March 29, 1998 will be remembered as the day a Chilean athlete managed to reach the top of the world.
This is Marcelo Ríos Mayorga, el Chino or the lefty from Vitacura, who after a brilliant year emerged as the best tennis player in the world over figures like Pete Sampras or Andre Agassi. After a great final at the Lipton, the Chilean became the No. 1 in the ATP.
But beyond the great game that he showed for long seasons on the world circuit, there are some curiosities that the best athlete of the 20th century always hid, but the book "The stranger with long hair" by Nelson Flores reveals in great detail.
Here we review some of those Chinese safety pins:
-An example is when he asked his coach Larry Stefanki who was "the old man" who greeted him, alluding to the Australian Rod Laver.
-He denied Illie Nastasse an autograph in Monte Carlo.
"He is a monkey that fell from the tree. To be great, you also need to be a good person off the court. He is a great son of a bitch," the European tennis player bellowed. "What do I care about his signing shit? It was for a bambino (his son)," he added.
-Ríos himself confronted Flores (a journalist who wrote his book) about the fact that he made a living at the age of 40 following a 20-year-old boy.
- As Vilas did, he said in England that "grass is for cows and football, not for tennis", a week before playing at Wimbledon.
-According to the story, in 1997 in Indian Wells, Ríos forgot his clothes in the laundry of the club where he trained, which he only noticed at the hotel.
After that, and casually meeting Eller Evans, ATP supervisor, and before saying a word, he asked about the whereabouts of his locker room. Evans told him that he had the laundry done in his room, that he could deliver it to him later. Rios insisted that he needed her immediately.
* "First you could start by saying hello and thanking," replied Evans * "Stay with them, then," Rios retorted and left his interlocutor talking to no one. In the afternoon, Ríos found his clothes floating in the club's jacuzzi.
- The Spaniard Benito Pérez Bardadillo worked for the ATP and ended up being a public relation and concealer of Ríos. He got splattered when a taxi driver was beaten up in Italy. They covered him in everything and, in the end, Marcelo did what he wanted.
-"Pato" Clavet told me "this asshole sends you to the psychiatrist. Off the court he has horrible attitudes, but inside he defends all the principles of the sport".
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-Once he was asked what he thought about Bjorn Borg and his contemporaries and he said "those roosters played with wooden rackets, so they don't exist". Just like women's tennis, which he never recognized.
-He had a lot of vibes and a lot of charisma. She had a little group with Nicolás Lapentti and Carlos Moyá that razed the mines. In all the tournaments he was chosen by the sexiest guy.
- A Croatian journalist asked him to arrange an interview. I asked him how it went with her and he told me: -'well, the problem is that he met me in her room at 3:30 in the morning'.
-When she won the centenary of the Monte Carlo Open in 1997, she received an invitation from Prince Albert of Monaco to be with him and she didn't even catch it. She took the envelope as if it were a pamphlet. I don't know if he will have gone, because that time he had another reel.
-When he won his first ATP tournament in Bologna in 1995, I asked him what he felt if he was excited. And he said 'Not at all, they put so much color on it if I beat five bad guys'. And he threw the tray at me as if to say 'you take it to Santiago and give it to my dad one day'.
-When I saw him in junior, I had no doubts that he was going to go very far. He was so good that in a tournament in the Jewish community in Forte Laudardale, in the United States, he played with a local youngster who came from the qualy and trashed him so much in tennis that at one point the "Chinese" approached me playing (one point) and he told me to get him the phone number of a blonde who was in the gallery.
-In general he got along very well with his little group of Argentine, Spanish and South American friends, in general, but with the Saxons he did not speak. The whole group that controlled the circuit, especially Pete Sampras and Patrick Rafter, had a bad feeling for him.
- It is pointed out that Marcelo Ríos activated a bomb alarm in the United Nations building in NY, played "hoyito-patá" in France, Germany or Italy, to cope with moments of boredom; and was arrested in Cincinatti for driving speeding a modern Cadillac.
- The biography has two names. What happens is that Marcelo always asked me for the computer to play Tetris. One time we were in New York and he used it without me knowing and when I came back he was going through the notes he had and retitled it "The Stranger with the Long Beak".
-In a challenger, in Slovenia, Marcelo was bored and he decided to go with me to Italy, which was an hour away. When he left he was carrying a large supermarket bag and, when the journalist asked him what was inside, the tennis player told him: 'the money I won in Slovenia. He collected the money from him for participation and the tickets were delivered to him in a black supermarket bag. We crossed the border like this, with 4 thousand dollars in a truck. We looked like muggers!"
Chino Rios Vieja
SEE MORE VIDEOS- In 1995 a tournament is played at the Carrasco Bowl, in Montevideo, and like good Uruguayans, the organizers put together a soccer match between the "Spanish Navy" -which had been undefeated in several matches in South America- with Carlos Moyá among others, and the rest of the world".
Marcelo Ríos will be a striker to "move around the front of the attack", as coach Marcelo Filippini asks him. Suddenly, Marcelo jogs towards the center of the field and, in a probably compulsive act, he slowly pulls up his shorts and begins to urinate in the middle of the central circle with incredible self-confidence.
The scene is worthy of a surreal film. Ríos pisses and pisses with the same relaxation that he would in the bathroom of his house. One of the organization is undaunted by the scene and does not hesitate to rebuke him: 'Ríos, what happens if one falls in your fucking urine? Other players also raise their voices to protest, but Marcelo doesn't give them a ball and pisses until he doesn't have a drop left in his bladder. He then adjusts his genitals, pulls up his pants and jogs back to where his teammates are practicing. The game ends one-nil with a great goal from Ríos, with a right hand that impressed as much as his entrance show.
Source: The stranger with long hair, excerpt published in Antartica.cl
