As Nastase’s prominence in tennis grew, the regime might have considered the temptation to defect could become overwhelming. To dampen such desires, not only did the government decide Nastase could keep all his prizemoney, it decreed that his tennis earnings be tax free.

So Nastase never defected, unlike other world number ones from Iron Curtain countries such as Ivan Lendl and Martina Navratilova (who in her early days embraced America’s spend, spend, spend culture and had two Rolls Royce convertibles and a Ferrari with the numberplate X-CZECH.) Nastase never had any need, or indeed desire, to defect, and in this respect it is refreshing to learn of a Romanian who could live anywhere he pleased, but who chose to call Romania home. There is little or no artifice in him. The main obstacle his communist origins posed was the frequency and time he spent arranging visas to travel to countries that did not take kindly to visitors from the Eastern Bloc. The eve of one of his two Wimbledon singles finals was spent inside the US embassy in London arranging a visa to the United States, because he was committed to play a tournament there as soon as the Wimbledon final had been played.

That is somewhat ironic, because by that time – the mid-1970s – Nastase was a fully fledged member of the international jet set, dancing the night away at Studio 54 in New York and hanging out with the likes of Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol between tournaments, having his way with tennis groupies – towards the end of the book he mentions in passing that he has slept with 2,500 different women, and one tends to believe that that is no exaggeration – and dividing his time between the house in upstate New York, the apartment in Manhattan, the house south of Paris, the apartment in Paris and the house in which he spends most of his time now in Bucharest with his third wife Amalia and their daughter, Alessia, born in August, 2003.

Nastase’s first tournament title was in 1959, when he won the national boy’s event for his age group. Held in Cluj, the same tournament saw a 20-year-old Ion Tiriac upset the Romanian number one to become national champion. It was that tournament, Nastase says, that made him decide to dedicate his life to tennis; though he lacked any grand plan, all he knew was that he loved the game and wasn’t afraid of practicing for hours on end. Tiriac would hold that same title until 1967, when he and Nastase squared off against each other, with Nastase emerging the victor.

The relationship with Tiriac is complex and well documented. Nastase’s talent must have been obvious from early on because Tiriac, seven years his senior, adopted a patrician attitude to the young firebrand, arranging appearance money and generally taking Nastase under his wing. The pair formed a formidable doubles combination for ten years until Nastase’s star quality outgrew Tiriac’s more workmanlike game.

Throughout that decade they traveled together, sharing hotel rooms and tennis success and off-court experiences which provide plenty of Boy’s Own-type memories. On a visit to Paris early in his career, a Romanian friend of Tiriac’s called Gheorghe arranges for the pair to visit a brothel where Nastase loses his virginity. After initial success at Wimbledon, Nastase bought a Ford Capri with his prizemoney before discovering his driving licence was not valid for countries outside Romania, and it fell upon Tiriac to drive it all the way back to Bucharest. The relationship remains close to the present day.
Other friendships in tennis include those with John McEnroe – whose mastery of the game was perhaps greater than no other player in history, and whose genius is frequently compared with Nastase’s own – Arthur Ashe, Vitas Gerulaitis, Bjorn Borg and, especially, Jimmy Connors. It is credit to Nastase that unlike many other professional sportsmen he didn’t spiral downwards after his tennis career peaked. Nor does his autobiography end there. There is an interesting vignette or two about the Bucharest earthquake, the Revolution, and his ill-fated tilt as the PSD’s candidate for mayor of Bucharest. Plus insightful summaries of the professional game today and the players that comprise it.

Nastase, the world’s first top ranked tennis player when the computer points system was introduced in 1972, can be credited for attracting millions of people to tennis through his on-court wizardry, his disdain for officialdom, his sex appeal and his sense of humour. Mr Nastase – The Autobiography relives all of this and more, and is packed with the kind of vignettes that tantalise sports fans.