William Tatem Tilden II (February 10, 1893 – June
5, 1953), nicknamed "Big Bill," is often considered one of the
greatest tennis players of all time. An American
tennis player who was the
World No.
1
player for seven years, Bill Tilden dominated the world of
international tennis in the 1920s.
Personal life
Tilden was
born into a wealthy Philadelphia
family bereaved by the death of three older
siblings. He lost his semi-invalid mother when he was 15
and, even though his father was still alive and maintained a large
house staffed with servants, was sent a few houses away to live
with a maiden aunt. The subsequent loss at 19 of his father and
older brother marked him deeply. After several months of deep
depression, and with encouragement from his aunt, tennis became his
primary means of recovery. According to his biographer,
Frank Deford, because of his early family
losses Tilden spent all of his adult life attempting to create a
father-son relationship with a long succession of
ball boys and youthful tennis protégés, of whom
Vinnie Richards was the most noted.
In spite of his worldwide travels, Tilden lived at his aunt's house
until 1941 when he was 48 years old. He reportedly had no sexual
relationships with women at all and apparently very few sexual
encounters with members of his own sex until he was well into his
40s and becoming increasingly effeminate in his mannerisms,
particularly in the more liberal atmosphere of 1930s Europe.
Although Tilden almost never drank, he smoked heavily and disdained
what today would be considered a healthy life style for an athlete;
for most of his life his diet consisted of three enormous meals a
day of steak and potatoes, with, perhaps, the occasional lamb
chop.
Early tennis career
Considering he became one of the greatest in the game, Tilden’s
early tennis days were none too promising.
He was not number one
at his prep school Germantown Academy
nor even good enough to play on his college
team. The shy, self-absorbed, sometimes arrogant
young man dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania
and began to practice his game against a backboard
and he also became a dedicated student of the game. In just
three years, he worked his way up the ranks. Prior to 1920 he had
won a number of Canadian doubles titles , but had lost to Lindley
Murray and
"Little Bill" Johnston in
straight sets. He won the 1920-1925 U. S. singles championships and
is so far the leader holding 6 consecutive U.S. titles and 7 total
U.S wins. In the winter of 1919-20 he moved to Rhode Island where,
on an indoor court, he devoted himself to remodeling his relatively
ineffective
backhand into a much more
effective one. With this change, he became the world's number one
tennis player and the first American to win the Wimbledon singles
championship.
Influence on tennis
Tilden was a champion player of the 1920s and 1930s who was, along
with the great French star
Suzanne
Lenglen, one of the two most influential persons in the history
of tennis. He was also perhaps the most paradoxical figure in the
history of any sport: a man who almost single-handedly changed the
image of tennis from that of a "sissy" country-club sport played
only by rich white people in long white pants or ankle-length
skirts to that of a major sport played by robust, world-class
athletes. The effeminate image of men's tennis during that era was
so pervasive that it led
W.C. Fields to comment in one film about two brothers
he knew: "One's a tennis player; the other's a manly sort of
fellow." (Fields, in real life, also played tennis.)
Suzanne Lenglen (1899-1938) and Bill Tilden (1893-1953)
In the United States' sports-mad decade of the
Roaring Twenties Tilden was one of the five
dominant figures of the "Golden Age of Sport", along with
Babe Ruth,
Howie
Morenz,
Red Grange,
Bobby Jones, and
Jack Dempsey.
Greatness as a player
There has perhaps never been an era in tennis more dominated by a
single player than Tilden in the 1920s. From 1920 through 1926 he
led the United States team to 7 consecutive
Davis Cup victories, a record that is still
unequalled. Among his foremost achievements, he won the U.S.
National
Championship (precursor to the US Open
) 6 times in
succession and 7 times altogether (1920-1925, 1929), doubles 5
times, and mixed doubles 4 times. He traveled by ship to
England to compete at Wimbledon six times (1920, 1921, 1927-1930)
and won three times (1920, 1921 and 1930). He never won the
Australian or French singles championship because prior to 1938
(when Don Budge won the first Grand Slam), these were not
considered prestigious titles as they are today. Prior to 1938, the
most prestigious tennis titles were the Davis Cup, Wimbledon, and
the US Championships.
Unique among tennis players, Tilden became a great player only at
the relatively advanced age of 27. Tall, lean, and gangly, with
long arms, enormous hands, and exceptionally broad shoulders,
Tilden possessed what was called at the time a "cannonball"
service. In 1931 his
serve was timed
at 163.3 miles per hour , although the figure has been questioned,
given the technology available at the time, and also because
hitting a serve that hard with the wooden rackets of the era would
have been exceedingly difficult. (By way of comparison,
Andy Roddick holds the modern, unassailable
record, measured by
radar, of 155 miles per
hour—a record set with a much more powerful racquet.) Although he
could serve aces almost at will, he had little interest in
advancing to the net behind his serve. He primarily used spin and
slice serves, reserving his famous cannonball for crucial moments
in the match.
It was little known at the time, but in late 1922 the tip of
Tilden's middle finger on his hand that gripped the racquet became
infected and was
amputated. He also had a chronic knee problem that
hindered him seriously from time to time. This too was concealed
from the public and hardly seemed to impede him in his long string
of victories.
In spite of his powerful serve, Tilden preferred to play mostly
from the backcourt, where he dazzled opponents with his
ever-changing tactics: a mixture of guile, of chopped and
sliced shots, of
drop shots and
lobs,
and of sudden powerful ground strokes deep to the corners. He hit
superbly angled shots on nearly impossible returns and liked
nothing better than to face an opponent who threw powerful serves
and
groundstrokes at him and rushed the
net—one way or another Tilden would find a way to hit the ball past
him.
In 1941, when Bill Tilden was 48 years old, he toured the United
States playing head-to-head matches with
Don
Budge, who at that time was incontestably the greatest player
in the world. Joe McCauley says that Budge defeated Tilden 51-7 in
their head-to-head tour, but Bowers says that by his count the
outcome was most probably 46-7 plus one tie, with 49 matches being
fully documented for a result of 43-5 plus 1 tie. In the whole
history of tennis, only
Pancho
Gonzales and
Ken Rosewall have ever
approached the sustained level of Tilden's greatness after reaching
the age of 40.
An iconic photograph of Tilden shows him leaping high into the air
to hit an overhead smash with classic footwork, form, and power.
Some contemporaries, however, considered Tilden's overhead to be
the single weakness in his game. Some later commentators felt that
a 1960s player such as Ken Rosewall would have been able to exploit
this weakness by the deft use of offensive lobs.
Tilden’s mental game
Tilden may have spent more time analyzing the game of tennis than
anyone before or perhaps since. He wrote two books about tennis,
The Art of Lawn
Tennis and
Match Play and the Spin of
the Ball; the latter is still in print and is the
definitive work on the subject. Besides his great physical
abilities, he was an extremely cerebral player, a master of both
strategy and tactics, adept at adapting himself to his opponent's
style and turning his strengths against him. He was also known for
his showmanship, which occasionally veered into what his opponents
might have called
gamesmanship. He
always tried to give his paying audience its money's worth and it
was frequently written, though never confirmed by Tilden himself,
that he would deliberately lose the opening sets of a match in
order to prolong the battle and to make it more interesting for
both himself and the spectators. (This ploy was confirmed in 1963
by William Lufler, who played on Tilden's pro tour for several
years. Lufler, who had become a highly regarded teaching pro — he
was instrumental in forming the USPTA, and served as its president
1963-1966 — claimed that Tilden threw the early sets in most
matches.)
In spite of his occasional overly colorful behavior he was a devout
believer in sportsmanship at all costs and above all other aspects
of the game, including the final score; he would readily (and
dramatically) cede points to his opponent if he thought the umpire
had miscalled a shot in Tilden's favor. He still remains the only
known professional tennis player, perhaps the only professional at
any sport, to have refunded money to a promoter when the gate was
not as good as it should have been, and the promoter was going to
lose money.
In another bit of showmanship, when Tilden was serving for the
match against lesser opposition, he would pick up four balls in his
massive hand and proceed to serve four aces, one with each ball. To
show his disdain for the women's game, it is said, he played an
exhibition against the foremost female player of the day,
Suzanne Lenglen, giving her three points in
each game, and won 6–0, 6–0 (He started each game from minus 40 to
love, not love-40, so Lenglen had to win four points before Tilden
won seven, also no date nor venue have ever been given so the story
may be apocryphal).
Tilden the consummate showman on the court was also a ham and
showman in the larger world.
He wrote many unsuccessful short stories and
novels about misunderstood but sportsman-like tennis players, and
dreamed of being a star on Broadway
and in
Hollywood. Much
of his off-the-court time — as well as his money — was devoted to
these pursuits, with failure the invariable result.
Professional tennis career
In the
late 1920s the great French players known as the "Four Musketeers" finally wrested the Davis
Cup away from Tilden and the United States, as well as his
domination of the singles titles at Wimbledon
and Forest Hills
. Tilden had long been at odds with the
draconically rigid amateur directors of the
United States Lawn Tennis
Association about his income derived from newspaper articles
about tennis. He won his last major championship at Wimbledon in
1930 at the age of 37 but was no longer able to win titles at
will.
In 1931, in need of money, he turned professional and joined the
fledgling pro tour, which had begun only in 1927. For the next 15
years, he and a handful of other professionals such as
Hans Nüsslein and
Karel Koželuh barnstormed across the
United States and Europe in a series of one-night stands, with
Tilden still the player that people primarily paid to see. Even
with greats such as
Ellsworth Vines,
Fred Perry, and
Don
Budge as his opponents, all of them current or recent
World
No. 1
players, it was often Tilden who ensured the box-office
receipts—and who could still hold his own against the much younger
players for a first set or even an occasional match.
Tilden thought he reached the apogee of his whole career in 1934 at
41 years old, nevertheless that year he was dominated in the pro
ranks by
Ellsworth Vines. Both
players faced each other at least 60 times in 1934, Tilden winning
about 19 matches and Vines 41
American Lawn Tennis reported
that on May 17, at tour’s end, Vines led Tilden by 19 matches for
the year (Slightly over about fifty matches would have been
played.) so a possible win-loss record on May 17 was 16-35
then both players met at least 6 times during the rest of the year
(
Ray Bowers has listed 5 tournament matches and 1 one-night
program) all lost by Tilden. Then both players met at least
six times (five times in tournaments and once in one-night indoor
program) with Tilden losing all his matches. And in 1945 the
52-year old Tilden and his long-time doubles partner
Vinnie Richards won the professional doubles
championship—they had won the United States amateur title 27 years
earlier in 1918.
Davis Cup coach
Tilden coached Germany's tennis team in the 1937
Davis Cup. In the inter-zone finals the U.S. team
won after the deciding singles clash between
Gottfried von Cramm and
Don Budge, a match which has been called "The
Greatest Tennis Match Ever Played".
Place in sports history
For approximately 35 years, from about 1920 to the mid-1950s,
Tilden was generally considered the greatest tennis player, his
only rivals being
Ellsworth Vines,
Don Budge, and
Jack Kramer. In the mid-1950s
many people began to think that
Pancho
Gonzales had claimed that title. Since then, however, public
opinion has swung away from the now nearly forgotten Gonzales to
champions of the
Open
era, first to
Rod Laver, then to
Björn Borg,
John McEnroe, and
Pete
Sampras, and now
Roger
Federer.
Allison Danzig, the main tennis
writer for
The New York
Times from 1923 through 1968, and the editor of
The
Fireside Book of Tennis, called Tilden the greatest tennis
player he had ever seen. "He could run like a deer," Danzig once
told
CBS Sports. An extended Danzig
encomium to Tilden's tennis appears in the
July 11, 1946 issue of
The Times, in which he reports on a
1920's-evoking performance in the first two sets of a five set loss
by the 53 year old Tilden to Wayne Sabin, at the 1946 Professional
Championship at Forest Hills.
In his 1979 autobiography,
Jack Kramer,
the long-time tennis promoter and great player himself, included
Tilden in his list of the 6 greatest players of all time. In the
article
World number one
male tennis player rankings with its unofficial but sourced
rankings, Tilden was the world's best player for 7 years, second
only to Gonzales' 8 No. 1 ratings, tied with
Rod Laver but ahead of
Jack
Kramer,
Ken Rosewall, and
Pete Sampras, each of whom had 6. Some
commentators counter that comparison of Tilden’s era to today is
impossible, due to today’s much deeper pro field, greater length of
the tour year, faster ground stroke speed, better diet and
conditioning, and more wearing hard court play.
Tilden, who was one of the most famous athletes in the world for
many years, today is not widely remembered despite his former
renown. During his lifetime, however, he was a flamboyant character
who was never out of the public eye, acting in both movies and
plays as well as playing tennis.
He also had two arrests for sexual
misbehavior with teenage boys in the late 1940s; these led to
incarcerations in the Los
Angeles
area. He was shunned in public, his name was
removed from the alumni files of Penn, and his photos removed from
the walls of his home club, the Germantown Cricket Club
. In 1950, in spite of his legal record and
public disgrace, an
Associated
Press poll named Bill Tilden the
greatest tennis player of the half-century by a wider margin than
that given to any athlete in any other sport.
Morals charges
Tilden was
first arrested on November 23, 1946, on Mulberry Avenue in Portage,
Indiana
. He could have been charged with a
felony ("lewd and lascivious behavior with a minor"),
but was instead charged only with a
misdemeanor ("contributing to the delinquency of
a minor"). He was sentenced to a year in prison, but served 7 1/2
months.
He was arrested again on January 28, 1949, after picking up a
16-year-old
hitchhiker whose name
remained anonymous until years later, when the boy filed a lawsuit
against Tilden. The boy claimed he had suffered severe mental,
physical and emotional damage from his encounter with Tilden. The
new charge could have been prosecuted as a felony, but the judge
merely sentenced Tilden to a year on his
probation violation and let the punishment for the
new molesting charge run concurrently. He served 10 months.
In both
cases, apparently, Tilden sincerely believed that his celebrity and
his longtime friendship with Hollywood
names such as Charlie
Chaplin were enough to keep him from jail. He therefore
defended himself in court in both cases in a far less than vigorous
fashion.
After his second incarceration Tilden was increasingly shunned by
the tennis world. He was unable to give lessons at most clubs and
even on public courts he had fewer clients.
At one point he was
invited to play at a prestigious professional tournament being held
at the Beverly
Wilshire Hotel
; at the last moment he was told that he could not
participate.
Despite those charges and conviction, according to contemporary
George Lott, a great player and later tennis coach at DePaul
University, and authoritative biographer Frank Deford, Big Bill
never made advances to players, be they other adults or his pupils.
Art Anderson of Burbank, who took lessons from Tilden since he was
eleven years old and remained a life-long loyal friend, reported
nothing of Tilden's sexual advances
“Bill had all the rumors floating around about his sexuality,” Jack
Kramer said.
The question remains if Tilden's prosecution was based on those
rumors and heterosexual biases of the time.
California did not repeal its sodomy law until 1976. In an era when
homosexuality was persecuted legally and was not tolerated
socially, there is enough room to suspect that Tilden was made
victim of the homophobic society of the time."Bill Tilden" in
Encyclopedia of World Biography. Thomson Gale. 2004.
Encyclopedia.com. 27 Sep. 2009 /www.encyclopedia.com>. Today,
LGBT societies list Tilden as a victim of homophobia of the time
and revere him as one of their heroes.
Death
Although
Tilden had been born to wealth, and earned large sums of money
during his long career, particularly in his early years on the pro
tour, he spent it lavishly, keeping a suite at the Algonquin
Hotel
. Much of his income went towards financing
Broadway shows that he wrote, produced, and starred in. The last
part of his life was spent quietly and away from his family,
occasionally participating in celebrity tennis matches.
He died
in Los
Angeles, California
. He was preparing to leave for the United States
Professional Championship tournament in Cleveland,
Ohio
, in 1953 when he fell dead of a
stroke.
Tilden
was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of
Fame
in Newport, Rhode Island
, in 1959.
Appearance in Nabokov's Lolita
Tilden is depicted, but not named, by
Vladimir Nabokov in his novel
Lolita. He appears as a has-been tennis champion
with "a harem of ball boys", whom Humbert Humbert hires to coach
Lolita, knowing that he will not try to seduce her due to his
homosexuality.
In retrospect,
Nabokov told Alfred Appel, who was
editing an annotated version of Lolita, that his anonymous
tennis coach was a real person who had won three Wimbledon
championships, was born in 1893, and died in
1953. Tilden is the only Wimbledon champion to fit this
description. The name of Nabokov's character is "Ned Litam", which
can be rendered "Ma Tilden" when spelt backwards.
Grand Slam record
- U.S.
Championships
- Singles champion: 1920,
1921, 1922,
1923, 1924,
1925, 1929
- Singles finalist: 1918, 1919, 1927
- Doubles champion: 1918,
1921, 1922,
1923, 1927
- Doubles finalist: 1919, 1926
- Mixed champion: 1913,
1914, 1922,
1923
- Mixed finalist: 1916, 1917, 1919, 1921, 1924
Major professional tennis championship wins
Other notable wins
See also
References
Sources
- Deford, Frank (1976). Big Bill
Tilden: The Triumphs and the Tragedy. New York: Simon &
Schuster. ISBN 0-671-22254-6
Further reading
- Fisher, Marshall Jon (2009). A Terrible Splendor: Three
Extraordinary Men, a World Poised for War and the Greatest Tennis
Match Ever Played. ISBN 9780307393944
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