Tennis Con Amore

For a long time, I'd been wondering what had happened to Adriano Panatta and Paolo Bertolucci, Italy's two best tennis players. I'd met them in Rome several years ago at my tennis club, when Adriano was ranked among the top ten in the world and he and Paolo had begun beating everyone in sight in doubles; but since coming back to the States a year ago, I hadn't seen or heard much about them. I gathered they'd reverted to their old style of play, both on and off the court. Then, while glancing through the sports (continued on page 94) Tennis Con Amore (continued from page 91) pages one day last fall, I came across a story about a big tournament in Madrid. Panatta had made the finals, putting out Guillermo Vilas 6-3, 6-4 and Björn Borg in three sets to get there. The next day, he lost to Jan Kodes in a bitterly contested match.

After that, I began to look for him and his name kept popping up here and there. In Barcelona, he got to the finals again, creaming Manuel Orantes in the quarter-finals 6-1, 6-2, before losing to Borg. In Stockholm, he beat Arthur Ashe in straight sets to get to the finals against Jimmy Connors, then won the tournament against Jimmy in three with a barrage of overheads and service aces that dazzled a screaming public. Although he was beaten later in the year in the Masters by Orantes (6-4, 7-6), Ashe (7-6, 6-3) and Ilie Nastase (7-6, 3-6, 6-0), the stories I read indicated that each of these matches could have gone either way.

Clearly, Panatta had somehow gotten his act together; but what about Bertolucci? I wrote to a tennis-playing friend of mine in Rome to ask about him and got the following reply: "Paolo had his usual indifferent year abroad, but in Italy he was amazing. He won a number of tournaments and in the Italian championship he had Adriano down 3-1 in the fifth set before losing. You know Paolo--he's so Italian he's one kind of player here and another kind abroad. You remember Stockholm."

How could I ever forget Stockholm? That was in April of 1975 and I'd gone there, on my way home, to watch Adriano and Paolo play. The occasion was the ninth and last in the series of World Championship Tennis tournaments for their group leading up to the finals in Mexico City and Dallas. Panatta and Bertolucci were out of the singles race, but they still had a chance to make the doubles play-offs and I assumed they'd probably get there, as I'd already seen them demolish Bob Hewitt and Frew McMillan, the prides of South Africa, earlier on the tour. I was looking forward to seeing them do so and to writing about it. I wasn't prepared for all the fun and games.

When the Italians arrived in Stockholm, they did what they always do when they hit a strange town: They went straight to their hotel, stripped to their underwear, turned on the TV set and called room service. "Yes," Panatta said to the startled girl who took their order, "that is eight hamburgers, four hot chocolates, two double orders of toast and eggs scrambled and six Coca-Colas for my friend Bertolucci, who is very short and fat and very ugly and likes to drink this filth, thank you very much." The girl who arrived with their order 20 minutes later found them wrestling on the floor in front of the TV set, while on the screen Candy Bergen seemed about to be raped in color by four sullen-looking Indians. "Yes," Panatta said, as he signed the check and handed it to the blushing waitress, who had a hard time keeping her eyes off his Jockey shorts, "that is very nice, thank you very much. Do not come back for the table, because my friend Bertolucci, who is also very lazy, will be asleep. We will push the table into the hall, capito, bella?"

Dickie Dillon, then W.C.T.'s man in Europe, was glad to hear that the Italians were in town, but he was still irritated by their previous behavior. They had ducked out of Munich, Monte Carlo and Johannesburg on one pretext or another and had almost eliminated themselves from the doubles finals that would be held in Mexico City the first week in May. "I don't understand it," Dillon said. "They're a terrific doubles team when they're in shape and they should have made it. And Panatta should be among the top ten in singles. My over-all opinion of them is that they have to work harder. They're very talented and nice to watch, but Italians, you know, aren't really happy away from home."

When Dillon bumped into Panatta in the lobby a few hours later, his greeting was cordial but a little cold. Panatta did not put him at his ease. "Paolo is very sick," he said.

"Sick?" Dillon snapped. "What's the matter with him this time?"

"He is missing the sun," Panatta explained. "You know the sun? It's that big round disk in the sky that glows hot. Here in Sweden they know not what that is. So Paolo is staying in bed."

That kind of banter is not calculated to delight Dillon, who has to account to the local promoters of each W.C.T. tournament for his players and explain, not always convincingly, why some of them won't be showing up. Hewitt, for instance, was not in Stockholm but back in Johannesburg nursing a tennis elbow. Since he and McMillan are a top doubles attraction, it's not good for the gate when they don't play. The fact that they were sure to get to the finals whether they played in Stockholm or not may have had something to do with Hewitt's elbow problem, but then some doctor can always be found to testify in writing to a player's disability and it wouldn't do Dillon any good to accuse his missing players of malingering. Anyway, from Hewitt Dillon could accept an occasional lapse. But, my God, the Italians--even when they showed up, you couldn't be sure how they'd play or what they'd do!

Panatta, for instance, was always forgetting things. In Philadelphia, the first stop on the tour, he showed up without his sneakers. The ones he managed to borrow for his opening match with Eddie Dibbs were too small and he swore loudly all through the match, even though reminded frequently by the management that Philadelphia had a large Italian population. But by then, even in that first tournament, a lot of the players who hung around with them were swearing in Italian. Borg, for one. "Shit-head," he was heard muttering to himself on court in Roman slang. "Asshole. Prickhead. Porcine Madonna." Borg and some of the other players like to hang around the Italians and they pick up these little mannerisms. The pro tour is a grind but very serious business to most of the contestants and to them, even the ones most serious about their game, the Italians are comic relief. "Panatta, stick it up your ass!" Borg shouted in Philadelphia as he was losing to Bob Lutz and caught panatta grinning at him from the players' section, while three middle-aged Italo-American housewives in the stands gasped, stood up and hurried for the exits.

Panatta arrived in Stockholm without his clothes. A suitcase supposed to have been checked through directly from Pisa had somehow gone astray. That didn't worry him, because his first match wasn't until the following evening and for practice he could always borrow enough equipment from Paolo, whose clothes, oddly enough, fit him, though the two seem about as physically dissimilar as Mutt and Jeff. Panatta is six feet tall and weighs about 180 pounds, while Bertolucci is four inches shorter and only ten pounds lighter. The real difference is in their looks. Panatta resembles Alain Delon, who also happens to be his favorite movie actor; Bertolucci is nice-looking but built like a small tank. When Panatta walks out onto a court, he seems to glow, to actually radiate masculine charisma; Bertolucci waddles along in his wake like a bored duck. An opera buff who saw them together for the first time at a tournament in Rome a couple of years ago observed that the two of them reminded him of Don Giovanni and Leporello.

The comparison is apt. Wherever he goes, Panatta is noticed and no one, not even the top teenage glamor boys like Borg, attracts more groupies. In Philadelphia, at one country-club party, a drunken matron lurched up to him and told him, "I don't know how to say this, but you're really beautiful."

Panatta turned to Bertolucci, who was, as usual, lurking, barely awake, in the background, and said, "See? You're short and ugly. Learn, study, work." To which Bertolucci replied with his customary indifference, merely pointing out--in Italian, of course--that Panatta's (continued on page 152) Tennis Con Amore (continued from page 94) heredity was seriously in question because his mother had obviously been one of the great whores of history.

Bertolucci is neither impressed nor disturbed by the female adulation his partner attracts. "Adriano has all the fourteen-year-olds in the world," he says. "What can you do with a fourteen-year-old that will not get you into jail?"

Actually, Panatta's adoring fans are not all 14-year-olds. One Philadelphia matron, who spent the entire tournament trying to run him down, announced to her friends, "Boy, wouldn't I like to have him for a couple of nights!" She was wearing a T-shirt illustrated with crossed rackets over an awesome set of boobs and proclaiming Tennis is my game. In Richmond, Virginia, a blonde called up on their last day there and asked for a date. Bertolucci, who answered the phone, told her to pick them up in a white convertible and to bring a friend along. Forty minutes later, a white Cadillac convertible, with two blondes inside, pulled up in front of the hotel.

So it isn't as if Bertolucci has much to complain about; he benefits from the fallout. Especially now, since Adriano's marriage last year to a rich and very beautiful Italian girl named Rosaria. Like Leporello, who grabbed off Don Giovanni's discards, Paolo has inherited more than a few of Adriano's leavings. It saves him the trouble, for one thing, of finding his own, a process that can prove exhausting to a man whose favorite occupations are sleeping and eating, in that order. A couple of Adriano's old girls were two Italian starlets noted for the lack of prudishness with which they publicly display the magnificent physical appurtenances a benevolent nature has so kindly bestowed upon them. "Paolo's only problem," Panatta explains, "is staying awake long enough. Mamma mia, what a phenomenon!"

The Stockholm tournament was held in the Ice Stadium, an indoor hockey arena about 20 minutes by car from the center of town. Two bright-green, hard-surfaced courts had been laid out at one end of the facility and the sound of tennis balls being hit very hard by the players at practice exploded between soaring rows of empty seats that Dillon and the Swedish promoters hoped would be filled by the time play Finally got under way that evening at six o'clock. The tournament's star attraction there, obviously, was Borg, who was seeded second behind Ashe. W.C.T. had sent out three touring groups of players, of which this one, the Green Group, also included such stars as Tom Okker, Kim Warwick and Buster Mottram.

The major problem in Stockholm, Dillon felt, was keeping the players interested, since by that time Ashe and Borg, for instance, had already, like Hewitt and McMillan in the doubles, earned enough winning points to nail down two of the eight slots available in Dallas for the singles finals and clearly the incentive that drove the players to put out during the opening leg of the tour had faded. The mystery to Dillon was why the Italians had never cared enough to try from the start, especially after they'd done so well in the doubles that halfway through they had seemed certain to make it to Mexico City. "They only really work hard when they're at home," Dillon said, as he glumly watched Panatta and Bertolucci take the court. "They can beat anybody in Italy, and have, but abroad they fool around."

Fooling around, the Italians feel, keeps them sane. The money they can win on the tour is not so important to them, since they both earn much larger sums from endorsements and business investments in Italy, and the pro tour is a grind. Playing tennis day in and day out is a grind. Panatta and Bertolucci have been at it since they were big enough to hold a racket. They first met in the finals of a tournament when they were ten, which Panatta won 6-4, 6-2, thus establishing the basic pattern of their professional and personal relationships right from the start. Neither boy had any choice about what he would do in life, since tennis offered the easiest way out of the modest circumstances of their social backgrounds. Panatta's father was a custodian, a job one step above that of janitor, at the Parioli, a very chic, very snobbish private tennis club for the rich of Rome; Bertolucci's dad was a teaching pro in Viareggio, a resort town on the coast that resembles an abandoned amusement park during the winter months. Italy is overcrowded and poor, not exactly a and of opportunity, and what else could these two kids have done to bust out and make it big?

Dillon was right about the way they played. Watching them on the practice court was a delight, testified to by the eager looks on the faces of the dozen teenage groupies who had somehow wangled their way into the stadium and were clustered at Panatta's end of the court, watching him play. He holds the racket way down at the very end of the grip and strokes the ball with the grace of a large cat, smashing overheads and serves that are as hard and accurate as any in the game. Opposite him, Bertolucci looks immobile and out-classed, until you notice that he seems always to be in the right place on the court and that the ball comes back off his racket with weight and top spin, landing almost always within inches of the base line. His nickname in Italy is Golden Arm, because he seems to do everything on the court without moving anything but that one part of his body. He looks easy, but he can beat almost anybody when he wants to, and has. His only problem is that he hardly ever wants to and his singles point total on the tour was the lowest of all the players, a distinction that did not in the least disconcert him.

Even in a practice session, Panatta and Bertolucci refuse to work hard. On the court next to them were the other two Italians on the tour, Corrado Barazzutti and Antonio Zugarelli, known to everyone in the group as "the other two." Because they are one notch down in the pecking order, they are more serious about their work, but they, too, can be easily distracted by fun and games. After they'd been hitting away for about 20 minutes of their scheduled hour, Panatta began belting balls into the other court, a tactic that led to exchanges of lobs and eventually to a four-way, two-court practice session that obviously delighted the groupies.

Winning isn't everything, the Italians feel; getting through life with a few laughs and a minimum of anguish is. Panatta and Bertolucci began to put this theory into practice when they were in their teens and at school together in Formia, a small seacoast town between Naples and Rome that has an advanced tennis program and where the country's most promising young players are sent to be trained.

Their crowning achievement was an April Fools' Day caper that suckered the whole town. Ad posters and handbills announced during the previous week that on April first there would be a special aerial display over the town involving a descent into the football stadium by a trained team of daredevil parachutists. By midafternoon of the great day, the stadium was packed with thousands of eager onlookers while Panatta, Bertolucci and their friends hustled soft drinks and candy in the stands. When they'd made enough of a profit and had prudently grouped themselves near the exits, two of the students ran out into the middle of the playing field. They were dressed in old-fashioned two-piece bathing suits and one of them carried a stepladder, the other an umbrella. The student with the umbrella opened it, mounted the stepladder, jumped to the ground and ran out again, after which the stunned public was informed over the public-address system that the daredevils had just done their stuff and the aerial display was over. By the time the startled crowd had begun to turn into an angry mob, Panatta, Bertolucci and their friends were already speeding away from the scene.

The jokes they play on the tour do not always amuse their fellow players. Mottram, the 21-year-old English star, was one of their frequent victims, but then Mottram is a natural patsy. He thinks of nothing but tennis and money and has been known to threaten waitresses and cabdrivers with physical mayhem. In Rotterdam, the Italians persuaded him one night that a blonde, nymphomaniacal groupie named Inge was crazy about him and that she would be contacting him in his room, with fellatio and other elaborate delights in mind. Mottram waited for hours, then descended into the lobby of the hotel, where he found the Italians sitting innocently around. "Buster," Panatta said, "why you did not come down? Inge was here waiting for you, but she has just left with Okker."

The Italians divided their fellow players on the tour into two main categories, the bravi ragazzi, or good guys, and the drearies. The good guys can be, like Ashe and Borg, players who take their tennis very seriously but have nevertheless remained bearable human beings, or happy-go-lucky types like Nikki Pilic, whose best days are behind him and for whom tennis is a means, not a crusade. The drearies, on the other hand, can qualify on any of many counts. Mottram, of course, was a leading dreary. So was Warwick, the young Australian whose court manners were among the worst anywhere. So was Hans Kary, the Austrian who fancied himself a wit. In Johannesburg, he asked Steve Krulevitz, a young American player with an overabundance of hair, how he had managed to escape from Kruger Park, the game preserve, and he liked to remind Okker, whose teeth are widely spaced, to comb them. "Is good yoke, no?" Kary asked laughingly after such sallies. The world, the Italians feel, teems with drearies and they deserve whatever happens to them.

Toward the end of the Italians' practice session, Freddy McNair, one of the younger and least-known players on the tour, paused on his way to the locker room to take in the action. "You know, maybe I should take up Italian training methods," he mused. "I've been working like hell on my game, I don't drink, I don't stay up late, I don't screw around and all I do is lose. I've lost seven singles matches in a row. There's a moral in here someplace."

The dreary Bertolucci disliked most in the Green Group was Onny Parun, the tall, gangling New Zealand player who looks like an aging cart horse and who practices with humorless concentration several hours a day, every day win or lose. "I hate him," Bertolucci said when he found out he'd drawn Parun in the first round, but he wasn't about to be lured into a real effort to beat him. He tries against Parun only in Italy, where he has trounced him. Elsewhere, he contents himself with making Parun run, drop-shotting to lure him into the net, lobbing to force him back to the base line. Their match in Stockholm was the last one scheduled that night, which caused Paolo to observe, "What the hell am I doing out here, playing at midnight? I'm going to lose, but I'll make him die." Parun won, all right, but at the end of the match, he was in a lather and Bertolucci was bone-dry.

Panatta worked a lot harder than his partner, but he, too, was bounced out in the first round, by another Swedish qualifier who played what turned out to be the match of his life and squeaked by 7-6, 6-7, 7-5. (The qualifiers are hungry, they have the world to gain and they often pull off this kind of upset, only to disappear again forever.) Panatta, however, does not like to lose, even when he's clearly not in top shape, and he worked hard, stamping angrily around the court and swearing in Roman whenever the match turned against him. His antics enchanted the groupies, who squealed and clapped every time their hero made a point. "Adriano is in his element," Bertolucci observed during the match. "You see, his ideal is not to play tennis but to be a star. The high moment for him is when he walks onto the court, dressed in his newest and most elegant clothes." Panatta's favorite American city was Richmond, where an article in a local magazine had described him as "one of the handsomest men in Europe." "They're intelligent here," Panatta had informed Bertolucci. "This is a civilized city. But what would you know? You're a dwarf."

Toward the end of his match, after blowing an easy overhead, Panatta suddenly hit a ball as hard as he could straight up toward the ceiling. As the crowd gasped, the ball soared above the lights, then plunged back toward the floor. With nonchalant grace, Panatta caught it on his racket and walked back toward the base line to serve. The crowd applauded and roared with admiration. It was a stunt he'd first pulled in Richmond, during his match with Ashe, to whom he usually loses. It had wowed everybody there, too, and he'd been pulling it off ever since. What one was liable to remember best from this or any match was the stunt itself, not the final score, and wasn't that the whole point, after all?

Panatta does have a way of upstaging everyone. At the beginning of the tour, for instance, Borg, a teenage idol, was getting most of the attention. Panatta's technique was to put him on. When Borg was playing, Panatta would suddenly leap to his feet in the stands and shout, "I want picture of Björn Borg!" Or he'd corner members of the press and tell them, "About me, you must only say I am friend of Björn Borg." In Philadelphia, when Borg was trying to sneak out of the arena one night to avoid swarms of autograph hunters. Panatta stood up and shouted, "Not to worry, everybody! I am masseur Björn Borg! I will show you where he is!" Then, pointing dramatically at Borg, who was trying to lose himself in the crowd: "Don't worry, Borg, I come with you, everything will be all right!"

Most players, including Panatta, handle the autograph fiends, mostly kids, with tolerance, but Bertolucci has his own system. He signs himself Aldo Moro or Amintore Fanfani, a couple of prominent Italian politicians, or else Giuseppe Verdi or Garibaldi. At a cocktail party thrown for the players in Richmond, everyone was given a name tag to wear. Panatta signed himself in as Alain Delon, while Bertolucci printed in Italian, under Aldo Moro's name, "I'll pay $60 for a blow job." He got away with it until late in the evening, when a handsome middle-aged society lady of linguistic ability peered closely at the tag, then clucked sorrowfully to herself and shook her head. "Inflation must be very bad in Italy," she said.

In the locker room, after his match, Panatta bumped into McNair, who grinned at him. "Too bad. Adriano," he said, "but there must be something to these Italian training methods. I was up till four last night, fucking my brains out, and I just won."

The doubles part of the tournament didn't get under way until the third night. The Italians did not train at all for it but spent most of the time in their room or at the movies in downtown Stockholm. They averaged $100 a day in room service, which now answered their calls with cheerful hellos. Once, when Paolo picked up the phone, the operator simply began laughing when she heard his voice. After all, his last order had been for $47 worth of hamburgers.

Meanwhile, through the rest of the hotel, a permanent floating party seemed to be in progress. The players clustered about the piano bar in the cocktail lounge, while available girls sat around in bunches, waiting to be picked up. They never had to wait very long. "My God," McNair said, "everything they told me about Sweden was true! I can't believe it!" Obviously, his newly adopted Italian training methods were still paying off; after another hard night, he won his second-round match in straight sets.

A few of the players stayed out of the action, among them Ashe, who was playing the best tennis of his life. He was avowedly determined to win in Dallas and go on to take Wimbledon. Panatta, newly married and serious about it, hung around but only to watch, leaving Bertolucci upstairs in bed. "Paolo was happiest in the States," he explained, "because there he could lie in bed and watch Star Trek and Mission: Impossible, which are his two favorite programs." Late one night, just to have a little fun, Panatta spirited a drunken Swedish couple up to their room. The woman, a fading blonde in her late 30s, was game for anything and kept giggling at Bertolucci, who stayed flat on his back in bed; but her escort, between endless bottles of beer, told long, boring stories about what he called "topical Swedish" behavior. "This is a shithead," Bertolucci said. "Give him two dollars and send him away."

Later that same night, just before dawn, two 15-year-old groupies knocked on their door and Panatta let them in. Even this potential bonanza failed to arouse Bertolucci, who suffered in silence through Panatta's teasing banter with the girls, one of whom insisted they were both boys. "You are boys?" Panatta exclaimed. "Ah, then is no problem!" He suddenly pulled down the sheets from Bertolucci's bed, revealing him flagrante erectione. The girls fled. To Paolo's screams of rage, Panatta answered, "Asshole, the age of consent here is twelve. Are you a pederast?"

In the first round of the doubles, the Italians faced Mottram and Dick Dell, a left-handed American with big, sweeping strokes and a nice net game. They lost the first set 6-3 and were down in the second 5-3, with Mottram serving. "You see?" Dillon said up in the press box. "You can't win if you don't try." As if they had overheard him, Panatta and Bertolucci began hitting winners all over the court. They ran out the match 7-5, 6-1. "We no lose to someone like Mottram," Panatta explained. "Tonight we call room service for him."

The next afternoon. Dillon arrived at the Ice Stadium to find the Italians, all four of them, at practice. But they were not exactly playing tennis. Bertolucci had dreamed up a sort of soccer-game version that involved the use of heads, arms, hips, knees and feet but not rackets. The contest was spirited but not calculated to please Dillon, who was probably beyond pleasing by that time. Borg had also been wiped out in the doubles and people were not overwhelming the ticket booths for the final rounds. Parun was set to face Ashe in the semis and clearly had no chance; like Ashe, he plays a serve and volley game that Ashe simply plays a lot better. In the other singles, McNair, still sleepless and hung over, was going up against Okker, whose game rarely varies and who beats everyone but the very best. Now, if Panatta and Bertolucci, who were at least colorful, could just make it to the finals of the doubles against Ashe and Okker.... But Dillon was skeptical.

With reason, it turned out. Panatta and Bertolucci lost, to "the other two," 7-6, 7-6, for the first time ever. They obviously didn't care and at no point in the match could they get themselves up for it, as they had at the last minute against Mottram and Dell. They came off the court grinning. "Ah, now we can go home." Bertolucci said, "where is the sun. I am never coming to Stockholm again."

On their way to the airport the next morning, the Italians shared a taxi with McNair, who had finally lost to Okker, 6-3, 6-2, in a match that had been a lot tougher than the score indicated. "Italian training methods," Freddy mused. "They're great, but I've got to get some sleep. Where are you guys going?"

"To my wife," Panatta said. "Then later to England, to play Bournemouth. I like England."

"Not me." Bertolucci observed. "I stay in Italy. There's a tournament in Florence."

"I'm going there, too," Freddy said. "After Nice."

"Freddy," Panatta warned him, "don't play Paolo in Italy. No one but me beats Paolo in Italy."

"Fuck this shithead of a tour," Bertolucci said. "Next year I stay home."

"Unless we play for the Stick-It-Up-Your-Ass Cup," Panatta said. "You know what is the Stick-It-Up-Your-Ass Cup? It's Bertolucci's new rules. Tell him, Paolo."

"Is the ideal tournament," Bertolucci explained. "With my rules. First, players must not practice more than ten minutes a day. Second, players must stay up till four a.m. every morning. Three, players must smoke minimum ten cigarettes a day and have wine with their meals. Four, players must sleep minimum twelve hours a night--"

"Five," Panatta interrupted, "extra points are awarded for elegance on court."

"Six," Bertolucci continued, "all matches are played in service courts only. Seven, there is special award for most teenage girls banged during tournament. That is for the Stick-It-Up-Your-Ass Cup."

"I'd play in that one," McNair said. "I could qualify now."

"The most beautiful thing is," Panatta sighed, "that with such a tournament, what does it matter who wins?"