Nasty Business
At the ATP Finals in Turin, Ilie Năstase gets honored yet again; the ATP should know better.
This is the free post for this week, in which the world continues venerating problematic 78-year-old men…
The draw ceremony for the 2024 ATP Finals, the year-end championship event for the men’s tour, was held today in Turin, sorting the eight players into four groups for round-robin play. Top-seed and local favorite Jannik Sinner landed in a group with Daniil Medvedev, Taylor Fritz, and Alex de Minaur, while Alexander Zverev leads a group including Carlos Alcaraz, Casper Ruud, and Andrey Rublev.
But rather than breaking down the names in those groups and how they match up, I thought I’d instead to write instead today about the names of the groups, particularly the first one.
The ATP Finals has been operating under various names since 1970, and within these 55 editions they’ve used many different ways for naming the two round-robin groups, depending on the creative mood of the tour and local organizers. Sometimes the ATP goes with letters; sometimes colors (the parallel WTA Finals this week in Riyadh are using Purple and Orange); sometimes with the names of players of yore.
This was a fun bit of mindless data mining on a day when I’m deeply in need of distraction:
After three years of Green and Red in a nod to the flag of host country Italy, this year the ATP went back to the player namesake groups. And in a choice that would’ve staggered me if I had any expectations for the ATP, one of the two players the ATP chose for 2024 was Ilie Năstase.
With two majors singles titles to his name, Năstase does not feature in any greatest-of-all-time type conversations in tennis, but he becomes the unlikely leader in this category by being made an ATP Finals group namesake for an unprecedented fourth time, after previously being honored in 1989, 1991, and 2015.
The ATP website published this rationale for this year’s choice:
“In recognition of the first No.1s in the PIF ATP Rankings, and the most successful doubles team in history, the singles groups for this year's Nitto ATP Finals will be the Ilie Nastase Group and the John Newcombe Group, while the doubles groups will be the Bob Bryan Group and the Mike Bryan Group.”
It’s true, Năstase was the first player ranked No. 1 when the ATP rankings were first made in 1973; he held the top spot for forty weeks before ceding it to Newcombe, who held the top spot for eight weeks. But given that the ATP used a completely different rationale for the doubles group namesakes in Turin this year (more on that decision later), venerating Năstase once more was a decision that the ATP clearly could and should have avoided.
The Case Against the Ilie Nastase Group
It’s not remotely debatable that Ilie Năstase is a messy figure, to say the least. On Nastase’s Wikipedia page, his “Career” section (991 words) is nearly equaled in length by his “Controversies” section (849 words). He was a boor on court and off throughout his playing career, and he hasn’t exactly mellowed with age. Veteran tennis writer Pete Bodo wrote that Năstase is “remembered as the greatest charlatan and delinquent of the Open era. He was amoral, his appetite for chaos and controversy unmatched. It wasn't the spelling of his name that made the nickname ‘Nasty’ so appropriate; it was his habit of mocking and tormenting his fellow players. Those included Arthur Ashe.”
Bodo had a reason for citing that example: Ashe, whose feelings on Năstase were considerably complicated, wrote that Năstase had called him “Negroni” to his face frequently; Năstase also infamously once called Ashe “Nigger” behind his back during a match in Hawaii.
Năstase also went out of his way to be awful to the women on tour. Pam Shriver, who arrived onto the tour as a teenager in the 1970s, has also said that Năstase frequently harassed her. “Anytime I saw him at any tournament he would ask me the same question, which was: ‘Are you still a virgin?’” Shriver said. ““I’m a teenager, I’m playing the tour, and it was a shocking thing. I’d never had anybody ask me that before. It must have been the 30th time he asked me that same question – I just said ‘Would you please stop asking me that?’”
The most chaotic series of incidents in Năstase’s life came a couple years after his most recent prior ATP Finals namesake turn in 2015. In the spring of 2017, at 70 years old, Năstase was serving as Romania’s captain at a 2017 Fed Cup tie in Constanta against Great Britain when he reeled off a series of reprehensible moments.
During the draw ceremony, Năstase put his arm around British captain Anne Keothavong—pregnant at the time—and audibly asked for her hotel room number, a line he had also used at a Fed Cup dinner the night before. Later during a team press conference, Năstase interjected as Simona Halep was answering a question about Serena Williams’ pregnancy to speculate about the baby’s future skin tone: “Let's see what color it has: Chocolate with milk?”1
Năstase wasn’t done that weekend. Angry that the comments he had made at the press conference podium had been accurately reported, Năstase stormed into the media room in Constanta the next day to accost British journalists, ultimately singling out the Press Association’s Eleanor Crooks—a great and entirely lovely reporter—for insults.
Năstase didn’t calm down once play actually started: he was ejected from a match after a tirade at Keothavong and top British player Johanna Konta, calling the pair “fucking bitches.” Năstase was ultimately expelled from the Fed Cup tie, but not before accosting Crooks once more while he was being restrained by security guards.
Serena, who had been keeping a low profile during her pregnancy, addressed the Fed Cup incident in an Instagram. “It disappoints me to know we live in a society in which people like Ilie Nastase can make such racist comments towards myself and unborn child, and sexist comments against my peers,” Serena wrote.
The International Tennis Federation suspended Năstase from the rest of the tie in Constanta and indefinitely. The ITF ultimately handed down a four-year ban that ran until 2021.
A year later Năstase ran into more formal legal trouble. On May 25, 2018, Năstase was arrested at 4:45 am in Bucharest for drunk driving. Police officers had to block Năstase’s car as he failed to stop; his blood alcohol level was 0.55 mg of alcohol per liter (that’s 0.12 BAC in the system used stateside, where 0.08 is the limit). Six hours later that same day, the 71-year-old Năstase was arrested again when he ran a red light on his scooter.
But Gosh, Don’t We Just Love “Personalities”?
Despite these offenses, there clearly remains a soft-spot for Năstase in the consequence-lite world of men’s tennis. In his native Romania, where he’s had mixed success as a political candidate, Năstase remains an icon. And for many of his generation in the nascent days of the modern professional tennis tours, Năstase and his coarseness are credited with demolishing the buttoned-up gentility which allowed tennis to appeal to the masses like never before.
A month after Năstase’s meltdown at Fed Cup, while he was already suspended by the ITF, his longtime friend and doubles partner Ion Tiriac enraged the WTA by including Năstase in the trophy ceremony for the women’s final of the 2017 Madrid Open; the WTA, not often quick to rebuke, called his presence “irresponsible and unacceptable.”
But years on, Năstase seems to be entering a renewed rehabilitation phase. A few months ago, a Romanian-made documentary about his impact, Nasty, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Many huge names in the sport participated, and the admiring tone is clear from the trailer:
The documentary is not yet available for streaming (and I didn’t have time to try to hunt down a screener before publishing this), but reviews make the positive tone of the film pretty clear. Deadline called the documentary “pleasingly hagiographic,” adding that “Nasty works better as a portrait of a moment in tennis history than it does as a portrait of the man of its title.” Nikki Baughan of Screen Daily agreed that many punches are pulled:
“The film does not push too hard into the darker elements of Nasty’s character, which seem to have endured into older age. It does include footage of his 2017 racist remarks about Serena Williams’ unborn child, for which Nastase, then Romania’s team captain, received a four-year ban from the sport. (Although it swerves his verbal abuse of female officials, players and journalists at the Fed cup that same year.) Nastase, now 77 and occasionally speaking to camera, is not probed about these more recent outbursts, and will only go so far as to describe himself as ‘passionate’.”
There are, of course, much fuller descriptions available for Năstase. In my favorite piece of tennis writing of all time, The New Yorker’s Martin Amis described Năstase as a tennis “personality,” and then defined what that term actually means. “True ‘personalities’ merely scoff at the passage of time,” Amis wrote in 1994 of a recent spate of Nastase misbehavior. “They just become even bigger ‘personalities.’”
The Line Drawn in the Doubles Court
The ATP chose to honor Năstase in Turin this week despite full knowledge of all of the above and more, citing Năstase’s role as the inaugural No. 1 in their rankings. But the ATP didn’t make the parallel choice for naming a Turin doubles groupings for the inaugural doubles No. 1s, as I mentioned above.
That’s because when the ATP doubles rankings were first created in 1976, the inaugural No. 1 was South Africa’s Bob Hewitt. Hewitt (no relation to Lleyton) held the top spot for six weeks, but his infamy lasted much longer: a 2011 investigation by The Boston Globe interviewed four named victims of Hewitt’s whom he had sexually abused and raped during his work as a tennis coach, in both Massachusetts and South Africa.
The investigation into Hewitt ultimately led to criminal charges and convictions. While Năstase was causing his commotion at Fed Cup in Romania, Hewitt was imprisoned in South Africa, serving part of what was set to be a six-year sentence. After being suspended in 2012, Hewitt was expelled from the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2016.
Hewitt, now 84, has never had a group at the ATP Finals named in his honor. The ATP has a limit somewhere, at least.
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It wasn’t the first time Nastase had offered unsolicited comments on Serena that spring: in an interview months earlier with Romanian website Digisport, he had insinuated Serena was doping—“Do you see how she looks?”
About to read this, but before I do … You just know that there will be a Group Alexander Zverev someday.