Mr Nastase: The Autobiography. Ilie Nastase
we had a teacher who spat all the time when he spoke and who was never satisfied if you didn’t say the word exactly right. He was Romanian, by the way. Anyway, he managed to put me off that language, which is a shame because if I’d known I would marry a French woman I might have paid more attention.
We were also forced to study Russian, and, as a result, it was universally the number one most hated subject. In fact, we hated anything to do with Russia and any influence it had over our country. I will say, in his favour, that one good thing CeauŸescu did was to remove Russian from the list of obligatory subjects to study at school. We were also the only Eastern bloc country never to have Russian soldiers on our soil, so somehow, in these small ways, we managed to keep our independence just a little bit. But our leader at the time, Gheorghiu-Dej, headed up a Stalinist regime and was more friendly with the Russians than CeauŸescu ever was. In fact, I remember vividly the day that Stalin died: sirens went off all over the city; trams, trains and buses came to a halt and everything stopped while we had a minute’s silence and we all pretended we were very upset. They used to make us chant a slogan at school that said: ‘Stalin and the people of Russia bring us liberty.’ It rhymes in Romanian (Stalin Ÿi poporul rus, Libertate ne-a adus), so it was meant to be a nice, catchy thing to chant. But no one was fooled. My parents, my brother and elder sister remembered life before Communism and they knew this current regime did not mean liberty. This wasn’t the right way to live. So even at a young age I knew this chant was not true.
I was still getting into trouble at school, not for anything really bad, but for just making a nuisance of myself, pulling the girls’ hair—that sort of thing. Then one day, something happened. I must have been eleven or twelve, and the teacher was about to punish me for whatever it was I was supposed to have done, when the guy who’d actually done it owned up. The teacher was about to hand out the punishment to him, but I said: ‘No, it’s OK, punish me anyway.’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘you haven’t done it.’ ‘Yes but it’s OK, punish me, it’s always me anyway.’ I was so used to it by then that any punishment didn’t mean anything any more. I treated it as a joke. Maybe if tournament directors and tennis officials had realized this, they would have not bothered to go through all those later fines and suspensions, and spared everyone a lot of problems.
Because we no longer lived at the Progresul Club, I was having to play tennis and soccer at the Steaua Club, about twenty minutes’ walk away from where we lived. The Steaua Club (which means Star) is the Army Club in Romania, and my brother played tennis for them. I was obsessed with soccer and tennis, and so I happily went down every single day, after school, to play both for hours and hours, practising tennis wherever and whenever I could, ball-boying for anyone who wanted me and generally hanging around as much as possible. Sometimes I would get up at 6 a.m. to ball-boy for members of the club. Nothing else mattered but those two sports and, between the ages of ten and thirteen, I played both nonstop.
With soccer, however, I used to come home battered and bruised all over (I played inside right, the number 8 shirt), and my mother was getting more and more unhappy about the state of my legs, which were usually a nice mixture of red and blue cuts and bruises. Tennis at least had the advantage of not risking broken bones every time I played a match. On the other hand, soccer was very good for my tennis because it helped with the coordination, the speed around the court, the footwork, and the balance.
So, until I was in my teens, I could not decide whether to be a footballer or to devote myself to tennis. It was not a question of a career or money because, in those days, it was clear that there was no money in tennis. My brother, despite being a Davis Cup player and despite bringing back exciting tales of foreign travels and the odd packet of chewing gum, was still having to work as an electrician to make ends meet.
From the age of eleven, I had a coach, Colonel Constantin Chivaru, who was an ex-tour player himself, a Davis Cup team member with my brother, and it was he who persuaded me to devote my time to tennis. He never changed my technique, though, because he could see that it was very instinctive and natural, and he realized that it would do more harm than good to give me formal coaching. Because he didn’t want me going off to play soccer, he would bribe me with chocolates and encourage me to keep practising—not that I needed much encouragement. So, for a while, there was quite a lot of friction between him and the Steaua soccer coach as each fought for my loyalty and commitment.
During this whole period, my parents never once pushed me in one direction or the other. They had never done a stroke of sport in their lives and they never showed the slightest interest in my sporting career, so they were the least likely to know what to advise. All they worried about was where on earth my future lay, because it was clear that I was never going to do more than the absolute minimum amount of school work. Frankly, they didn’t even know what I was up to in sport. My father used to tease me. He’d say: ‘What are going around with that guitar for? You’re not going to do like your brother?’ He didn’t actively discourage me, but probably if he’d encouraged me to play I would have done the opposite, because it always upset me—and, yes, it still does at times—when someone told me I had to go and do something. So I can definitely say that my parents were the total opposite of pushy tennis parents. They never went near a court. But, in my mind, I knew that I wanted to do sport. I didn’t care what it led to—I just knew I could not imagine doing anything else. It was just a question of which one I was going to choose, tennis or soccer.
In the end, tennis won because I just enjoyed it more and I knew deep down that I was better at it. And when you are good at something, you get emotionally involved in it. I suppose I stopped being emotionally involved in soccer. Also, in tennis, I could get noticed more: if I won it was all down to me, and if I lost it wasn’t because ten other players had let me down. I could play the match my own way, unlike soccer where there is a team to consider. Although, I have to admit, I did tend to do as I wanted a bit too much on the soccer pitch as well: I’d hog the ball, to the extent that some players would shout: ‘Hey, did your mum give you the ball? Is that why you won’t let it out of your sight?’
My first tennis tournament was when I was eleven or twelve, and it was not a success. I played this kid who quickly beat me 6-0 in the 1st set. That was too much to bear, so I put my racket down and started to chase after him round the court until I caught him. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ he said. I immediately started to cry and then screamed back: ‘Nobody’s going to beat me 6-0,’ and promptly started to hit him on the head. He still beat me 6-2 in the next set, but it had started already: my first on-court tantrum. And it was not the last time I cried after a match, either.
My brother and my coach could see I had a lot of talent but they did not know whether that was going to be enough because I was so skinny. At that age, I used to run like a rabbit, chasing balls all over the place, whether they were in or out, and would return absolutely everything, using big, loopy shots. It used to drive my opponents crazy. But, with no television, I’d never seen top-level tennis, other than the odd Davis Cup tie, so I did not know how else tennis could be played, especially not when I was twelve or thirteen. The notion of clay-court tennis versus, say, grass-court tennis, or serve-volley versus back-of-the-court play had never even entered my mind. All I had was a treasured photograph of Roy Emerson that I had cut out of a tennis magazine brought back by my brother from one of his trips abroad. In it, Emerson was hitting a high backhand volley, so for years I only had that to go on when trying to work out how to hit that shot. But really, I didn’t have a clue, I just played instinctively, because my technique was never taught to me.
When people look back at their lives, they realize that certain events along the way were crucial to the direction that life eventually took. Some are down to good luck—and I believe that to be successful we all need a bit of luck—others to conscious decisions. In my case, the first key event that shaped my life occurred when, aged thirteen, I won the National Championships for my age category. Held in a city called Cluj, this was a big win for me but, best of all, I was given my first ever new racket—a beautiful Slazenger. I was unbelievably excited. That decided it. I realized tennis could be good for me and, from then on, I worked hard and was determined to get better.
The other thing that happened to me that week was that I saw, for the first time, the man who was to become the biggest influence in my life for the next ten years, Ion Tiriac. Aged