His Game Was Held Hostage

Whatever you do, don’t call him the Ayatollah. Not even in jest, as in “the Ayatollah of tennis.” T’aint funny, McGee.

He’s Mansour Bahrami, of whom you’ve probably never heard, but that’s the fault of the real Ayatollah, the one who took hostages.

In a sense, Bahrami was one of those hostages. The scenario was this: Bahrami was on his way to becoming the best tennis player in Iran--and maybe one of the best in the world--when the revolution took place, the Shah was unseated from his Peacock Throne and the Ayatollah Khomeini took over.

The Ayatollah’s fundamentalist religious approach took the position that tennis was a decadent western sport and had no place in the society he planned to impose on his countrymen.

Tennis, historically, has been played and indulged in by guys with Roman numerals after their names, or Sir in front. In the western world, it’s not only considered honorable but a distinction for young men and women who show a talent for the game to go around in white sweaters tied round their necks by the sleeves, play in shorts and accept the accolades of their society because they excel at it.

In the Ayatollah’s Iran, it had to be played in secret. Women couldn’t even watch it, and it was considered just another manifestation of the great Satan that was America’s preoccupation with the frivolous.

Bahrami’s struggle to become a tennis player had never been easy. He used to sneak onto one of the half-dozen or so courts Tehran had in the Shah’s era and, although the Shah did not ban or otherwise discourage the game, this did not mean young Mansour could refine his game at will.

Iran was not Long Island, with a court in the back yard and a teacher at the baseline. This was Tehran in the early ‘70s, and young Mansour had to learn to play the game by hitting balls with dustpans, broken paddles or hand-me-down rackets with cotton strings.

When he got caught on court, the guards would confiscate even these inadequate implements and beat the young intruder.

“They would slam me to the ground five or six times till I was bleeding from the head and ears,” Bahrami says. “They would take even the broken racket and step on it till it was in splinters, a bad souvenir. You couldn’t even sneak on at midnight.”

So it was back to the dustpans for the youngster, who could have been his country’s first international tennis star.

Even in the days of the monarchy, Iran had no youth tennis program as such. So, the young Bahrami became a ball boy at the royal courts.

“We never even had a coach,” he says. “You had to teach yourself the game.”

Even so, he became a creditable young player. At 16, he was tapped to take part in a junior Wimbledon tournament.

“I stayed at the King George Hotel but I had no money,” he says. “I didn’t eat anything for three days, and after that, I had to play on the first grass court I ever saw in my life.”

Not surprisingly, he lost to Billy Martin, 6-0, 6-0.

But, it gave him a glimpse of what tennis could be. And then, just as he was becoming a Davis Cup hopeful, his world came crashing down when the Ayatollah came to power in 1978.

“Everything shut down. All I could do was play backgammon every day,” he says.

Mansour lobbied with friends of the government to get a visa to France. The tennis courts were open there. Unfortunately, so were the casinos. He landed in Nice with about $2,000 in pocket money.

“I figured I could live on that maybe 10 days or so. Then, I thought ‘Hey, if I win at the casinos, I can get maybe $8,000 or $9,000 and stay three, four months!’ ”

They build casinos for guys who think that way.

“In 20 minutes, I lost all my money,” Mansour mourns.

That began a life in Paris that was right out of the pages of “Les Miserables.” Bahrami slept under bridges and ate chestnuts, and majored in staying alive and out of the French gendarmes’ hands until, with only two days left on his visa and his life at set point, he managed to qualify for the French Open.

When he beat the French No. 3 player, Davis Cup veteran Jean-Louis Haillet, in straight sets, the French press came around.

“They wrote how wrong it was for a great sportsman not to be a citizen of the world,” he says. “So, I got my green card.”

Bahrami, who today is married to a Frenchwoman, lives in Paris but steadfastly refuses to be classified as a political refugee, as comfortable as it would be.

“I am not political,” he says. “Never was. And I could not go back to Iran if I were a political refugee and I could never see my family there. I couldn’t bear that.”

The Ayatollah is gone but his philosophy isn’t.

Bahrami today is a functioning member of the Nuveen Tour of senior tennis players, the showcase featuring Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, Roscoe Tanner and other marquee names of the game.

His game is crowd-pleasing, tricky, unpredictable, unorthodox, eccentric--as you might imagine from a guy whose game was honed with a dustpan for a racket and a garage door for an opponent.

His technique provides the comic relief for the tour as it moves from Riviera Country Club here, where it finished Sunday, to Washington, D.C., where it will be held at the Woodmont Country Club next week. But Mansour usually gets the last laugh as a shot materializes from under his legs or behind his back or through his arms for a winner. Look at it this way: Pete Sampras doesn’t have that shot.

Of course, no one ever took a racket out of Sampras’ hands and put a dustpan there.

How good could Bahrami have been? Well, no telling. For a guy whose game was held hostage all those years, it’s remarkable. He’s beating guys who were throwing temper tantrums over line calls when he couldn’t even open his mouth to a guy stomping on his racket. Or to protest making his game a crime.