Actually, I’m dead straight when it comes to sex, and I’m not into anything that deviates from a normal one-man one-woman encounter. It’s like sex in a car. We’ve all seen the movies, and it seems like a great idea at the time, but, believe me, when you’ve played a long match, sex in a small place is not good. I remember trying it once—and we’re not talking about a car the size of a Mini, here, but a reasonably big American car—but I got cramp in one leg. I know, not very impressive for the girl. There I was, supposedly the great athlete, suddenly seizing up at the crucial moment. ‘Huh, so much for a performance,’ she must have thought. ‘He was good on the court, what happened to him now? He’s dead.’ I just about got through, but afterwards, as I recovered, I thought: ‘I must remember never to do that again after a long match.’
Similarly, the Spanish girl who decided she wanted to have sex on the hotel balcony—it was enclosed, I should explain—to see if those on the street below might hear, came closest to my limit of what I was prepared to do with a girl in public. It might seem like fun at the time, but I hate hearing other people having sex (sometimes thin hotel walls give you no choice), so I can’t stand the idea of others hearing me.
So really sex is best when you can spread yourselves out, you can both relax, and nobody can see or hear you. Mostly, I was still a good boy, and I’d wait until I was at least out of the singles before going to look for a girl. Sometimes, though, Tiriac would get annoyed because I’d ignored him and gone out, even though we had a doubles match the next day. He never actually locked me in for the night—despite rumours that he did—because he knew that this would not have stopped me disappearing through the window and out into the street. But I knew he found me quite difficult to control by this stage. The thing was, if I did sleep with a woman during a tournament—and I’m not talking about my wife, later on, where the situation was obviously different—I would always be conscious that I could not give 100 per cent. It’s scary to say, now, but I could not go full speed ahead with sex, because I was afraid I might not play as well as I could the next day. So I would always hold something back, I would not go on all night, much as I might want to, so that I did not exhaust myself completely. I’d call them ‘mon amour’ or ‘darling’ (most women understand those words and, that way, it doesn’t matter if you forget their name), but I’d also say: ‘I have a match tomorrow’ (even if I didn’t) ‘so it would be very nice if you could leave.’ I never threw them out but I would try to come up with an excuse that wasn’t too painful. Those were the ones I didn’t want to spend the night with. Of course, the good-looking ones sometimes left before I wanted them to. That also happens, so it works both ways. But I’m afraid to say that, for me, quite a lot of sex in those days was like taking a daily shower: you take one, it feels nice, then you forget it.
By the end of the Sixties, Romania was one of the most advanced Eastern bloc countries. We all had enough to eat, thanks to our agriculture, and everybody had a job and somewhere to live. But around this time, CeauŸescu embarked on his massive industrialization project for the country, and Bucharest started to become a building site. Bucharest had always had a reputation for being beautiful. It was called the Paris of the east because of its wide tree-lined avenues that resembled those of the French capital and also its Parisian-style pale stone buildings with their grey, slate roofs. We even have a theatre that is modelled inside on the Paris Opera House, with a sweeping double staircase and a frescoed ceiling inside the auditorium. But CeauŸescu did not care about all this. He was desperate to build factories, oil refineries, chemical plants, anything to get us away from the agricultural country we were. So he started to pull people off the land in order to build high-rise blocks of flats. Then he put people in those apartments to build the next lot of apartments, and so on. Finally he put people in the apartments who would work in the factories. This building work finished in the late Eighties, by which time there was nobody left on the land, and we suffered once again from massive food shortages. But, by the Seventies, whole areas where there had once been little houses were starting to be pulled down, and big grey apartment blocks were put in their place. Although I spent very little time at home, I knew that I was well off compared to many of my friends, although quite a lot of them were other sportsmen, especially soccer players, who lived a reasonably privileged life as well. I was still in my small apartment, though. I did not have three cars lined up outside my home (I had given my green Fiat to a friend), and I was not throwing lavish parties every night. If we went out, yes, I would pay for everyone but I have always thought that was normal. But when my friends insisted on paying their bit, or invited me round to their home, I would happily accept as well. I didn’t want my new life to make a difference. So I tried hard—and still do—to minimize the effect that my wealth had on those around me.
My parents were very simple people, so this helped. They would never ask me to buy things on my travels for them, other than small things maybe, like decent whisky and shaving foam for my father, or coffee and Toblerone chocolate for my mother. In 1970, things had not yet got very bad in Romania, and I was not yet earning the sort of money that I would later on, so the gap in wealth between me and those around me was easier to smooth over.
What was less easy to smooth over were the cracks in my relationship with Tiriac. Inevitably, as I became more successful, I gained confidence and turned to him much less for help and advice. I started to stand on my own two feet. I got my own friends, and I also liked to go out with women. We did still socialize a lot together, though, because we were part of a whole group of players who would play against each other during the day and then go out together for a meal in the evening. Sometimes, we would all then go on to a nightclub or bar.
There were two groups on the tour: the Romanians, Italians, French, and Spanish in one—the Latins, really—and the Anglo-Saxons and Americans in the other. Curiously, the Australians were with us. Maybe because they too liked to have a good time. Then, later, Borg came along, as did Vilas and other South Americans. We’d play each other, beat each other, and that evening we’d all be eating together. None of this happens today. Each player is an island, surrounded by his ‘team’, his coach, his masseur, his psychologist, his stringer, his girlfriend. You name it, they’re all there to protect him from, God forbid, some contact with another player.
Tiriac and I would still be together a lot, day and night (though we were no longer sharing a room), but I had distanced myself from him. I needed him less. Sometimes, he tried to stop this happening by attempting to control me, by telling me to play in a particular way, or to do a particular thing. I would just go and do the opposite, just to annoy him, because, as countless umpires and referees have discovered over the years, I have never liked being told what to do. Eventually he realized what I was doing, so he would tell me to do the opposite of what he really wanted me to do, knowing that I would then do the opposite, which would be what he had wanted me to do in the first place. A complicated way of controlling somebody, I think. I did not realize he was doing it at the time, but I discovered later when he told other people.
One of the last occasions when he influenced me strongly was in spring 1971. I was due to defend my title in Rome, but Ion called the director there and told him that we weren’t going to play because I wanted to have a guarantee on top of any prize money I might earn. The guy said that was not possible, they were not giving any guarantees. So we went to Madrid instead, and they paid me a lot of money to play.
At the end of that week, we both found ourselves in the final and it happened to be the day of his birthday, 9 May. So the night before the final, he suggested we both go out to dinner.
‘Ilie, come on, you’re much better than me’, he starts, ‘tomorrow, just give me a couple of games, you know, then that’ll be OK. I have the money anyway, so I’ll be happy. Just don’t kill me.’
So I say: ‘OK, I won’t wipe you