Rumanian Rhubarb

At times, it looked more like street rioting than Davis Cup tennis. Indeed, the cup finals, won by the U.S. last week on the rust-red clay courts of Bucharest, seldom even resembled the mannerly game perfected in 1873 by Major Walter Clopton Wingfield as a diversion for English society.

The U.S. had previously won the cup four years in a row. But this year few experts gave Captain Dennis Ralston's charges much of a chance of defeating the wily and temperamental Rumanians, Ilie Nastase and Ion Tiriac, on their home grounds. In the face of rowdy fans and the worst officiating this side of Olympic boxing, only a superlative performance by Army Specialist Fourth Class Stan Smith, 25--who won both his singles matches and teamed with Erik van Dillen, 21, to take the doubles--enabled the U.S. team to eke out a 3-2 victory. Said a disgusted Captain Ralston: "We've been under the most incredible circumstances ever. This is the toughest place to play I've seen anywhere."

Smith showed his class in the first match against Nastase, 26, keeping his cool while the gallery of 6,500 partisan fans shouted "Hai, Ili-uta!" ("Go, little Hie!"). Nastase, an army lieutenant and the closest thing Rumania has to a matinee idol, ran the gamut of his storied antics. He danced back and forth while waiting for a serve, interrupted play to swat at a fly with his racket, and soccer-kicked a ball to the sidelines. The crowd lapped it up, but Smith refused to be shaken. Leading 10-9 in the first set, he responded to a Nastase charge at the net with a soft lob that landed on the baseline to give the American the set. The gallery quickly piped down, and was not heard from again as Smith went on to win in straight sets 11-9, 6-2, 6-3.

"Liniste." Tiriac, 33, proved even more outrageous than his countryman, retiring to the backboards to sulk whenever a call went against him. That did not happen often. At one point Smith served a clean ace only to have a Rumanian linesman call it out. Another time a linesman belatedly ruled that an obviously bad Tiriac serve was out--only after Smith had whipped the return past the Rumanian. The calls became so bad that the referee, Enrique Morea of Argentina, took the unprecedented step of expelling one of the linesmen. He would probably have liked to include most of the stadium. The fans repeatedly ignored pleas for "liniste" (silence), and cheered wildly at every American mistake. When the small American section offered up cheers, the rest of the gallery had the temerity to show indignation; one Rumanian fan shouted, "Quiet! It's not a baseball game."

But for sheer unattractiveness, nothing quite matched Tiriac's attack on James Van Alen, a patriarch of American tennis. Objecting to what he thought was razzing, Tiriac stalked over to the stands, threatened to emasculate Van Alen and called his startled wife a bitch. When Smith shook hands with Tiriac after their match, he told the Rumanian: "I've lost a lot of respect for you in the last three days." Said Ralston, summing up the U.S. reaction to the tawdry affair: "I still can't believe we won it."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.