(ed. note: correction appended - Pete)
**
"Mister Boh-doh. . . give me a seegarette, please."
"Come on, Ion. You've got more money than God. Buy your own cigarettes, cheapskate."
"But if I buy them, I will smoke them." At this point, Ion Tiriac would shrug those great big hulking shoulders, and look at me with a mournful frown - and nobody ever did mournful frown better than Ion - while brazenly fishing in my shirt pocket. "Thank you, Boh-do. You are a good man."
"I don't know how to take that - coming from you."
This scene, or some variation thereof, was played out for many years, albeit quite some time ago (I no longer smoke, at least in theory) between me and a seminal figure in Open-era tennis. In fact, you could look at the origins and growth of pro tennis through the Tiriac prism, and this is what you would see: former ice hockey player, sensing the tremors of the developing tennis boom, takes up tennis at a ridiculously late age and becomes a world class player; he goes on to manage one of the most gifted and mercurial early Open-era stars (his countryman Ilie Nastase) and (inadvertently) helps tennis boom in the eastern, less fashionable part of Europe.
Next, he turns Guillermo Vilas, a soulful , earnest lad from the Argentine, into a poetry-writing, heavy-metal listening, (arguable) World No. 1 and (inarguable) father of the tennis boom in South America, after which Tiriac drifts on to Germany and discovers and grooms young Boris Becker. Key Tiriac moment: at Wimbledon in 1985, Becker rolls his left ankle in his fourth-round match with Tim Mayotte. Sitting courtside, Tiriac urges him to remain on the turf to get treatment, persuades him not to abandon the match (by all rights, Becker should have been defaulted for taking too long to resume play), and Becker goes on the become an instant, overnight sensation by winning the tournament at age 17.
The emergence of Becker, at age 17, with Tiriac very visibly by his side, is ultimately acknowledged as a marker for the marriage of a few critical trends in tennis: the maturation of the pan-European tennis market, the impact of new technologies on the game (John McEnroe has said, for the record, that Becker could not have won Wimbledon at 17 playing with a standard-sized wooden racket; he should know, having been one of Becker's victims at that fateful Wimbledon (see correction, below), the growing trend toward a cradle-to-grave, intensively managed focus on tennis.
Are we there yet?
Not quite. Tiriac also emerged as a promoter of indoor, mega-events (starting with Stuttgart, the German event that ultimately morphed into the Madrid Masters Series) and exhibitions. And when the Soviet Union crumbled, he established Banca Tiriac, the first private bank in post-Communist Romania. As he drifted further and further into the tennis wallpaper, one of his companies (Elite Management) took over player representation duties, with Marat Safin as their flagship client. Meanwhile, Tiriac continued to diversify, to the point where he's now identified as the richest man in Romania, with an net worth of somewhere around $800 million.
So, it was somewhat amusing to read, a few days ago, that a number of comment posters seemed to think that Tiriac was a kind of, oh, Darren Cahill - hey, what's his name - wasn't that guy Boris Becker's coach? That's okay, of course; it wasn't like Tiriac cured cancer (if anything, he might come down with the lung variety, partly hanks to me).
So, these days Tiriac is chimeral but still seminal (let's remember who proposed killing the doubles in Madrid last year). And all of this would be rather more ho-hum if he weren't, hands down, the most intelligent, intriguing and controversial figures in tennis. Trust me - nobody ever mistook Tiriac for the ultimate shades-of-gray father of sports agenting, late Mark MacCormick.
I suppose you could see all this coming in the way Tiriac shoehorned his way into international tennis after his start in ice hockey (he was on Romanian Olympic squad). He was a bearish, lumbering fellow who moved at about the same pace - and with about the same delicacy - as a loaded hay wagon. He had paws for hands, a negligible forehand, and one backhand - a slice that he hit from somewhere around his thick mid-section, hunched over the ball like Rosie O'Donnell lurking over a pepperoni pizza.
Yet Tiriac managed to carve out a career that included a Grand Slam doubles title (this back when top players actually played the game) at Roland Garros and two Davis Cup finals, the second of which (1972, Bucharest, Romania) takes a prominent place as perhaps the most controversial, electrifying final of them all: The U.S. squad won, 3-2 (thank largely to a collapse of epic proportions by the highly-strung Nastase), in a confrontation that took on the dimensions of a battle between good (the U.S.) and evil (Romania). This, by the way, was the consensus opinion in the international community, not merely that of the aggrieved U.S. party.
Tiriac's greatest asset as a player was his mind, in ways good and, well, Machiavellian. He was not only a great tactician, he was the ultimate gamesman who never met an opponent he didn't want to cheat. Harsh words? Just ask any of his com temporaries, for Tiriac took the ruling "gentleman" ethic of tennis, turned it on its ear, and shook it at every opportunity, sometime, it seemed, just to see what would fall out. Find him a loophole of any size - and until the ATP codified the rules, there were dozens of them, pertaining to everything from line-calling to courtside coaching - and he would drive a lorry through it, then shrug and apply cold logic to defend his position.
All this might have seemed cold-blooded in a reptilian way, but for the fact that Tiriac was also a Big Personality. Early in his pro career, he was immortalized by John McPhee in one of the all-time great tennis books, Wimbledon: A Celebration. This is what happens when you're a Romanian with a glowering visage, a Medusan tangle for hair, a passion for gamesmanship of the worst kind, and a basso profoundo with which you deliver startlingly trenchant observations that approach something truly rare: blunt poetry of realism. Among my favorites:
On Nastase: Ilie doesn't have a brain. He has bird flying around in his head.
On Becker: Boris was both formed and deformed by his early fame.
Tiriac was , a deadly combination of a realist and brazen, seemingly amoral opportunist distinguished by one redeeming feature: he never pretended to be anything he was not. He was many borderline "bad" things, starting with "cheat". But "hypocrite" wasn't one of them.
Tiriac took the honor system as an invitation to feast freely and get away with as much as anyone would give him (and that turned out to be a lot, given the milquetoast tendencies of the establishment combined with the manners and mores of the players). He was the ultimate devil's advocate, and it just happened to turn out that in most constructions, he himself was the devil. How convenient. How Tiriac.
You think I exaggerate? I say it's impossible to exaggerate when it comes to Tiriac's flagrant disregard for conventional ethics; but if it were as simple as that, he would be merely distasteful. The truth of the matter is that he's an attractive character who you can't help but love - even when you suspect that, just maybe, he's selling missiles to somebody who ought not have them. Also, he seems to subscribe to that odd "honor among thieves" principle, which is the ethic of the outsiders. Most of all, though, you sense that he is the ultimate loner, communing in his conspicuous drive to achieve with something he's never articulated and perhaps nobody will ever understand.
To his everlasting credit, Tiriac never played up the struggle that almost everything he did somehow represented - the singular outsider vs. the insiders (mostly the tennis establishment), many of whom were easily as compromised as he, only in deep denial - or worse - about their condition. I suppose he might have been created, in another context, by Clint Eastwood, circa High Plains Drifter, or even my favorite of all movies, Unforgiven. You'd never call him a good guy, but the theoretical "good guys" are worse.
If Tiriac had a moral framework - a value system, I guess - he would have been a saint. But without any apparent one, he was a kind of free radical, acting out of an unmitigated self-interest for which he never apologized, and which very often had the effect of making those who did work within an ethical framework look silly or suspiciously conflicted. Of course, that's an ignoble if shrewd position, in the big picture; working outside the system frees you from the conflicts and struggles that arise out of operating within one, and that's an advantage Tiriac continually exploited.
Nowhere was all this more in evidence than in the sad and shabby tale of the way Vilas, one of the most beloved players of his time, was slapped with what amounted to a career-ending, one-year suspension by the powers-that-be (in those days, it was an entity called the Men's Pro Tennis Council) in 1983. I tell the story in detail in my book, The Courts of Babylon: Tales of Greed and Glory in the Harsh New World of Professional Tennis, but for our purposes here I'll give a short version:
It was an open secret at the time that players were paid under-the-table (as opposed to today's under-the-radar) appearance fees to play in certain star-starved tournaments (Actually, the practice violated the tour's by-laws back then; today such "guarantees" are allowed at many tournaments below the Masters Series level). In a classic case, the tournament director at Rotterdam, in an emergency 11th hour move, offered Vilas a big guarantee to take the place of another big star, who had bailed on the event. According to the TD, who was in a weak negotiating position, he paid Tiriac a hefty $60,000 in cash to get Vilas - who then went through a conspicuous amount of last-minute maneuvering to enable him to play Rotterdam.
The only problem was that he guarantee had to be hidden leading to an ultimate shortfall when it came time to tally the books. The real nut of the matter: who absconded with the dough: the TD (since it was cash), Tiriac, or Tiriac and Vilas? Whatever the case, this spelled trouble, because the money came from municipal funds. The city of Rotterdam, which didn't want to know from illicit guarantees and such, was threatening to launch a full-scale, transparent investigation - something that could have resulted in tons of bad publicity for Vilas, the game of tennis, or both. Given these circumstances, tennis officials felt they had to be pro-active and go after Vilas, even though they acknowledged that guarantees probably were being paid left and right to all kinds of players. Supporters of Tiriac/Vilas cried, "foul", arguing that the pair, as relative outsiders, were being made scapegoats.
Ultimately, I came down on the side of the Pro Council; I accepted the argument that the nature of the developing case put them in a position of having to go after Tiriac and Vilas, to maintain their own credibility. "We didn't go looking for the case," Pro Council administrator Marshall Happier III told me at the time. "It came looking for us. We couldn't ignore it."
The cost of my stance was my friendly relationship with Vilas (which has since been repaired). But I have to credit Tiriac for bearing no grudges, and I like that he never orchestrated or endorsed those cries of "scapegoat", some of the loudest of which came from the usual, proud-to-be-defensive suspects in Argentina.Somehow, the determined that this was a prosecution of the whole of South America, by the dominant Anglo tennis establishment.
Today, I notice that most references to the suspension have been expunged from the record. It's probably best for all concerned. The tennis wars of the 1970s and 80s weren't pretty, but then, neither is Tiriac.
(Correction: Becker did not beat McEnroe at that Wimbledon; Kevin Curren did, and Becker went on to beat Curren for the title. Hat tip to MWC for catching the error - Pete)