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TILDEN, WILLIAM TATEM, II 1893-1953

TENNIS GIANT

Accomplishments

William "Big Bill" Tilden dominated men's tennis in the 1920s. Through his dramatic play he attracted public attention to a sport that had often been regarded as unmanly, snobbish, and boring. He won the U.S. Championship for six consecutive years from 1920 through 1925 and again, at the age of thirty-six, in 1929. On 3 July 1920 he became the first American to win the men's singles title at Wimbledon, a title that he successfully defended the following year and recaptured in 1930, when he was thirty-seven. He was a member of the U.S. Davis Cup team from 1920 to 1930, leading the team to seven championships until a strong French team emerged in 1927 and beat the Americans in the finals for four years straight. In Davis Cup play he lost only one doubles match and five of the twenty-two singles matches he played, all of his losses coming after 1925. In 1925 he ran off fifty-seven winning games that, as his biographer Frank Deford notes, was "one of those rare, unbelievable athletic feats—like Johnny Unitas throwing touchdown passes in forty-seven straight games or Joe DiMaggio hitting safely in fifty-six games in a row—that simply cannot be exceeded in a reasonable universe no matter how long and loud we intone that records are made to be broken."

Early Career

Born into a wealthy Philadelphia family, Tilden began playing tennis as a child but despite his obvious talent did not develop a strong game until he was twenty-seven. In 1915, when he was twenty-two, he was ranked seventieth in the world and was notorious for his first-round losses, usually the product of lackadaisical play. After he was rejected for military service in 1917 because of flat feet, he devoted himself to improving his game through sharpening his strategy and his technique—his individual strokes, his footwork, the spin of the ball. In so doing he was making himself into "the first real intellectual of the game, and the first to introduce elements of psychology, tactics, and even ballistics" into his game, as Gianni Clerici has written. As a result of his new discipline, Tilden reached the finals of the U.S. Championship in 1918 and 1919.

"Big Bill" and "Little Bill."

His victorious opponent in the 1919 finals was William M. Johnston, whom Tilden would also face in five of his six U.S. Championship finals between 1920 and 1925. Fierce competitors and close friends, Tilden and Johnston played thrilling five-set championship matches in 1920, 1922, and 1925. The pair were known as "Big Bill" and "Little Bill," and together they were a study in contrasts: Tilden, at just over six feet and 155 pounds, was tall, thin, and an eastern aristocrat; Johnston stood five feet six inches tall, weighed 121 pounds, and was a California commoner. Together these two led the U.S. Davis Cup team during its 1920s glory years.

Officialdom

Throughout his career Tilden mocked and fought with tennis's governing bodies and officials, calling for rules changes that were often later effected and attacking what seemed to be absurd restrictions. Because Tilden had agreed to write a tennis column for The New York Times, the United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA) banned him as captain of the 1928 U.S. Davis Cup team just before the finals were to be played in Paris. When the French players learned that they would not be allowed to compete against him, they insisted that he be reinstated. The USLTA reluctantly returned Tilden to the team, but only after a U.S. ambassador intervened.

Sportsmanship

Contemptuous toward officialdom, Tilden was scrupulously fair and sportsmanlike to opponents. If a linesman made a bad call in his favor, Tilden would often purposely miss the next shot to rectify the mistake. During Davis Cup play he once gave away a complete set to Australian James Anderson to correct a line call that had awarded Tilden a set point in error. He regarded sportsmanship as crucial to the game and to his own patrician image.

Style of Play

Tilden's style of play was athletic, graceful, and dramatic. Essentially a baseliner, he was blessed with an enormous serve and with devastating forehand and backhand drives. In October 1922 Tilden's career was threatened by a cut on his right middle finger that became infected and that, in those prepenicillin days, ultimately required amputation just below the second joint. He retained enough of the finger that the power and placement of his shots were not noticeably affected.

Professional Tennis

With the stock-market crash of 1929, athletes in general were being pressured to turn professional. An outspoken advocate of amateur athletics throughout the 1920s, Tilden acquiesced to financial realities and turned pro in 1931. He won the men's professional singles championship in his first year on the tour and again in 1935. He retired from tennis in 1936 at the age of forty-three but returned in 1945 to win the pro doubles title with Vincent Richards. Tilden was then fifty-two.

Other Pursuits

Tilden was throughout his life passionate about the arts. He loved opera, painting, and the theater and counted among his friends movie stars Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks. He hoped to become an actor but proved to have little thespian talent, though he did once play the role of Dracula in a sixteen-week road show. He published a substantial amount of bad fiction, most of it populated by impossibly noble or evil characters, and wrote several excellent books on tennis, including The Art of Lawn Tennis (1923).

Final Years

Tilden's final years were difficult. He had, while he was still playing tennis, surrounded himself with attractive teenaged boys, and twice in the late 1940s he was arrested and served prison time for child molestation. Ironically, a few days before his release from his second jail term in December 1949, he was named by the Associated Press the greatest athlete in his sport for the first half of the twentieth century. Yet he could not recover his former glory or respect. Proud, financially pressed, and virtually friendless, he lived in a small apartment near Hollywood and Vine and tried to make ends meet by teaching tennis. He was invited to play in the U.S. professional tournament in Cleveland in June 1953, but the evening before the tournament began, he died of a heart attack. Only a few people attended his funeral, and no official or other form of tribute was sent by the USLTA.