Tennis’ Count Dracula Is Saved by New Blood : Ion Tiriac Is Glowering in the Limelight Once Again, Thanks to Becker’s Success

The shaggy malevolence of Ion Tiriac, one of tennis’ first bad boys and still the game’s lone iconoclast, is somewhat overrated.

“Uh, he may not talk to you,” the publicist reports. And if he does? “Well, that would be the worst-case scenario.”

In fact, when approached, his famous stare dissolves in the desert sun and he becomes merely shaggy. His conversation is forthcoming and, if not quite the stuff of comedy routines, certainly more pleasant than his past press would lead you to believe.

Was he just having a good day? Is the tennis press not quite so unflinching? Or has he merely been mellowed by the millions of dollars that are offered him daily, just for being Boris Becker’s manager.

Because he is, in fact, the luckiest man in the world these days. Imagine: Not long ago, his career as a player was over and his new career as a manager was in something of a shambles, and his hopes were riding on a German tennis prodigy who looked, well, maybe fat. By no means was this prodigy the best tennis player in the world. He wasn’t even the best in the juniors. But this red-haired Germanic lug was, basically, Ion Tiriac’s stable. It was all he had.

And then, at 17, this tennis player wins Wimbledon and his future, as they say, is ahead of him. All Ion Tiriac has to do, which he has so far done shrewdly and in an independent way that has outraged the tennis Establishment, is collect ransom for the boy everybody wants back. And it’s Carl Sagan money were talking about: Beelions and beelions .

So now Ion Tiriac is the luckiest man in the world, which is not enough to make him smile, of course. “Nobody’s ever seen his teeth,” Wojtek Fibak once said. But it presumably suppresses, somewhat, his appetite for sportswriters.

“We all mellow,” explains Charlie Pasarell, a tennis playing contemporary of Tiriac who is now tournament director at La Quinta Hotel, home this week to Becker and the Pilot Pen tournament.

In saying so, Pasarell seems apologetic for his old friend’s possible loss of legend. This mellowing, perhaps, is sad to see; where is the man who once ate a wine glass, never mind a sportswriter? “Still,” says Pasarell, hopefully, “Tiri is a character, a real maverick. You have to say that.”

You do have to say that. He would probably be a character in any sport, but in the bleached world of professional tennis he stands out like, say, Count Dracula at a meeting of morticians. Of course, as he comes from Romania and sports one of those walrus mustaches, he stands out like Count Dracula wherever he is. In fact, that’s his nickname.

In his playing days, from the late ‘50s to 1980, he was regarded more as a controversial player than a successful player, although he somehow won a lot when you check the records.

“He was considered just an unbelievable competitor,” Pasarell explains. “He never had a lot of weapons, but he had touch and control and was very intelligent.”

Very foreboding, too.

“He could be very intimidating, if you took him seriously,” Pasarell says. “He was not a normal guy, I will say that. And that tough-guy look, well, it was part of his style and it obviously worked on some people.”

It worked well enough that the brooding Tiriac and outrageous Ilie Nastase were a doubles team of some reknown, if not curiousity. Together they won the Italian Open twice and the French once. In the process, Tiriac made quite a reputation as the McEnroe of the ‘70s. “I was not the quietest player on the court,” he says.

Tiriac claims, in fact, though false it may be, that he was the first player ever suspended when his distracting gamesmanship in 1972 Davis Cup play earned him two weeks on the sidelines. At once he is both proud of being suspended and resentful of the authorities who suspended him. “It wasn’t even my fault,” he snorts, shaking his big shaggy head.

“Even as a player,” he concluded, “I was always a man on my own.” Of course, sometimes a man has gotta do what a woman has to do, as when he vowed to wear a dress and join the women’s tour and make the easy money. But that’s another story.

His story these days is Boris Becker--finding him, polishing him and now marketing him. Boris Becker, you will learn, did not simply happen. Nor, thanks to Tiriac, will he simply get rich. He’s going to get unbelievably rich, Robin Leach-rich.

Tiriac, you may recall, was the man behind Guillermo Vilas. Tiriac was the dominating coach, father, manager--you name it--to Vilas and moved him through six sensational years during which Vilas never fell below No. 6 in the world. It was the kind of total-care management not then or now offered by the big companies that sign players on the tour. And it worked.

But keeping all the eggs in one basket only works so long as you keep the basket. In early 1984, the pro council found Vilas guilty of accepting appearance money and he was suspended, off the tour.

It was a career calamity for both men, but Tiriac rebounded remarkably. He looked for a new basket and found one in Boris Becker.

“He was a good player,” Tiriac says. “But I don’t think everybody knew he would be great. The big agencies speculate, sign 100 juniors. They’re bound to have one winner. It’s a matter of percentages. But I was looking for one kid because that’s how I operate--a hand-made tailor, somebody who can do everything for the kid because I know what the kid will have to go through. I’m the only one who could know what is exactly in his guts because I’ve been on the same court.”

Tiriac scouted Becker for a month, spotted “a determination that was not common and his ability to hit the ball. Then I dived headfirst.”

Tiriac, who would make a poor recruiter, what with his menacing presence, wooed Becker through the boy’s coach, Gunther Bosch, a kindly man who still has the father role in this little tennis family. Tiriac was through being a coach and father, as he had been with Vilas.

“Anyway, it wouldn’t have worked,” he says. “We are two strong personalities and we don’t be compatible.” Bosch, he says, is diplomatic. “And I am not.”

But Becker does not need coaching--”He is a molded player,” says Pasarell--so much as career guidance. And Tiriac, doing everything a new way, is the man for that.

Tiriac doesn’t simply have one of the best three tennis players in the world in Becker but a marketable presence as well. Becker is very attractive.

“You have to win but after that, there’s more to it,” Pasarell says. “Look at Becker, Germanic, a young god, lunging after the ball on court. He has a great image.”

Tiriac talks about Becker’s charisma, his likability. He would never storm off a court as Jimmy Connors did last week. Nor utter profanity. “Here’s the first athlete in 15 years with the ability to smile,” he says. “It’s insane how people like him.”

Now here’s a role model, kids and corporations. Who wants to be associated with this pleasant little phenomenon in what is the most international of sports? So far, according to Tiriac, the answer is everybody.

“I throw a fortune away every day,” Tiriac says. “Maybe he gets burned. But I don’t think he should be holding up a hammer for $100,000--best hammer in the world. Look at (Bjorn) Borg. He had something like 50 endorsements. I’m looking for Boris Becker to have five, maybe eight, but with high class companies. Instead of 10 deals worth $200,000 apiece, I want two for $2 million apiece.”

So far, he says, Becker has signed only two major contracts for endorsements, one with Frankfurt’s Deutsche Bank (earning more than the bank president, it is said, to say “Start young with your first account, to finish old with your big account.”).

Tiriac is going for associations with companies like Disney or Coca-Cola, that kind of thing. This kind of choosiness has not hurt Becker, who reportedly made $3 million last year. Tiriac says he gets a smaller percentage than the average agency like International Management Group or ProServ gets; but he gets a smaller percentage of a lot more dollars, so it doesn’t hurt.

Tiriac’s other role in career management is to play the bad guy, which is character casting to a ridiculous extreme. He supervises the lad’s exposure and availability, making sure Becker is not pressured by the press. “It is not bad in the United States,” he says, “but in Germany, you would not believe it.” He describes the so-called Boulevard Press there, including tabloids that would make the National Enquirer look like National Geographic.

“There are people who quit their jobs to become free lancers over night,” he says. “Their new job is Boris Becker.”

Tiriac, the scowling bear, keeps the press somewhat apart from Becker, who himself keeps saying he’d love to talk more but, alas, never can. Here comes Tiriac now, slumping over to terminate yet another interview.

“I am the black guy, the no guy,” he says. He shrugs. “But the blacker I am, the whiter Boris is.”

Hence the greening of the two of them, which is enough to almost make Tiriac show his teeth.