When I had first met Dominique I had no idea what sort of family she came from, but I quickly learned all about their past. Her maternal great-grandfather had become very wealthy through various business projects, including building the Cairo metro, and had been made the First Baron Empain. As a result, Dominique’s mother was the Baronne Empain, the half-sister of the current baron, who in 1975 was kidnapped and had his little finger famously sawn off to force the payment of a ransom. The baron also headed up the Schneider industrial group, a huge company based in France that makes all types of electrical goods. Dominique’s father was also an industrialist whose family came from Italy originally, and she had three older brothers—Daniel, Bernard, and Jean—as well as her sister Nathalie.
After three days, it was time for me to jet off again, back to the USA, for the Pacific Southwest tournament in Los Angeles. For the first time ever, I wanted a woman to accompany me on tour, but ironically she was not able nor willing to do so. This was partly because her parents would never have allowed their daughter’s reputation to be compromised in this way by a strange Romanian they barely knew and partly because Dominique herself was a bit scared by the idea of travelling with me. She resisted me every time I asked her if she wanted to accompany me to a tournament. So the Davis Cup final in Charlotte came and went, the Embassy British Indoors in London came and went (I beat both Newcombe and Laver on my way to the title), and we continued our relationship by speaking on the phone a lot and me hopping over to Brussels for a day or two whenever I had a spare gap in my schedule, which was not often. Very frustrating.
Eventually, I invited her to a tournament in Stockholm in November, and she said her parents would let her come, as long as they accompanied her. What a choice! ‘No problem, sure, come with your parents,’ I heard myself say enthusiastically. So, after making sure my room was well away from theirs, I arranged for them to stay in the same hotel. Surprise, surprise, I was so happy and relaxed that week that I won the tournament. I also finally made love to Dominique after weeks of waiting, and realized that I was serious about the relationship and wanted her to start travelling with me as soon as possible. I couldn’t believe what had happened to me in the space of a few weeks, but it was not just my usual impetuousness that made me act like this. I had been around long enough to know that this was very special and that I was very much in love.
Unfortunately, when we went our separate ways again at the end of the week, Dominique had other ideas. She felt things were starting to get too serious too quickly and that, unlike me, it was time to put the brakes on. She also wanted to explore life a bit before getting into yet another big relationship. I had really hoped she would join me in Paris where I’d be playing in the end-of-year Masters tournament. Instead, she told me during yet another of our long phone conversations that she thought it would be better if we had a bit of a break from each other. In fact, she had decided to improve her English and join her brother Jean in Cambridge for an indeterminate amount of time. Stunned, I did manage to point out the obvious, that she could improve her English on the tour as well, but that was clearly not the main reason. She wanted to cool things down before we got much more involved. The problem with my life was that it was all or nothing. I could not date women like everybody else, seeing them once or twice a week. It was either a case of travel with me or see me once every three months. Not very good for developing a relationship.
So I had no choice but to agree to her request and went off to Paris on my own. Just to show her what she was missing, I made sure I won the tournament. This was a really big win for me, because the Masters gathered together the eight top-ranking men from the fourteen Grand Prix series of tournaments held during the year. We all had to play each other in a round-robin format, and I played so well that week that I ended up winning every single match, beating players such as Stan Smith and Jan Kodes (who that year had won the US Open and French Open, respectively) on my way to the £6,000 first prize. I had also come second in the Grand Prix rankings of points accumulated during the fourteen tournaments, and this qualified me for a $17,000 share of the $150,000 bonus pool. The end of the year, for tennis, had brought me a lot of success and money. It was personally that I was now hurting.
After a rather sad Christmas with my family in Bucharest, I set off again for the USA in the new year, winning tournaments in Baltimore and Omaha. I did not speak to Dominique for weeks because the whole separation had been her idea, and I did not want to annoy her by phoning the whole time. I figured she’d either fall in love with an Englishman or she’d come to her senses and realize what an amazing guy I was!
After a great spring, when I retained my clay-court titles in Nice and Monte Carlo and won in Madrid, I was feeling confident for the French Open in May. Unfortunately, I had a bad tournament: within two days, I had lost to the young Roman Adriano Panatta in the 1st round of the singles. Adriano was already a good player, but as last year’s finalist I would have been expected to beat him, so I was not pleased to go out in this way. In the doubles, Tiriac and I also lost in the 2nd round to the Belgians Mignot and Holmbergen, hardly a top-class combination, so I was feeling down about my results when I returned to my hotel that evening. There, I was immediately handed an urgent telegram. ‘Bravo for your brilliant defeat’, it said, teasingly. It was from Dominique, just when I thought I would never see her again. I called her straight away in Brussels, where she was now living again and invited her to Paris. To my surprise, she accepted at once, and within twenty-four hours I was waiting impatiently at the Gare du Nord for her train to pull into the station. This time, her parents did not accompany her. At long last, we were alone.
By the end of a wonderful week, I had decided I wanted to spend my life with her, so one evening we went out to a really nice restaurant in the Latin Quarter. I started telling her how much I had missed her and was she planning to stay for a while. ‘Yes’, was the answer, ‘I think so.’ I didn’t quite go down on bended knee—luckily, as it turned out—but when I did finally ask her to marry me, she just said: ‘No’. Nicely, but firmly, ‘No’. She wasn’t ready yet. Fine, I thought, no problem, I’ll just keep trying. And over the next couple of weeks, I asked her twice more. I’m someone who is very tactile, very romantic, so each time I set it up so that the atmosphere was right, the conversation was right, she couldn’t possibly refuse me. But, however hard I tried, still the answer was ‘No’, she wasn’t ready yet. OK, forget it, I thought, I’ll just wait. Maybe after Wimbledon.
No sooner had she returned, though, than she was off again, this time on a long-planned family holiday to Sorrento, in Italy, for the whole two weeks of Wimbledon. I tried to persuade her to skip it and stay with me in London, but her family was very traditional about these things, and the holiday was not something she could miss. So again I waved her off, reluctantly, and flew over to London.
At Wimbledon, I was seeded number 2, behind Stan Smith at number 1. One journalist said I was too high but I didn’t care, even though he was probably right because I had never yet got past the 4th round. In the end, though, compared to Stan—or ‘Godzilla’ as I always used to call him because of his 1.9 m height and enormous reach—I had a harder path through to the final, because I had to beat some good grass-court players on the way. In fact, it’s better to have a tough draw and to have to beat good players on the way, because then you feel you deserve to win the tournament and you are full of confidence. If you haven’t had to beat anyone much, you don’t know what you are capable of when you finally get to a big or tough match.
My first test came in the 2nd round when I faced Clark Graebner, who I had had a few on-court arguments with in the past (he had a temper, like me). He had also beaten me at Wimbledon in 1969 and 1970. This time, I beat him easily enough in four