After Philadelphia, I had been signed by Bill Riordan, who organized one of the first pro tours in the USA and who was in direct competition with Jack Kramer, who ran one of the others. Bill looked after me in those early years; he was like an agent but also a friend. He put me up in his house in Salisbury, Maryland and lent me an old car to drive around the first week, until, that is, the engine caught fire one day outside the stadium. Firemen had to rush to put out the flames, while I was standing there helplessly, worrying about who would pay for all this. I have to say that, although cosmopolitan Washington DC was not far away, the good people of Salisbury clearly thought I was a real oddity and were fascinated by this Communist alien who had landed among them. They asked me all sorts of questions. What was life in Budapest really like (like many people, they were convinced the Hungarian capital was in fact in Romania), did we have electricity, cars, that sort of thing. Were we still in the Middle Ages, in other words. I always answered politely and even showed them that I could use a knife and fork. Still, the people were very nice, and the tournament was well organized, so I could not complain.
I was still technically amateur at the time, as far as the Romanian Tennis Federation were concerned, so I was not formally earning prize money. Instead Bill paid me a guaranteed weekly sum, about $50 a week, if I remember rightly, and reimbursed my expenses on top. Later, I would receive as much as $250, as Bill worked out that not only did I entertain the crowds but I would also sign for another pro tour, Lamar Hunt’s World Championship Tennis (WCT), if he did not take good care of me.
This was a limbo period for the sport, because, whilst many tournaments were now open, the Davis Cup was still reserved for amateurs. As this was what my Federation cared most about, I myself was not allowed to turn fully professional until a couple of years later, when the Davis Cup finally became open.
Bill’s tournaments took me to a few more small American towns on my introductory tour of the USA, towns like Macon, Georgia, deep in the south of the country, and Omaha, Nebraska, where Tiriac and I, in another of his crazy money-saving schemes that lasted a week, slept in a $1-a-night mobile home. Other than noticing that the food portions were pretty big, and the cars and the people even bigger, I did not have too much time to make comparisons between the American and European way of life. I was living and breathing tennis, to the exclusion of almost everything else.
Even when it came to girls, although I was now able to chat them up and get them into bed pretty easily, I have to say that, until I got beaten in the singles, and often even the doubles, I was a good boy. But once I was out of a tournament, assuming I did not win it, which was still often the case, I went out looking for girls. Tennis is a sport where there is no shortage of girls willing to sleep with a player, just for the sheer hell of it. They’re tennis groupies. Many of the girls at that time were not interested in anything more than being able to tell their friends what they had done. I honestly don’t think they planned for anything more than that. The notion of kiss-and-tell to the newspapers certainly did not exist, nor, thank God, did the idea of using the media to extract money from a man if she became pregnant. Usually, the most they might want was to hang around with you for the week, or maybe travel around with you for a little, not that I ever allowed the latter. When you visit a different beach every week, why take a bucketful of sand with you from the previous week? This was the late Sixties, and sex was on tap. For those who could get it, sex with no strings attached was quite common. For tennis players, let’s just say it was the norm.
So, having finally got rid of my inhibitions a couple of years before, and now that I was earning a little bit and had more confidence, I would usually find myself a girl before the week was out. If I was staying in someone’s house, such as the house of a volunteer at the tournament, it could be a bit tricky to smuggle the girl in and out, though sometimes they had a suitably willing and attractive daughter so I didn’t need to worry.
The last tournament on that winter American tour of 1969 took me to Colombia, and the coastal town of Barranquilla. Colombia was not the drug capital of the world in those days, and good players used to turn up for this event. My week in Colombia was one of my most successful so far, and I won the tournament, even though it was the windiest place I have every played in. I beat two highly rated players, first Mark Cox, then my old adversary Jan Kodes in the five-set final. That gave me a huge boost of confidence, because I realized that I was able to keep up with the top guys. As I headed back to Europe, I felt I had taken another step up in terms of the level I had reached.
Most of the matches back then, both singles and doubles, were played as best of five sets, unlike now where they are mostly best of three, other than in grand slam tournaments. Also, tournaments usually had men’s and women’s draws, because the women had not yet developed their own separate tour (this happened in the early Seventies). In any given week, I would play singles and doubles as best of five sets, plus mixed doubles. That is why, when I am asked if I practised a lot during tournaments, I answer that, once I started passing a few rounds, I did a minimal amount of practice—usually about half an hour a day—because I got all the practice I needed by simply playing matches. The doubles were my practice sessions. Fortunately, Tiriac recognized this and let me do as I wanted most of the time. By contrast, Guillermo Vilas, who Tiriac coached and managed in the Seventies, had the capacity to work like a mad dog (and, I should add, was happy to practise for hours every day). My game would have been neutered if I had been on a similar treadmill. I needed to stay fresh mentally in order to play my game that relied on inventiveness, instinct, and speed. Slogging away on a practice court for hours before a match would not have been the way to make me perform at my best.
That said, I remember one year, at Queen’s Club, when I was challenged by Roy Emerson, who loved to stay superfit.
‘Come on, Ilie, I’m going to jump the net, twenty-five to thirty times with both feet. Can you do that?’
‘Sure, that’s boring,’ I reply dismissively.
‘No, come on, try.’
So I start to jump. I quickly get to twenty-five, thirty. Then I just carry on. Fifty, sixty, seventy, no problem. Emerson’s just staring at me, really surprised. After jumping it one hundred times, I announce: ‘I’m bored, can I stop now?’
He got the point. I suppose I was just lucky that I was both naturally fit and did not need to practise much once I reached a certain level.
Also, I was very sensible when it came to smoking and drinking. I have never smoked in my life, and I never drank alcohol until I was well into my twenties. I would always drink Coca-Cola, Orangina, or Fanta. I still do. My first alcoholic drink was beer, which I’m afraid to say I liked very much from the moment I drank it, and I do now drink a bit of red wine. But that’s it. I’m very careful about how much alcohol I drink.
This was sometimes a problem when we went out with the Aussies, especially John Newcombe and Tony Roche, who Tiriac and I got on very well with. In Paris in 1969, the traditional players’ party was held in Montmartre, and the one area where I could not keep up with John and Tony was drink. They really liked the beers, non-stop beers. They never got drunk, they just had this huge capacity for drinking them. That night, I had to stay until 4 a.m., until they’d finished drinking. Looking back, I’m not sure why I didn’t just get up and leave, but maybe I was still too shy or needed to share the cab fare back to the hotel. I just remember having to wait hours for them to finally call it a day with the beers before we all headed home.
My relationship with Tiriac remained incredibly close. Usually, wherever he went, I went too. The only difference now was that I was getting results in singles and doubles, whereas his were mainly in doubles. But he was still an enormous influence on me, even though in many ways he is very different from me. It reminds me of the film The Odd Couple, with Jack Lemmon and Walther Matthau, because we were such a contrast, both in terms of physique