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SpotLight: Ilie Nastase
By Sean Egan
Today, Ilie Nastase is merely a face that pops up when TV leavens its
coverage with comedic clips from bygone days: an image from the age of
wooden racquets humorously holding an umbrella on court or taking issue
with Cyclops. Few who didn’t see him in action in his heyday or who are
not aficionados of tennis history would realize from such footage that
Nastase was one of the most breathtakingly gifted players of all time. To
some, he was literally the greatest. Yet even those who sing his praises
say he underachieved, letting his hot temper and his propensity for
buffoonery cheat him of too many titles that were his for the taking. An
indication of just how great a player he was is the fact that even in a
career of what is universally acknowledged as unfulfilled promise, he
claimed championships at the French Open and the US Open as well as an
unbelievable four Masters victories.
Here Ilie is seen clowning it up but Nastase was also one of most
breathtakingly gifted players of all time.
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Ilie Nastase was born in Bucharest, Romania in 1946, the youngest of
five children. His father started out as a police officer but in time
moved over to banking work. In a country then in the grip of communism,
young Ilie found refuge from his grim surroundings in sport. He was gifted
in several but especially soccer and tennis.
“I have the feeling that every sport I played with a ball, I [had] a
very good touch either way,” he says in the endearingly fractured form of
English he made familiar at press conferences in the Seventies. “I played
basketball, anything. If the sport has a ball, I’m very talented with
that.”
Opportunities for practice at tennis were plenty: Nastase’s family
lived in a house that was situated in the bounds of a tennis club.
Nastase acknowledges that this was a very important factor in his life. “I
think it was the basing of becoming a tennis player because I was a ball
boy and I was very close to the good players when they play in the club or
Davis Cup and I follow all the players everywhere,” he reveals. “I learned
quick and that’s what’s for me the preparation to become a good player.”
Though Nastase, of course, had some coaching and practiced hard in his
early days, he was one of the few players in history (John McEnroe was
another) whose skills were essentially in-born: his instinct, anticipation
and quicksilver shot selection were the type of things that simply could
not be coached. “It was natural,” he says. “I didn’t have to worry too
much what’s coming. I had a lot of intuition for the game. I know ahead
what the ball was coming and things like that. I was lucky to have this
talent or whatever you call it: gift from God. It’s helpful if you don’t
have to practice so hard. For me, everything was natural.” This natural
ability meant that Nastase could afford to spurn conventional techniques:
“It’s different when you play the way you want and then you see players
playing different. For me, it was like, ‘I have to do it my way’. I did it
for myself. I pleased myself and if I pleased somebody else, people around
the world, even better - but I did it for myself.”
This Gift from God made Nastase a stark contrast to many of his rivals
when he became a professional. Asked whether he felt sorry for someone
like Bjorn Borg, who was rarely off the practice courts, Nastase says,
“No, because it’s a talent that way too. If you ask me to practice five
hours, I can’t do that but there are not many players like [me]. The only
player I see in the world today I guess like me is Martina Hingis. She
knows where to go before the other girls hit the ball. She’s very good
intuition. You cannot practice at this.”
Nastase was a new breed of player, he argued with umpires, tormented
his opponents, and engaged in silly antics
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Despite his natural skill, Nastase didn’t actually start playing on the
circuit until he was 21, a very late age even then. He feels this may have
handicapped him in a couple of ways. Firstly, it meant he didn’t have as
much time to acclimatize to grass as his rivals: “The problem was because
I build my tennis on clay,” he laments. “Being brought up on clay, because
the courts were so slow. I never had a chance much to play on fast
courts.” It wasn’t until he was 21 that Nastase even saw a grass
court. The second handicap was the way his backhand - always the weakest
shot in his armory - failed to mature: “I developed maybe a wrong shot,
that was my backhand. It was difficult for me to go in the big tournaments
and improve it quick.” However, another possible explanation for his
underachievement was something that couldn’t really be blamed on his late
start: his emotionality. “Everything bothered me,” he admits. “If someone
was moving in the stadium or the staircase. Some guys like Bjorn never
let anything bother them at all.”
When Nastase did start playing on the international circuit, it became
clear before very long that here was a new breed. A sport that still
dripped with country club connotations - and which for the first few years
of his career was still contaminated by the hypocrisy of ‘shamateurism’ -
simply wasn’t prepared for Nastase’s kind of character. He argued with
umpires in the most profane language imaginable, tormented his opponents
with blatant time-wasting and psychological warfare and engaged in silly
antics designed to alternately please and alienate the spectators. He was
thrown out of tournaments, suspended and fined again and again. All of
this produced a rather inevitable nickname: “Nasty”. (“The Bucharest
Buffoon” was another favorite insult of his detractors.)
Yet for many, his sublime talent made everything forgivable. He was
tennis poetry in motion, gliding around the court with incredible speed
and an apparent effortlessness. Equally fast and fluid was his
shot-making, switching grips in the blink of an eye to produce exactly the
kind of stroke his opponent assumed he couldn’t possibly manage. Charlie
Pasarell once marveled, “Sometimes you find him just standing there
waiting for the shot.” Topping off those in-born skills was a quality
Nastase achieved by the practice normally alien to him: a thunderous first
service.
Despite storming out of their match at the Masters, Arthur Ashe
remained Nastase's friend.
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Not that it was mere talent that provided Nastase with absolution. That
he was a man as warm-hearted and friendly off-court as he was spiteful on
court ensured that even the players he tormented found him lovable. The
dignified and aloof Arthur Ashe, for instance, was an unlikely friend and
remained so even when he stormed out of their match in the 1975 Masters
tournament in exasperation at Nastase’s antics.
The mixture of Nastase’s graceful talent and graceless behaviour soon
made him the biggest box office attraction the game had hitherto seen and
helped attract a younger audience that had previously disdained the sport.
Nastase is unrepentant about his behaviour, despite the widespread
feeling that it prevented him fulfilling his potential. (One commentator
once described him as “The best player with the worst results of all
time”.) “I don’t know,” he shrugs when that issue is put to him. “That’s
somebody else’s problem. I only want to be myself and if I look back
then, I don’t have any regrets. That’s the way I feel to play the game.
Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe if I wasn’t the way I was, then I didn’t win
anything. It’s to prove.”
Nastase was also accused of looking down on players whose games weren’t
as stylish as his own, even to the point of mocking them by reproducing
their own boringly orthodox shots for stretches of matches. Nowadays, a
mellower Nastase is almost offended by the suggestion of disdaining the
less gifted: “No, no, no,” he insists. “I didn’t do this. Just, maybe
the way I was playing, the way I was taking the other man, but no, I never
put anybody down or said they are not good players.”
Nastase won his first non-Romanian title in 1967. The first of his two
Grand Slam titles came in 1972 when he beat Arthur Ashe in the final of
the US Open, astounding even himself by winning a tournament played (then)
on grass. The following year, he defeated Nikki Pilic to claim the French
Open. (He’d finished runner-up to Jan Kodes in 1971). He should also
have won Wimbledon but was always the bridesmaid at the All-England Club. In 1972 he was defeated by American Stan Smith in a stunning final which
many still talk about as the greatest ever played there. In 1976, a last
hurrah at the age of 30 was only stymied when new young hope Borg beat Nastase to take the trophy.
Nastase’s best tennis, however, was reserved for the Masters. “The
last tournament of the year - maybe everybody was tired!” Nastase now
suggests in an uncharacteristically modest way. The season-ending
tournament which sees the top eight players in the world congregate to
determine who is the crème de la crème was an occasion to which Nastase
always seemed to rise. He often became bored when taking on lower ranked
players (“That was my problem” he admits) but put a superstar in front of
him and Nastase suddenly became alert and eager to prove a point. For
three years on the trot - 1971 to 1973 - he won the title. In 1974, he
was defeated by Guillermo Vilas in the final but came back triumphantly
the following year to reclaim the title by trouncing Bjorn Borg losing only five games. Not even Pete Sampras - so
dominant in his own era - has been able to best his closest-placed peers
so consistently.
When the computer rankings system was first introduced in 1973, Ilie
Nastase was its first number one.
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Of Nastase’s more than one hundred titles, about half were doubles,
inevitable for a player with such lightning fast reactions. In mixed, he
partnered Rosemary Casals while he had a variety of partners in men’s
doubles, the most notable of which was Jimmy Connors, a player with a
temperament very similar to his own. “We played for three or four years,”
Nastase remembers of his partnership with the pugnacious American. “The
time we finished, we’d been defaulted many times. But finally we won two
grand slams. Playing with Jimmy was fun. A lot of fun.”
Nastase was the first ever number one in the computer rankings when
that system was introduced in 1973, something he is very proud of: “I want
to be remembered like a number one. I’m one of the few number ones in the
world. For me, it’s a great pleasure to be with all these guys. I think
there are twelve or thirteen only, until now.” He feels that the computer
rankings were a change that had to be made. “I think the rankings before
[’73] was a problem because it was not computer and the sport writers,
they make the rankings,” he points out. “Then when the computer came in I
thought it was a good system.”
However, he does acknowledge that there is perhaps something unhealthy
in the lack of competition to the ATP. In his day, circuits such as World
Championship Tennis were alternatives considered equally valid to the main
tour. “I think it was okay then,” he recalls. “Many players, they can
choose a tour. Now, I don’t know if there is a monopoly, but players,
they cannot choose. They have to play ATP. Every single tournament is an
ATP tournament. But I think ATP are doing quite a good job. What they’re
doing now, they’re trying to cancel some tournaments because obviously
there’s a lot of tournaments and, players, they cannot play everywhere and
every week.”
Talk of the modern game brings up the subject of players Nastase
considers in his own elegant image - or rather, the lack thereof, Hingis
excepted. “He’s not playing anymore but a guy from Czechoslovakia -
Miloslav Mecir,” Nastase says. “But I don’t know anybody now doing that.”
When asked whether he agrees with the perception of many that players
today treat the game too much like a business to the detriment of fun, the
once outspoken Nastase is surprisingly coy: “I don’t know. I think the
game is different, the players are different, and I don’t want to compare
with when we played and what we do.” When it’s suggested to him that the
game is generally considered less exciting now, he only offers: “I don’t
know. I think it’s different and I cannot comment more than that.”
A gifted doubles player, Nastase won more than fifty titles, many with
long time partner Ion Tiriac.
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Such coyness is a measure of the fact that Nastase - while in no way an
establishment figure - has come a long way from the man of scandal of the
1970s. For example, in 1996, he stood as a left-wing candidate for the
post of Mayor of Bucharest following his country’s conversion to
democracy. Although he didn’t win, he surprised many with his thoughtful
campaign. Meanwhile, he was until recently a part-owner - with former
doubles partner Ion Tiriac - of the Romanian Open ATP Tour event. “It was
different,” he says. “It was something that I had to find many things
out. It was a good experience.” However, his part-ownership didn’t
entail the former terror of the courts having to endure the embarrassment
of disciplining players who misbehaved: “I was not a director of the
tournament. I was owning the tournament but I didn’t get that deep, being
involved so much. I just put my money in.”
Nastase is still closely involved in tennis development. He is also a
fixture on the seniors circuit, where his clowning makes him a crowd
favorite. Unfortunately, the partnership between him and Connors has
been temporarily shelved: “I’m going into the 55-65 now. Jimmy Connors is
a young man. He’s playing in another group with the young players. I’m
playing with the grandfathers now.”
Looking back on his career, Nastase says he is happy with his record. Those who talk of him concentrating on indulging himself too much and
concentrating on his tennis too little and assume some level of lingering
dissatisfaction on his part are barking up the wrong tree. “If you win 57
tournaments and 51 doubles and [four] Masters and I’ve been number one.
I’m pleased with my results,” he says. “So I have both. I’m not
disappointed with myself.”
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