Mr. Nasty: Part 2
Steve Tignor
That Illie Nastase would be the first casualty of the Open era wasn't all that surprising. He had come to stardom midway through his career and been caught unprepared.
Mobbed by teenage girls at Wimbledon one year, he shook his head incredulously, "I don't understand it. I'm 31 and very ugly."
Inhibited and innocent in his early days on tour-his friend and mentor Ion Tiriac had to pay for Nastase to lose his virginity to a Paris prostitute-and with no map laid out for him by any professional predecessors, when he did hit the big time, he had played too much, spread himself too thin, and overindulged in the temptations of the road.
"Tennis is a sport where there's no shortage of girls willing to sleep with a player, just for the hell of it," he said.
Still, just because he slept with one in one city didn't mean she got to travel with him to the next. "When you visit a beach each week, why take a bucket of sand with you from the last beach?" he asked.
Nastase's initiation to sex may have come late, but his fame allowed him to make up for lost time in a hurry.
By the end of the 1960s, he could "usually find a girl before the week was out." He often slept on the couches of tournament volunteers, which made it tricky to smuggle the girl in. Thankfully, the problem often solved itself. "Sometimes they had a suitably attractive daughter, so I didn't' need to worry."
From those humble beginnings, Nastase would grow increasingly cosmopolitan in his expertise with the fairer sex. As with everything else in pro tennis, Nastase tested the boundaries when it came to women.
After winning the Italian Open in 1970, he celebrated at various spots across Rome until, he said, "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?"
Nastase was sufficiently enamored of the woman, who may or may not have been an actress or a contessa, that he broke his cardinal rule about bringing sand to the beach and invited her to the next tournament, in Naples.
After a picturesque week there, the woman asked him to come to Tuscany with her. Nastase was on the verge of saying yes when she casually added that her parents would be there, too.
Now it had gone too far. Nastase bid her farewell. "I'm afraid, amore mio," he told her wistfully, "that I have another tournament to go to, and I am very busy this summer, so that will be difficult."
Explaining his regular use of terms of affection such as "amore mio" and "mon amour" and "darling"--depending on what country he was in on a given evening--Nastase claimed that most women understood what they meant, whatever language they spoke, and it helped when you forgot the woman's name.
Nastase went on to discover that "German girls are among the most relaxed and open when it comes to sex." On the downside, he also found out that he didn't like doing it in a small car-a big American car was one thing, but a Mini was out of the question.
"It seems like a great idea at the time," he said instructively, "but believe me, when you've played a long match, sex in a small place is not good." Nastase tried it once and was embarrassed when the "great athlete" seized up with a cramp in his leg. As he lay recovering from the ordeal, he decided he would never try that again after a big match.
A little later, in Spain, he found that he wasn't crazy about sex on hotel balconies, either. The woman he was with wanted to see if people on the street below could hear them, but this ended up being a turn off for Nastase.
"I hate hearing other people having sex," he said, showing his concern for others, "so I can't stand the idea of others hearing me."
Nastase's most notorious relationship of the 1970s, though, was not with a woman. It was with his fellow hellion, Jimmy Connors. Nastase and Connors first squared off at an indoor tournament in Salisbury, Maryland, when Jimbo was a teenager.
Nastase won in three sets, and Connors dragged himself disconsolately back to the locker room. Gloria's tiger had discovered that life on the pro tours could be lonely.
So he was surprised to see his eccentric, lank-haired Romanian opponent, whose English was still a work in progress, walk toward him, point his finger at his chest, and say, "You, me, dinner." It was the beginning of a long and tremendously vulgar friendship. While Borg had introduced (innocent) sex to the chaste lawns of Wimbledon, Nastase and Connors took the next step by debuting a simulated sex act between male doubles partners.
Nasty and Jimbo dove for a ball that was hit between them; afterward, there was nothing left to do but have a roll on the lawn. They were an act. Loved by the sport's new fans for their sense of cheeky fun, loathed by the traditionalists for the same thing, Nastase and Connors defined the outrageousness of the early pro era.
They wore bow ties and sipped champagne on court in London. They played in matching rugby shirts at Wimbledon, and paid the fines afterward. They tore around a soaked grass court during one final because they didn't want to let down the customers.
Nastase took Connors under his wing, and tried to impart some of his knowledge of women to the young American straight arrow. Connors, Nastase discovered, had a lot to learn. "He was always promising women things," Nastase said. "I would say, 'Why did you tell her you'd take her to Vegas? You don't need to do that."
"After all, he was only trying to get laid. You could tell his mother influenced him beyond his tennis. Jimmy thought you needed to be in love with a girl before you could do anything." On occasion, Nastase took it upon himself to get rid of Connors's girl for him.
Nastase won the first eight times that the two played, providing confirmation of Connors's need to hate his opponents to play his best against them.
With that record, and with Connors's victory or death approach, the friendship and the doubles partnership were doomed. It reached a low at a special event at CaesarsPalace in 1977.
Nastase was late in arriving. Connors believed he had done it purposely to throw him off. When Nastase finally got to the court, he found Connors swiping the net with his racquet. "Fuck you, Nastase, fuck you," he said with each swing.
The verbal barrage from Connors continued until Nastase brought out the big guns. "Why don't you get your bloody mother down here?" he yelled. "You know you can't win anything without her!" Connors looked as if he'd been punched in the face. He sat down in silence and didn't say another word. Nastase won easily.
Though they were no longer inseparable, their friendship continued. Nastase faded from the tour; Connors plowed on. In 1986, Nastase tried his hand at a surprising new career as a novelist. That year he published Break Point, a "thriller" set, of all places, in the world of the professional tennis tour.
One of the characters, named Dumbo Cooper, bears a striking resemblance to a famous real-life American tennis player. Cooper's hotel rooms are notoriously ill kept, with socks, shirts, and underwear strewn over every square inch of floor and bed.
One spot, though, is conspicuously kept clear: the space where Dumbo keeps a framed photograph of his sainted parent, Mother Cooper.
As coarse as Nastase could be, there was also an effervescent quality to his personality and his game. Few tennis players have come to the sport as naturally-or nakedly.
Like Pancho Segura's, Nastase's father had been a groundskeeper, at Romania's national tennis center, the large and beautifully landscaped Progresul Club in Bucharest. Nasty liked to streak naked through the grounds, and one year he climbed up to the top of the stands that way during a Davis Cup match.
There was no history of athleticism in his family, but the sport surrounded and seeped into him as a child. Old tennis balls rolled on the carpet. Rackets were stacked against the walls. There was a stringing machine nearby.
And there was the sound of the sport, the thwock of balls against strings, all around. At 4 or 5 years, Nastase would spend hours watching the Davis Cup team practice, unconsciously imitating their movements. He didn't learn the sport so much as internalize it.
And that's how Nastase played it. Like later tennis artist John McEnroe, Nastase disdained practice. He didn't need it. He hit the ball with, in the words of British tennis writer Linda Timms; "that rarest of combinations, flair with precision."
Nastase's game, like his career, bridged two eras. He could serve and volley-he won at Forest Hills and reached the final at Wimbledon, both on grass. But he was a clay-court touch artist by nature who could win from the back of the court and loved to use the drop shot.
Nastase was a balletic player with his feet, and as quick as any pro in history. With his racquet, he looked like a maestro conducting with a flick of the wrist. "I want to play the game inside out," he said early in his career.
McEnroe used the tennis court as a canvas, Pancho Gonzalez as a refuge, and Jimmy Connors as a boxing ring. Ilie Nastase saw it as a stage.
Shy elsewhere--attention in restaurants made him nervous--he was free to express himself when he was alone on court with a captive audience.
A fine soccer player as a kid, he had chosen tennis over the team sport in part because it allowed him to show more of himself. This isn't unusual. Tennis, which demands a blend of thoughtfulness and aggressiveness, attracts that seeming oxymoron, the outgoing loner.
But Nastase wasn't content, like so many other players, to let his racquet do the talking. He loved to communicate verbally-with his opponent, the umpire, the audience.
It's fitting that he began to fulfill his potential only in 1969, at age 23, when he won a tournament in Colombia because he said he was tired of hearing other players make fun of him for not knowing how to use his talent.
During his 1972 U.S. Open final with Arthur Ashe, Nastase said that when he was behind two sets to one and the crowd was booing him-he'd given them the finger and hit a ball at a linesman-he spotted one man in the audience who desperately wanted him to win, and who was suffering with him on every point.
It was enough to inspire Nastase to come back. "He changed my life," he recalled, "but I never met him."
