“We’d never seen a player like this,” says one contributor. “When Ilie was on the court, something was always happening,” says another. They are talking in a new documentary about Ilie Năstase, the original bad boy of tennis in the early 70s, which is screening at the Cannes film festival on Friday.
The film’s title is Nasty, the nickname that quickly attached itself to Năstase, whose on-court antics, petulant complaints and confrontations with umpires were barely thinkable in what had previously been a staid and well-behaved sport dominated by amateurism. The “open” era, in which grand slam tournaments started to offer prize money and allow professional players to compete alongside amateurs, had only started a few years earlier in 1968, and Năstase became one of the first high-profile beneficiaries.
