The first few trips I made were to countries such as Egypt and India. Hardly places that symbolized the glamorous Western lifestyle, but, in the beginning, the only thing I thought about was tennis. I had no time or money to go exploring very much beyond the club. In Egypt, Tiriac and I would play for several weeks in a row, going from one tournament to another. I loved Egypt, the people were so kind, and the club in Cairo—the Gezira Club—was a beautiful English club with a great tradition going back a hundred years. The tournament there was the start of the European circuit, and good players would come and play.
That first year, I played the Australian Ken Fletcher. He was an excellent doubles player who won the Wimbledon men’s and mixed doubles titles. In my match with him, my shoes were so bad that I had no grip at all, and I was slipping and sliding all over the place, like I was on ice. There was only one thing for it: off went the shoes. After that, it was easy. Game, set, and match to me. Fletcher couldn’t believe it. He’d been beaten, not only by some skinny unknown Romanian but also by one who was wearing socks as well. I’m sure he drowned his sorrows with a few beers that night.
We would get two Egyptian pounds (20p) a day in pocket money, enough to buy two pairs of shoes. OK, so they were Egyptian shoes but they were still shoes. We would be given one free meal a day at the club, and we would supplement that by buying all the exotic fruit, such as oranges (for us these were exotic), which cost so little out there. We would usually stay in small, very basic hotels or with English families, who took good care of us. But once or twice, because we had basically run out of money, Ion decided it would be good to sleep on the beach. It was hot, he figured, so we washed at the club, bought food and ate dinner on the beach and settled down to sleep outdoors. Why not? Well, actually, it was terrible, that’s why not, with sand getting everywhere inside our clothes, so luckily he soon went off that idea.
My game around that time was unorthodox and relied heavily on my speed and anticipation around the court. I had a very loopy forehand, no serve, and no power in my shots. I just used to run everything down. This made my opponents mad, but there was not much else I could do. I also loved to drop-shot, lob, and try out crazy shots that my opponents were not expecting.
Because I’d never been shown how to hold a racket, my grips were not perfect, particularly the backhand grip, and this did not give me the ideal backhand, like Laver’s or Emerson’s. I also held (and still do) the racket so that the end was in the palm of my hand, rather than emerging beyond. If you look at photos of other players, you can usually see the tip of the racket handle, whereas with me you cannot. The advantage was that I could play with much more wrist, and, throughout my career, this enabled me to get shots back with the much heavier wooden rackets that everyone used—shots that other players could not return. Consequently, I developed both a very strong wrist and great touch.
As for the anticipation, you cannot teach that to anyone. All I knew was that I had a sixth sense, particularly at the net, about where the ball would go. If you put me with my back to the net and hit ten balls, eight times out of ten I would turn the right way to hit the ball. Martina Hingis was the same, and that’s partly what made her such a great player. Nowadays, players so rarely come to the net that they cannot have that anticipation. They will stay in the middle and wait for the shot to be hit before moving, whereas I would start to move as the shot was being hit—and sometimes even before—because I was usually right about which direction it was going in.
Slowly, my experience grew and I began to win a few matches and to do well with Tiriac in doubles. At first, he told me he would have preferred to play doubles with other players—even my brother who was closer in age to him than I was—because I was not helping his results, but gradually we started to improve on court and to get closer off court. His influence over me began to grow and, at that time, I used to lap up everything he said and copy everything he did. He would look after our spending money and give me just enough to buy something to eat—another great way to stay skinny—although if I really wanted to buy myself a T-shirt or something, and we had enough money at the end of the week, he would allow me to do so. Usually, though, he made very sure that I did not spend all my money at once and that I saved what I could, not that there was usually much left over. But it was advice that I have carried with me to this day. He’d say it was better to put the money in the bank, where it would grow slowly but surely, than to invest it in something crazy which might or might not work.
When it came to tennis, Ion was also the first to recognize that his success was down not so much to talent as to sheer hard work and determination. This was fine, except that he was sometimes so determined to win at all cost that it became very well known on the tour that he would use various tricks to obtain an advantage over an opponent. Tricks such as staring long and hard at him when he’d won a good rally, or breaking up his rhythm either by slowing down or speeding up play between points. Gamesmanship was a word that Ion knew well, and many people think that he deliberately taught me all the tricks in his book. I suppose in some cases he did, but in others I just watched and learned. If it worked for him, then I might use it on a later occasion, though I was not always conscious that I’d seen Ion use it first.
In those early years, I was happy to work hard and practise for hours. I did not see it as ‘work’, just as total enjoyment. If ever Tiriac had to go rushing off court during a practice session to make a phone call or whatever, he would return a quarter of an hour later to find that, to amuse myself, I had been hitting lobs to myself, jumping over the net to retrieve them, then hitting another lob back over, jumping the net again, and so on, trying to see how long I could keep the rally going without the ball bouncing twice. It was all just a game.
Although I was totally at ease on the tennis court, I was still hopelessly shy off it and didn’t say much to anyone. I took the view that no-one was interested in what little I had to say. Winning gives you confidence in yourself as a person, and as I was not winning anything I was not confident. As for women, I was physically incapable of looking any of them in the eye, still less to lay a finger on them. God knows I was interested and I liked looking at them, but I was still not able to go any further. In Romania, I had had a few fumbles with one or two girls but that had never led to anything, partly because I was away a lot and partly because I felt so unattractive. Skinny and with no muscles to speak of, who on earth would want to go to bed with me, I thought? I avoided what I assumed would be a humiliating refusal by never putting myself in the situation of asking.
My two trips to Roland Garros in Paris, in spring 1966, proved to be a breakthrough for me, both professionally and personally. As a child brought up to play clay-court tennis, Roland Garros was my Mecca. It was the biggest tournament for Europeans, and the one that I had dreamed of playing and occasionally that I had even dared to dream of winning. Walking through those historic gates, seeing the distinctive grey concrete stadium, knowing that those French Musketeers had won here so many times, thrilling the crowds for years, all this was unbelievably exciting. Unlike today’s players, I have always been fascinated by the history of tennis, by the great champions of the past and how they managed to play. Even when I first started to travel—and maybe because as a child I had been starved of information about tennis—I had nothing but respect and admiration for everything these past champions had achieved, even though their style of play and equipment were totally different. Despite that, they played fantastic tennis. When you think that, not only were players such as René Lacoste playing in long trousers, but also their rackets did not even have leather on the grip. They played with just wooden shafts. Incredible. I don’t know how they held the racket. That’s why a visit to the Roland Garros museum, which opened in 2003, is a trip all tennis fans should make, to appreciate how exceptional these champions were.
So when I was selected to play Davis Cup for Romania against France in Paris, I could not wait. As anyone from a Communist country will tell you, it was always made clear that representing your country in any sport was the highest honour for any citizen and what really mattered to the country was not what you achieved as individuals but what you achieved as a team, in our