‘A rat, a rat!’ I screamed at Ion.
‘What are you talking about, a rat?’ he replied, exasperated.
‘There, look! Look!’ I pointed in terror at this large hairy animal watching us carefully as it gnawed away at something nearby.
‘You’re right. Shit, let’s get out of here.’
And we ran out of the cinema, as fast as our legs could carry us.
In India, Tiriac and I used to play singles, doubles, mixed, anything, because they gave us a little bit more money every time we played an extra event. One day, I partnered a turban-wearing, eighteen-year-old Indian player called Jasjit Singh for a men’s doubles. After the match, he asked me if I could play with his mum, in mixed doubles. I did a quick mental calculation and figured she must be about thirty-six or thirty-seven.
‘How good’s your mum?’
‘She’s number 2 in India,’ he replied.
‘OK,’ I said. Then I saw her shuffling onto court, a vision in a wonderful pink sari. ‘What’s happening, can you run? Will your sari be OK?’ I asked, worried.
‘Oh yes, no problem, no problem, no problem,’ she replied, smiling calmly.
But it was a problem, a problem, a problem, because I was the only one who ran that day. I don’t know what she was number 2 of, but it can’t have been of India. I swear she didn’t run once for the ball and, sure enough, her sari stayed firmly on.
In another mixed doubles match, this time a final, Tiriac was on the other side of the net. I had broken the strings on all my rackets by this stage of the week, and, in those days, there were no stringers at tournaments. There was not much you could do in such a situation, other than ask to borrow someone else’s racket. So Tiriac lent me his last spare racket. At one point, he broke a couple of strings on his own racket and asked me for his last good racket back. So I took his broken racket and proceeded to beat him with it. He was not amused. Things got worse when, in the men’s final, later that day, I borrowed a terrible Indian racket—it did have strings but it was a really odd shape—and beat him again. Then he really was mad with me.
Along with Egypt and Italy, India remains one of the countries that I remember with most affection. Not only did we enjoy the hospitality of the people when we played there, but we also managed to get a sense of what those countries were like beyond just the tennis. Normally, when I played tournaments, I was so busy playing singles, doubles, and mixed doubles that I had no time or energy to go visiting the sights. But I spent so many weeks in these countries in the early years that I felt I actually had time to get to know them a bit.
Our Davis Cup encounter with France in 1966 led to another lucky development in my career. The referee for the tie was Signor Martini, who was high up in the Italian Tennis Federation. As with the Musketeers René Lacoste and Toto Brugnon, I obviously impressed him enough for him to recommend me to his Federation, and this secured me an invitation the following year to come and play a series of tournaments in southern Italy plus, best of all, the Italian Open at the famous Foro Italico in May. This was fantastic for me and, for the next few years, I spent April and May playing in places such as Catania and Palermo in Sicily, Reggio Calabria and Naples, before heading up to Rome. The Sicilians and the southern Italians really adopted Tiriac and me, because we quickly picked up the language. We made a good friend in Sicily, who owned an orange plantation, and he used to invite us over for dinner every night and bring us basketfuls of oranges.
The rest of the time, Tiriac and I would often buy pizza and eat it on the nearest beach before heading back to whichever low-cost hotel we were staying in that week. As anyone who has been to Italy knows, the country is full of these pizza shops where you can buy pizza by the weight. There are only four flavours, and the pizzas themselves are incredibly cheap but totally delicious if you are ravenously hungry and have little money.
In Rome, we stayed with a guy who became a close friend, Francesco d’Alessio. His father was very rich and owned racehorses. He even named a couple after Tiriac and me in the end, though I don’t think my horse could run much because he never won a race in his life. Francesco used to take us out to Trastevere, the old and bohemian part of Rome near the Vatican. In typical Italian fashion, we always seemed to be about twenty noisy people for dinner—tennis players, friends of his, anyone he picked up along the way. Most of the time, I had no idea who half of them were and where they came from, but we always had a great time. At the end of the evening, we would simply call for ‘il conto’, divide it up, and go our separate ways until maybe the next evening.
On other occasions, Tiriac and I would take a bus up to the Via Veneto, the most glamorous street in Rome at the time. We’d first of all go to the cinema, then we’d sit at Doney’s café, the best café to be seen at, and ogle the girls. We didn’t chat any up because we still had no money. No fame, no money, no action, as far as the girls were concerned. They simply weren’t interested.
In the spring of 1967, Ion and I returned to Bucharest for a Davis Cup tie against Spain. We were in Lugano, Switzerland the week before and we must have overspent our allowance, because we no longer had enough money for the plane trip back. So we took the train instead. This was no ordinary journey, though. It took something like twenty-eight hours, involved God knows how many changes in God knows how many countries, and sitting on backside-numbing wooden benches for most of the trip. We managed not to let anyone into our compartment, and we took it in turns to sleep, three hours each, in the luggage net above our heads.
When I eventually staggered off the train in Bucharest, I was not in the best shape to pit myself against Manolo Santana, the player who, along with Roy Emerson, was one of my all-time idols. He was the number 1 clay-courter at the time, a winner of the French and US Opens, the reigning Wimbledon champion, and the guy who really invented the topspin lob, which I was later to make one of my trademark shots. Manolo could lob on both sides, so, after watching him practise it and even getting to hit with him for a bit (it was unusual to be asked to practise with an opponent), I went away and practised it myself for hours and hours, because no matter who you are you only learn to do those shots by practising them really hard. I still assumed I was going to get wiped off court, so I thought I don’t care, I’m just going to try to copy exactly what he does. If he drop-shots me, I’ll drop-shot him back; if he lobs, I’ll lob.
So the match starts. I break him first game. ‘Jesus, good start,’ I thought. Next thing I know, I’ve stretched out an easy 6-0 3-0 lead. The crowd are going wild because this is the best clay-court player in the world and I’ve got him totally bewildered. The Spanish captain, Jaime Bartroli, turns round to his players: ‘Have you ever seen this fucking guy play?’ They all shake their heads. Mystery. Manolo was playing with Tretorn rackets, which he was testing because he was trying to sign up with them, but in his bag he still had his old Slazenger ones. I can tell you, after that he switched pretty quickly back to Slazenger ones and finished me off in four sets.
We eventually lost the tie 3-2 (Tiriac and I won our doubles and I beat Gisbert in one of the singles). At the traditional post-match dinner, I made sure I went up to Santana and said: ‘You know where I learned that shot? Watching you. And practising.’ He laughed and very kindly signed his photo for me ‘para un futuro campion del tennis’. I still have it to this day. It meant a lot to me that a player of his reputation should be so nice to me. At tournaments afterwards, he would always smile, say ‘hello’, chat to me, and this is an attitude that I always tried to adopt with young players when I became successful, and I hope I carried it through.
Although we were technically amateur sportsmen, there was still a gap between the sort of money I was subsisting on and what the top amateurs, such as Santana and Newcombe, were making. It was commonly accepted that they would be paid appearance money for every tournament and, in those days, they could easily make $500-$1,000 per week—good money, in other words. The player restaurants