STEPHEN LEWIS is charmed and appalled by the autobiography of the outrageous Mr Nastase.

ILIE Nastase had a recurring dream that came to him all the time during Wimbledon tournaments, the former bad boy of tennis reveals in his autobiography.

"Finally, I win this son-of-a-bitch tournament, and I take this trophy and go all around the stadium, bowing to people and giving the finger to everybody. Then I take my rackets and break them in my hands. I throw them in the river, and I stop playing tennis forever. Just like that."

He never did win Wimbledon, so we'll never know whether he would have done it. If he had, it would have been typical Nastase: flamboyant, entertaining and thuggish.

Yet with Wimbledon starting on Monday, it is worth recalling how few players have aroused the strength of feeling that Nastase managed. A supremely gifted player with a magical touch, he combined charm and nastiness in almost equal measure.

In the days when John McEnroe was still little more than a tantrum in his mother's eye, Nastase was appalling and delighting crowds on Wimbledon's centre court and elsewhere like no one before or since.

He is disarmingly frank about his behaviour in Mr Nastase: The Autobiography, admitting there was more than a little gamesmanship in his behaviour.

He cites his quarter-final match against Cliff Richey in the 1975 Washington Star International. He knew Richey and knew he could get under his skin if he needed to.

Nastase was match point down when he was foot-faulted.

"I went berserk, argued, and flipped my shoe at the line judge," he writes. "Sure, I was to blame. But I was losing, and hey, I was a bit more tense when I was about to get knocked out of a tournament."

He continued to play up, demanding he be given another first serve, while Richey left the court twice and the crowd went ballistic. Eventually the umpire announced he had 15 seconds to start playing again.

"The crowd started to count down loudly and enthusiastically. When they got to zero, I was defaulted... Afterwards Richey said: 'Nastase has pulled that crap 49,000 times. It was time to stand up to him.' I guess he was right; he'd called my bluff and he'd won."

There is a certain style in the way he casually admits to what was really a blatant attempt to cheat. The problem was he simply couldn't control himself.

Comparing himself to tennis's other bad boy, John McEnroe, Nastase insists that whereas he liked to play the buffoon, McEnroe was more aggressive and threatening.

"My problem was that, once I started, I sometimes found it impossible to stop. Unlike McEnroe, who seemed to have an in-built stop button somewhere."

He may not have had a stop button, but there was no denying his supreme talent. Nastase in full flow could be sublime. He may never have won Wimbledon, but his epic 1972 final against American Stan Smith was one of the great matches. And he did win two grand slams - the 1972 US and 1973 French opens - and held the World No 1 ranking for 40 weeks in 1973.

Mr Nastase: The Autobiography is at times a little episodic, as Nastase describes in detail almost all the major matches he played in his career. But at times flashes of that buffoonish charm shine through - such as in his account of losing his virginity to a Paris prostitute as a gauche, skinny 19 year old.

He had been too shy even to look at girls, until his mentor and fellow Romanian tennis player Ion Tiriac arranged a visit to a brothel.

"I can think of worse ways to lose one's virginity," he writes. "The truth is, when you have no money, your looks aren't great, your body's too thin and you don't speak the local language, let's face it, you're not a great catch."

After that late start, he began to make up for lost time. This is the man who claims to have slept with 2,500 women during his years on the tennis circuit. ("In hees dreams!" his third wife Amalia, 31 years his junior, said in a recent newspaper interview. "He would wish!")

Now aged 57, Nastase still plays regularly on the seniors tour, and is president of the Romanian Tennis Federation. Next week he will be visiting Waterstones in Leeds to sign copies of his book, as part of a promotional tour. It will be a chance to see first hand whether the charm has won out over the thuggishness or not as the bad boy of tennis approaches his sixties.

Updated: 08:45 Wednesday, June 16, 2004