ilie nastase Comic, Clown, Genius, and Lunatic

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Bucharest airport was just like any other for Jan Kodes when the former Wimbledon champion arrived to play a Davis Cup tie against Romania in ‘77. Clutching a passport that was stuffed with all the tedious visas and paper work required for a person traveling from one communist country to another — or anywhere else for that matter — Kodes strode into the arrivals lounge and plunked the documents down on the ledge of the glassed-in control desk.
Barely glancing at the uniformed figure inside the booth, Kodes looked around the arrival hall to see if the Romanian Federation had actually remembered to send a car for him.

Suddenly he was shocked by a disembodied voice from the booth barking at him. “This visa is not valid!” it said in English.

“Why not?” asked Kodes angrily.

“Because you are the biggest son-of-a-bitch in the whole world, Russian!”

Even if Kodes hadn’t caught on as to who was setting him up, the term ‘Russian’ would have done it. Only Ilie Nastase called him that: just to annoy him; just to rub salt into the open wound of the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. It was all in jest, but there was always a hard edge to the rivalry between these two great East European champions who might otherwise have come from different planets, so different were they in style, personality, looks and temperament.

But everyone was different from Nastase. Even Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe, his two co-conspirators in taking pro tennis outside the confines of its exclusive, ivy-covered walls by grabbing the attention of the masses, were not like the man they called Nasty. And the difference could be summed up in one word: Humor.

Nastase was a clown; a comic; a genius for making people laugh. He had the instincts and timing of a natural comic, as was proved when I drove him to his appearance on Saturday Night Live back in the ‘70s. He was as nervous as a kitten on the way there but, within ten minutes of meeting the cast for rehearsal, he had a group of the funniest people in America in stitches. Connors could never do that and oh, how McEnroe wished he could.

He knew just when to grab the umbrella and try to play a point underneath it when it started raining at Wimbledon; he knew just when to call out to the serious Soviet player Alex Metreveli in the middle of a World Team tennis match, “It’s okay, Alex, you can smile now — you’re bosses in the Kremlin, they say it’s okay to smile sometimes!” He knew when he could get away with goading Arthur Ashe at the bar the night before they were due to play in Stockholm by telling him, “Negroni, tomorrow I do things on court that will turn you white!”

Outrageous? Politically incorrect? You bet. But Arthur would just smile his little smile because it was Nasty, half-man, half-child and wholly impossible.
But there was a tough, arrogant side to Nastase as well. I spent time with him in Bucharest in ‘77 and saw how he maneuvered his little Lancia sports car around the broad streets with a panache that did not always stay on the right side of the law. Once we roared through a red light right under the nose of a young traffic cop. “I am Nastase. I am late for practice.” It was a statement that brooked no argument, certainly not with the flustered cop who had shown every sign of knowing precisely who Nastase was and didn’t feel inclined to argue. All we got was a petrified salute.

In fact, he could pull rank on a lot of people at that time because he had been forced to enlist in the Romanian army. Fighting didn’t come into the curriculum and the rank of major was merely an attempt to mirror his celebrity. But the fact that I had insisted he dress up in his uniform for a photo shoot just before he left for the airport to meet Kodes had allowed him to pull his prank. Army officer’s uniforms were almost identical to those of the customs personnel and as a few of them were pals of his, it had been easy to arrange it so that he was in the passport booth.

On court, he could be everything from maestro to clown to raging, foul-mouthed lunatic. In that epic Forest Hills battle against Hans-Jurgen Pohmann, a German who could be pretty obnoxious himself and always rubbed Ilie the wrong way, Nasty turned really nasty and leaned over the net yelling obscenities at his opponent as Pohmann writhed on the ground in agony with cramps.

His tirade against the owner of the San Francisco Gaters WTT team one evening was totally inexcusable but, as his Los Angeles Strings colleague Vijay Amritraj has said of him “He was a mixture of Mozart and Beethoven. Any fool could see how great he was just by watching him glide about the court. He had extraordinary natural ability and 80% of the time he was funny and 20% he was gross. But, as an entertainer, he was unique.”

When he ran for Mayor of Bucharest, his long time Davis Cup colleague Ion Tiriac said, “I knew you were stupid but not that stupid.” After a few political skirmishes, Nasty saw what he meant and settled for becoming President of the Romanian Tennis Federation. He also has a new wife, his third. She is young, Romanian and keeps him on a short leash. Amazingly, he no longer complains.

—RICHARD EVANS