Tennis: “Nasty Nastase” lashes out
Forty-five years have passed since Wimbledon rose to applaud Ilie Nastase, said Kevin Mitchell in The Observer. Despite losing to Stan Smith in a classic final, the Romanian “entertainer” was so scintillating that he won over the crowd with his charm. But after his “appalling” behaviour last week, no British audience “will ever again give him such acclaim”. During Romania’s Fed Cup match against Britain, in Constanta, the 70-year-old team captain roared at Johanna Konta and her team captain, Anne Keothavong, calling them “fucking bitches”. His comments left Konta in tears, and landed Nastase a suspension. Yet that was only the pinnacle of his “vileness”. The previous night, he had put his arm around Keothavong, asking repeatedly for her room number, and speculated about a pregnant Serena Williams’s unborn child: “Let’s see what colour it has. Chocolate with milk?” As a backlash mounted, Nastase was characteristically unapologetic. “I don’t need this bullshit,” he told a reporter.
It’s very sad to see Nastase “make such a fool of himself”, because few players have done more to popularise tennis, said Simon Briggs in The Daily Telegraph. A seven-time Grand Slam winner, he was famed for his deft touch and extraordinary speed as much as his outlandish behaviour: at Wimbledon, he once grabbed a spectator’s umbrella and held it in one hand as he played the next few points. But even then, there were signs of the “darker side” that earned “Nasty” his nickname, said Jane Fryer in the Daily Mail. He once told a noisy spectator that he’d “shit in her hat” if she didn’t pipe down; the former American player Pam Shriver revealed this week that when she was a teenager, Nastase asked her dozens of times if she was a virgin. He is just as outspoken about his own sexual exploits – he has, by his own estimation, slept with close to 1,000 women. Nastase remains obsessed with his sexual prowess and his looks: the top floor of his home is given over entirely to his dressing room; downstairs is “a shrine to himself, in which he can barely sit without weeping with nostalgia”. He even tried to buy his old Madame Tussauds waxwork, only to discover it had been melted down.
Nastase’s defenders insist he’s just a “character”, said Sean Ingle in The Guardian. That is what has allowed him to get away with so much: in 1980, he slapped Daily Mail reporter John Passmore, knocking off his glasses, yet faced no charges. He continues to be indulged in Romania, where he is perhaps the most famous person in the country – he brazenly entered the arena in Constanta the next day, flouting his suspension. For too long, the tennis world has shied away from challenging Nastase with “sufficient force”. This time, it can’t let him “volley away” his indiscretions.