But my earliest memory was when I must have been about three years old. The seating around the main stadium court just consisted of open wooden benches, rising up above the court. I remember I used to run around naked a lot—it was summer and hot—and I liked to clamber up to the top corner of the stadium’s seats and watch the tennis, naked. On this occasion, Romania was playing a Davis Cup tie against France, and the ground was full. People were excited to be able to see great names like Benny Berthet playing. So there I was, happily watching the action when I realized I badly needed to go to the toilet. Unable to hold myself, I started to pee and everything started to dribble between the stands. At first, people below thought it was raining until they realized what it was that was dripping on to their heads. Some guy came running up and started to scream and beat me up, and my mother rushed up and beat the hell out of me too. That was my first court-side scene. And, even then, the punishment didn’t put me off.
When I was four, my brother hired me as his sidekick to help sell Turkish delight to the fans who went to the nearby soccer stadium to watch matches. Constantin has always been one to spot an opportunity to make a bit of extra money, so he’d buy this Turkish delight and sell it at a profit to the captive audience. I’d have to nip over the busy tram lines that separated the Progresul Club from the soccer stadium, carrying not only the sweets but also big jugs of cold water—we’d offer a glassful as well to offset the cloying taste. I suspect we weren’t really allowed to engage in this sort of entrepreneurship as it did not really fit in with Communist thinking.
By the Fifties, food shortages were severe in Romania and, even though Ana and Constantin were also working, we only had just about enough food for us all. I remember my father queuing for basic foods such as bread and, although we never actually went hungry, others certainly did. The one thing we were most lucky about was that the authorities allowed us to keep a cow and a goat in the grounds of the club, which meant we always had enough milk. My mother would regularly get me to hand bowlfuls of milk to children on the other side of the fence separating the club from the street, and I have to say that the image of these hungry children has stuck with me to this day.
But it was because we had these animals that this absurd legend began to circulate when I first joined the tennis circuit, that I had once been a shepherd boy, although God knows how I could have kept sheep in a city-centre club. Even so, I lost count of the number of articles about me in the early years that stated this ‘fact’ as the Gospel truth. The intention, I guess, was to make out that I had only just emerged from a cave and that my story literally was a rags to riches tale.
By the time I was five or six, I had started at the nearby kindergarten, where I was allowed to go by myself, although the grass was so tall that you could not see me walking through it. I also used to spend a lot of time watching tennis but had yet to pick up a racket. My brother, who is thirteen years older than me, was a good tennis player who went on to play tournaments abroad and Davis Cup for Romania. I would admire his rackets, although they were still too heavy for me to pick up, but there was never any question that I might start to play. Actually, I think that was the best thing for me because, if I had started when I was three or four, as so many kids now do, I would probably have got bored with tennis by the time I was a little older and would have moved on to something else. My mother never said: ‘Go and watch them in the Davis Cup, try to learn from them.’ I would just run up over the little grassy hill that separated our house from the courts and watch the players for hours on end, subconsciously taking in all their movements, simply because I enjoyed watching. I never thought of it as a learning process.
I was extremely skinny when I was young, largely because I was unable to stay still for very long. When I was six, I was very ill with bronchitis and pneumonia, and my father—fearing that I might suffer the same fate as Volodia—scooped me up, took me to the governor of the bank, put me on his desk and pleaded with him to get me some medicines. This had the desired effect because the guy signed at once to allow me to be prescribed some antibiotics. But even so, I remained scrawny right through childhood and adolescence. Even in 1970, aged twenty-four, I still only weighed 70 kg, which is not very much for my height of 1.85 m.
Around the age of six, I started to play tennis a bit, not with a real racket but with a sort of wooden bat. I would hit endlessly against a wall that was directly below a chocolate factory that backed onto the club, and occasionally the women who worked there would throw sweets out to me. Needless to say, that encouraged me to go there more regularly and to play for hours on end. I would still watch the club members whenever I could, but I remember thinking, even at that age, that I could probably beat most of them if I was given a chance. Because the grounds were also next to the soccer club, I would often wander onto the pitch, juggling a ball at my feet and the bat and a tennis ball in my hand. The soccer ball was sometimes just made of old pieces of material tied up and stuffed into a sock and I would kick it around until basically it disintegrated. Still, I loved running around doing both things at once. It was all just one big game.
Unfortunately, my huge, safe playground was taken away from me when I was eight: my two eldest siblings had left home, so we had to move house to make way for others. Our new home was a ground-floor, two-bedroomed apartment in a small, grey block of flats nearer the city centre. I had to share a room with Gigi and Cornelia. With its windows that were barely above street level and no garden, the apartment was bleak compared to our bungalow, and I hated it at first.
The street became my playground, and my main pastime with my friends was to play soccer for hours on end. We also liked to run over to the US ambassador’s residence, which was not too far away, and rummage through the bins, picking out anything that was American or that smelt good. What we were really looking for was Coca-Cola bottle tops, which we would then place on the tram tracks. When they had been well flattened by the trams, we would retrieve them and play a game of chance. This involved flipping the tops like coins and the one whose top came out with the Coca-Cola sign on top would win both coins. You could, if you were lucky, accumulate quite a lot of these prized symbols of Western decadence.
My current wife, Amalia, tells me that, thirty years later, under CeauŸescu, with the country in massive debt and food shortages a daily occurrence, she and her friends used to play an almost identical game. They would collect Pepsi bottle tops (by then, for some reason, Pepsi had overtaken Coca-Cola in appeal) and the one who had the most tops was the most important. So nothing had changed, and, either way, it goes to show that if you deprive kids of these sorts of things, they will just come to want them even more.
The only good thing going for our new apartment was that it was literally over the road from the school that I went to from the age of eight to seventeen. So I used to jump over the fence at lunchtime, grab a piece of bread with sugar on it for lunch, which was sometimes all we had to eat, then run back and spend the rest of the breaktime playing soccer with my friends.
The school was mixed and had about 1,000 pupils. Until we were eleven, there was no school uniform so I used to wear the same blue tracksuit every day. My mother would wash it every three days in our huge bath, because we did not have a washing machine. She would then hang it up to dry and hope that it was dry the next morning for school, which was not always the case. The tracksuit was like wearing jeans and a sweat shirt now for kids. Similarly, the only shoes I had as a child were tennis shoes. But then, what other shoes would I have needed at that age? I wasn’t exactly going to parties.
School was something that I put up with. In primary school I was constantly being punished, sometimes for things that I did not even do. Because I was so shy and never dared look the teacher in the eye, I always looked guilty. The teacher would then pull my ear, which made me mad, or hit me round the head, which made me madder. But one of her favourite punishments was to get me to kneel in a corner, for hours on end, on upturned walnut shells. Weird, I know. And painful, too, I can tell you. By the end, my mother would be summoned in almost every day to see this mean old teacher, and she would try to tell me to behave, but somehow no amount of threats or punishments seemed to work. Do you detect a pattern for the future?
In secondary school