David Lloyd interview: I fought Nastase and played golf with Trump

Tune into the BBC’s summer tennis coverage, and it will not be long before you hear the urbane tones of John Lloyd – the blond boulevardier who married Chris Evert, squired several Hollywood actresses, and reached the final of the 1977 Australian Open.

And yet, while this much-coveted Lloyd might have provided the face of British tennis throughout the early Thatcher years, it was his elder brother David – the pugnacious bulldog to John’s elegant Afghan hound – who has proved vastly more influential in the long run.

Now 78, David admits to being the lesser player – “John had all the flair in the world”, he says, “whereas I just ran very fast” – but he was also a human dynamo whose work still permeates every aspect of our national tennis culture.

It was David who founded the first real tennis academy in 1985, talent-spotting an 11-year-old Tim Henman as the key member of the original catchment. It was David who helped Greg Rusedski relocate from Canada, thus transforming the British Davis Cup team into genuine contenders. And it was David, above all, who dreamt up David Lloyd Leisure, the chain of clubs that still supplies more than 1,000 courts to the nation’s regular racket-wielders.

On top of that, he fought with Ilie Nastase during a Davis Cup tie in Bucharest, played golf with Donald Trump in Florida, and had flour-bombs thrown at him because of his National Front-supporting doubles partner Buster Mottram. It has been a colourful and hugely productive life – and also a controversial one at times.

“There’s a reason why I never got to run the Lawn Tennis Association,” Lloyd told me when we met for lunch last week, a top-spin lob from the bustle of Wimbledon High Street. “I had just said too many things, things they didn’t want to hear. Like all those years ago [during an appearance on BBC Radio in 1995], when I said Wimbledon should dig up the grass. Well, I was only pointing out that the tennis at that time was unwatchable – an average rally length of 1.2 shots when Sampras played Ivanisevic! – and so they needed to make the courts slower. That was just my style, but people didn’t like it. The biggest regret I have is not getting a chance to do something” – ie. run the LTA – “which I know I would have been very good at.”

More on the LTA later, but we should start at the beginning. Growing up in Leigh-on-Sea at the southern end of Essex, the three Lloyd brothers – David, John and Tony – spent long hours banging a tennis ball against the coal-shed wall. Their father Dennis, who had a background in the clothing business, coached at nearby Westcliff Hardcourt Tennis Club. So when a hard-up David started playing pro tournaments, travelling to Africa in search of matches, Dennis provided finance – of a kind – by giving him a suitcase full of dresses to sell while he was on the road.

Despite some decent wins – including one against Jimmy Connors in Bristol – David never overcame the one big weakness in his game: a vulnerable backhand. It left him exposed against the best players, but against those on his level – which peaked just outside the top 100 – he would run around that backhand to club his modern-style, open-stance forehand: a shot that the LTA’s traditionalist coaches kept trying to exorcise as if he were suffering from some sort of demonic possession.

Lloyd, typically, stuck to his guns. His best results came in doubles, where he reached the Wimbledon semi-finals in the strike year of 1973. He also thrived in the patriotic setting of the Davis Cup, winning every home rubber he ever played, and teaming up with a variety of partners including the ever-eccentric Mottram. A man with strong and often unpalatable political views, Mottram once wrote a supportive telegram to Margaret Thatcher about her anti-union stance, and signed it from the whole Davis Cup squad.

“Buster was a machine,” Lloyd recalled. “The great thing about him is that he wasn’t inhibited by hostile crowds. In Paris one time, there was a bloke banging all these tin cans by the side of the court to make a noise, and Buster kept asking him to do it again. But the toughest crowd we encountered was probably at home. Buster got involved with the National Front in the late 1970s, and when we played at Bristol in 1978, we were flour-bombed by our own fans.”

Lloyd describes the recent decline in the Davis Cup’s visibility as “very sad”. As a passionate patriot, he loved the fact that “they only mention your name at the start of each tie; from then on it’s just ‘Game, Great Britain’.” And despite once having argued on the court with a sulky Mottram – who told him “You’re not really good enough to be in this team” – Lloyd made up for any technical deficiencies with unlimited commitment. One example stems from Bucharest in 1977, where Nicolae Ceausescu, the dictator, was part of a rowdy crowd.

“We were playing Ilie Nastase and Ion Tiriac, who were inseparable at that time. Now Tiriac” – who went on to become a billionaire business magnate after the Ceausescus’ fall – “was a very hard man. I remember we were sitting round playing cards in Stalybridge one year when he said ‘How much will you give me if I eat this wine glass?’ We stumped up something like £10 and he did exactly that: chewed and swallowed the whole thing.

“Everyone was scared of Tiriac, including Nasty [Nastase], who probably would have gone out to party a lot more – and won a lot less – if it hadn’t been for Tiriac looking out for him. I think they were the No 2 pairing in the world at that time. When we played the doubles rubber, Nasty was taunting me about my mother and stuff, as he used to. I said, ‘Nasty, if you say another word, I’m going to jump the net, and I’m going to grab you.’

“What happened then was that he hit a sharp angle which made me run around, past the net, on to his side of the court. While I’m over there, he said something shocking. So I grabbed him – and there was a riot. Suddenly everybody was on the court. And he didn’t hit me hard, but Nasty leaned over and tapped me on the head with his racket. So I said, ‘Right, I’m claiming the match. Come on, John.’ We grabbed our rackets and marched off the court. But after an hour or so we were told we had to play on, and we lost a tight match in four sets.

“Nasty ended up being banned from Davis Cup for a year. The funny thing is that I actually get on great with him now. But in those days, he used to have this bouncer – he was called ‘Bambi’ – who was always with him because he used to taunt everyone, and they all wanted to boff him one.”

This story has an unexpected footnote, in that both combatants ended up captaining their national teams after retirement. Nastase took on the role in the Fed Cup, where he would earn another lengthy ban for referring to the British team – specifically Johanna Konta and Anne Keothavong – as “f—ing bitches”. Lloyd, meanwhile, spent almost six years at the Davis Cup helm between 1995 and 2000. His first and most influential move was to help recruit Rusedski, whose mother was born in England, from his native Canada.

“I helped Greg get into the country,” recalled Lloyd. “I gave him a lot of references, and he played in the first Davis Cup match on my watch at Eastbourne. [Mark] Petchey didn’t like him. Tim didn’t like him. I thought, ‘Okay, how am I going to get around this?’ I asked all the players’ coaches to come along, to try to improve the atmosphere, and then they didn’t like each other either! No one wanted to eat together. It was just a nightmare.

“I looked after Greg a little bit, and then the drugs thing came out [when a group of seven male players were revealed to have tested positive for nandrolone in 2002 and 2003, in a scandal that was later explained via contaminated electrolytes distributed by ATP trainers]. He was in Australia, and of course the tournament was at my club, the Next Generation Club in Adelaide. He called me, so I got them to sort of hide him, basically.

“Then I said to him, ‘Come back,’ and he went up and lived in my house in Loch Lomond. He explained what he thought had happened, and I believed him. And then one day I was up there in Scotland, getting these phone calls from a reporter I knew, and I said ‘Be careful, because I don’t think you’re right.’ But the reporter wrote the drugs story anyway, and it was on the front page of the paper. I went nuts.”

Rusedski repaid Lloyd’s loyalty by playing 43 Davis Cup rubbers for Great Britain over 13 years – a duration that only Andy Murray can match. A win rate of 70 per cent puts him up there among our best performers, although his jitteriness on the court – which he would later mitigate by inventing the now ubiquitous towel-down routine after each point – needed to be carefully managed.

“Greg was such a fidget,” Lloyd recalled. “He would do up and undo his shoelaces sometimes four or five times in a game. So for one Davis Cup match we basically glued them together. It saved a lot of energy.”

Rusedski’s perennial agitation marked him out from the contrastingly unflappable Henman. Yet the mutual antipathy between these two very different men did not prevent them from winning eight straight doubles rubbers together, until the Austria tie of 2004, when a horrific blister on Rusedski’s racket hand helped to end the streak in their final outing together.

Perhaps the only thing Henman and Rusedski had in common was that they both owed their captain a great deal. Henman was 11 when Lloyd identified him to be part of his new venture: the Slater Squad. The idea, launched in 1985 and named after the millionaire banker who financed the training programme, came out of Lloyd’s insistence that the LTA – whose own programmes started at 14 – were leaving it too late to develop aspiring young players.

“People say Tim failed because he didn’t win Wimbledon,” Lloyd tells me. “But he didn’t. He probably got as much out of his ability as any player can get. His forehand could maybe have had more on it, and his second serve wasn’t quite good enough, but his mental side was great. At the Davis Cup, I never had to talk to him, because he was in his own zone.

“There was a moment when he was 14 when his parents were still keen for him to become a lawyer and carry on the family tradition. I said ‘You’ve got to let him do this because he’s got something special.’ He lived and breathed tennis, and never put in a bad practice. Not once could I ever get stuck in to him for not trying. And that, to me, is the best way to live life.

“Unfortunately, Greg and Tim didn’t like each other. I used to say, ‘Guys, you’ve got to play Wimbledon doubles, because you will win it.’ They were a fantastic pair. But they wouldn’t do it. It is what it is.”

By now, you might have picked up on the fundamentals of Lloyd’s world-view. Pick a direction in life – whether that involves building a company from scratch or driving the bright-red Ferraris he is so fond of – and then go full throttle.

This attitude was certainly the foundation stone behind the 14 years that Lloyd spent running his self-named chain of leisure centres. The former BBC tennis correspondent Richard Evans wrote an entertaining book – How To Succeed In Business While Really Trying – about this exhausting process. In the first year after Lloyd opened his first club, at Heston near Heathrow Airport, he took just a single day off. And if there was no time to go home at night, he would sometimes grab just a few hours’ sleep in his car.

How To Succeed … reveals a hugely driven personality who could inspire his employees – some of them, at least – to work almost as hard as he did. But Lloyd could also be cantankerous and litigious, with a propensity for falling out suddenly and drastically with old allies. In that first year at Heston, staff turnover stood at 80 per cent.

Lloyd has even gone through periods of estrangement with some close family members, including brother John, although John tells me that they “played golf together about a month ago. The only problem is that he’s picked up this bad habit from Donald Trump [who got to know both brothers when they all lived close-by in Florida]. They both expect to be given putts when they’re really quite long. David just grabs his ball and says ‘That’s a Donald Trump gimme.’”

At 78, Lloyd is working on a project – David Lloyd Sports Gardens – with six planned sites in the UK where he wants to set up a variety of diversions including climbing walls, padel and pickleball courts, golf simulators, zip-wires and go-karting.

‘When I was running David Lloyd Leisure, people said I was a dictator’

But he has accepted the sad truth that the one job he always wanted – the LTA chief executive role which he interviewed for in 2013 – will never come his way. The irony being that, since 2018, the post has been filled by his son Scott – a man who started out in business by running the same Next Generation chain of clubs where Rusedski had to be hidden away in 2004.

“I told Scott, ‘You’ve got to apply for it. You’re going to get it. But you know what, you can’t keep these people [long-serving LTA staff] on. They’re not good enough. They’ve never been good enough. You’ve lived with me when you were a young kid, you grew up with me making these comments, and you can only be as good as the people around you. You’ve got to pick the best people in each discipline and then listen to them’.

“When I was running David Lloyd Leisure, people said I was a dictator. I’m totally the opposite. I ask everybody, and if I know someone’s better than me, I listen. I’m a sponge.”

As he finishes off his salmon tartare, Lloyd stares ruefully into the distance. “Scott has never asked my advice or opinion. He’s never talked to me about it, so I’ve no idea if it’s better or worse. I don’t ask the question. I don’t have many regrets, but that” – not getting the LTA job – “has been a disappointment. Because I just feel I could have done something special.”