Results for Bill Tilden

On this page:

Bill Tilden

Bill Tilden (1893-1953), known as "Big Bill" and "Gentleman Bill," was the first American tennis player to compete at Wimbledon - and the first American winner. During the 1920s, he was undefeated for seven years. His book The Art of Tennis is still regarded as a classic in the game. "In the 1920s and 1930s," wrote Kim Shanley on tennisone.com, "Bill Tilden was to tennis what Babe Ruth was to baseball."

William Tatem Tilden Jr. was born on February 10, 1893, in Philadelphia, the son of wealthy parents. His childhood was marked by tragedy. Before he was born, three older siblings died within two weeks of each other in a diphtheria epidemic, in 1884. His parents had two more children: Tilden and his brother Herbert. When Tilden was 15, his mother contracted Bright's disease and was confined to a wheelchair. His father, who was considering a campaign for mayor of Philadelphia, was rarely home. When Tilden was 18, his mother died; three years later his father died from a kidney infection; a few months later his beloved brother Herbert died of pneumonia. At age 22, Tilden was the only survivor of a once-large family.

After the deaths, Tilden left the University of Pennsylvania and went to live with his mother's sister, Betsy Hey, and her niece, Selina. He was encouraged to resume playing tennis by Selina, who considered the game to be a form of therapy for his grief. Tilden did go back to the game and, within five years, was a world-ranked player. During his amateur period, he won 138 of 192 tournaments, and his match record was 907-62. In 1920, at the age of 27, Tilden was the first American to win a tournament at Wimbledon, in England.

In the 1920s, Tilden dominated the sport of tennis, winning seven U.S. championships, the equivalent to today's U.S. Open. He was a finalist at the U.S. Open ten times, and also won five men's doubles and four mixed doubles there. Tilden won at Wimbledon two more times, in 1921 and 1930. In addition, he won 13 straight singles matches in the Davis Cup from 1920 until 1926. In 1925, Tilden won 57 games in a row - a feat that biographer Frank Deford wrote was "one of those rare, unbelievable athletic feats - like Johnny Unitas throwing touchdown passes in 47 straight games or Joe DiMaggio hitting safety in 56 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."

A Cerebral Player and a Flamboyant Performer

Tilden was known for his style, grace, and commanding manner, as well as for his cannonball serve, which was once clocked at 151 miles per hour. In addition to his grace and power, he was also famous for his cerebral approach to the game. Unlike many other sports champions, who can't explain how they do what they do or why they excel, Tilden loved to think and write about the physical, emotional, and mental traits of a champion. According to Shanley, Tilden wrote: "The game is a science and an art. It can reach its highest expression only if a player is willing to study and practice in an attempt to master the game in all its varied facets." Tilden also told tennis students that it would take them 20 lessons before they could even begin to play and six months of lessons before they would even begin to have fun playing. "Anyone who promises quicker results is either an optimist, a miracle worker, or a liar," he wrote. He believed that, because of its technical challenges, tennis is by its very nature a very difficult sport to play. "In the range of sporting activities," he wrote, "successfully hitting a tennis ball back over the net and into the prescribed area on the other side (given the whole range of variables, including ball speed and spin, body movement, and wind and sun) is an inherently difficult task." And, he wrote, "Remember that in first-class tournament tennis, 70 percent of all points end in error, a net or an out, and only 30 percent end in winning placements or service aces."

Tilden was a strategist, advising players, "The primary object in match tennis is to break up the other man's game. The first thought that you should have, when you step onto a court for a match, is 'What are my opponent's weaknesses? Where will he miss next?"' He also believed in appreciating the past, writing in his 1923 book How to Play Better Tennis, "There are some very valuable things of the past that have been lost in the wild scramble for speed and power. These should be recovered and brought back into the repertoire of the modern player. The champion of today owes his game to the champions of yesterday, just as he will add his bit to the champion of tomorrow." In addition, he wrote, "The wise student should learn all he can about the styles and methods of the great players of the past, every bit as much as he does of the players of the present."

Tilden knew his opponents well, and often toyed with them, playing to the crowds. In Famous Tennis Players, Trent Frayne quoted sportswriter Allison Danzig, who wrote, "To win the crowds to his side, he went to lengths that bordered on lunacy. He would allow his opponents to gain so big a lead as to make his own defeat appear inevitable. Then, from this precarious position, he would launch a spectacular comeback that had the crowd cheering him and that invariably ended with an ovation from the stands when he won." Despite these stunts, he made a point of being fair. If an official incorrectly made a call that unfairly favored Tilden, he often deliberately missed his next shot in order to restore fairness to the game. In the Davis Cup, he once allowed Australian, James Anderson, to win a whole set in order to make up for a bad call that had wrongly given Tilden a set point.

In addition to being a flamboyant tennis performer, Tilden also was deeply interested in the theater. When he inherited $30,000, he used the money to produce Dracula, with himself in the title role. The show ran for sixteen weeks, but was a disaster. He also wrote fiction, in addition to his tennis books; Frayne described the books as "droopy novels usually inveighing against the evils of alcohol, which he personally abhorred."

In 1922, Tilden lost part of his finger in an accident. He simply modified his grip and continued to play at the same level he had played at before the accident.

Clashed with Officials

Tilden disliked authority and frequently came into conflict with officials of the United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA). In one famous clash, described by Frayne, Tilden was scheduled to play doubles in the Davis Cup finals of 1927, with Frank T. Hunter as his partner. The team had already won Wimbledon and Forest Hills but, for unknown reasons, on the morning of the match the officials changed their minds and declared that Dick Williams would be his partner. Tilden was annoyed by their high-handed manner. "Splendid," he told them. "I'll be playing bridge in the clubhouse. When you've regained your sanity, come and advise me." Tilden calmly went and played bridge, impervious to the demands, threats, and pleadings of officials; at one point, he asked them to stop interrupting his game. Out on the court, a sellout crowd was noisily demanding to see Tilden play. The officials gave in and Tilden played-after he finished playing his hand. And he won the set, though he lost the Davis Cup for that year.

In 1928, the officials were still annoyed with his attitude. They decreed that he would be suspended from amateur competition and would not be allowed to play in the Davis Cup challenge round between the United States and France. Technically, amateurs were not allowed to make money from their sport, and Tilden was well known for writing articles on tennis for various publications. Although he had been doing this for many years, officials had always ignored it. Now, they suspended him for six months. What they had not considered was the effect of Tilden's fans.

All the seats for the Davis Cup matches in Paris were sold out. When the French heard that Tilden would not be playing in their new Roland Garros Stadium, they sent diplomats to ask Calvin Coolidge, then president of the United States, to allow Tilden to play. The president told the American ambassador in Paris to disregard the U.S. Davis Cup team captain, and to select Tilden for the team. Tilden could be suspended after the match - which he won.

Tragic End to a Great Career

Tilden's fame led him to have many famous friends, particularly movie stars. He moved to Hollywood and coached many of them in tennis, including Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, and Tallulah Bankhead. He also became good friend with Charlie Chaplin. Tilden played at Chaplin's tennis parties, where he coached Errol Flynn, Joseph Cotten, Montgomery Clift, Spencer Tracy, and Olivia deHavilland.

Although Tilden is widely considered to be the greatest tennis player of all time, his life story is also the most tragic. Tilden was gay, in an era when homosexuality was not tolerated. He was arrested, convicted, and put in jail twice for homosexual encounters. When this became public knowledge, he was no longer allowed to enter tennis clubs or to play on the professional circuit. By the end of his life, his former friends had abandoned him. Some of them literally turned their backs when he approached. The officials at Penn removed his name from their alumni files. The Germantown Cricket Club, where he had won many of his Davis Cup matches, removed his pictures from their walls. The same happened at Forest Hills, where to this day there is only one photograph of him on the wall.

Friendless and penniless, Tilden had to pawn his old trophies, and lived in a sparse rented room near Hollywood and Vine. On June 5, 1953, he died of a heart attack in West Hollywood, California. He was alone, and his rackets were found beside his bed, packed and ready to go to the 1953 U.S. Championships.

Although his friends turned their backs on him, his reputation as a tennis player endured. Tilden won the National Sports Writers Association "Most Outstanding Athlete of the Year" award in 1949, with ten times the number of votes of the nearest runner-up.

In The Story of the Davis Cup, Alan Trengrove quotes John Kieran as saying, "Big Bill was more than a monarch. He was a great artist and a great actor. He combed his dark hair with an air. He strode the courts like a confident conqueror. He rebuked the crowds at tournaments and sent critical officials scurrying to cover. He carved up his opponents as a royal chef would carve meat to the king's taste. He had a fine flair for the dramatic; and, with his vast height and reach and boundless zest and energy over a span of years, he was the most striking and commanding figure the game of tennis had ever put on court."

Twenty-three years after Tilden died, writer Frank Deford visited his small, modest tombstone, and according to Frayne, wrote, "It is the only monument of any kind anywhere in the world - at Forest Hills, Wimbledon, Germantown, anywhere - that pays tribute to the greatest tennis player who ever lived."

Bill Tilden
Born	February 10, 1893 Philadelphia, PA
Died	June 5 1953 (aged 60) Los Angeles, CA
Nationality	United States

Personal life

Tilden was born into a wealthy family that was overshadowed 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 of his father at 19 marked him deeply and tennis was apparently a means of recovery. He dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania and began to practice his game against a backboard. 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 ballboys and youthful tennis protégés, of whom Vinnie Richards was the most noted. In spite of his world-wide travels, Tilden lived at his aunt's house until 1941 when he was 48 years old. Tilden 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 3 enormous meals a day of steak and potatoes, with, perhaps, the occasional lamb chop.

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 gay 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.)

In the United States' sports-mad decade of the Roaring Twenties Tilden was one of the five dominant figures of the "Golden Era of Sport", along with Babe Ruth, Red Grange, Bobby Jones, and Jack Dempsey. His subsequent arrests and convictions on charges of soliciting underage males cast a shadow over his illustrious career.

Greatness as a player

Except for an extended period in the 1950s when Pancho Gonzales completely ruled the men's professional tour, there has never been an era in tennis more dominated by a single player. During a 7-year period in the 1920s it was said that Tilden never lost a single important match, particularly in the Davis Cup matches, which in those days had far more importance than they do today. Among his many achievements, he won the United States amateur championship 6 times in succession and 7 times altogether. And from 1920 through 1926 he led the United States team to 7 consecutive Davis Cup victories, a record that is still unequalled.

In the article World number one male tennis player rankings with its unofficial but sourced rankings, Tilden is the world's best player for 7 years, second only to Gonzales's 8 No. 1 ratings, tied with Rod Laver but ahead of Jack Kramer, Ken Rosewall, and Pete Sampras, all of whom had 6.

Unique among tennis players, Tilden became a great player only at the relatively advanced age of 27. Prior to 1920 he had won a number of national doubles titles but had lost to Lindley Murray and "Little Bill" Johnston in the 1918 and 1919 singles championships. 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. It was all he needed. He emerged with a new grip and a powerful new backhand in the summer of 1920 and for the rest of the decade dominated world tennis.

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.) 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. 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 told CBS Sports.

It was little known at the time, but mid-way through the 20s the tip of Tilden's middle finger on his hand that gripped the racquet became infected and had to be 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 dropshots 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 ground strokes at him and who 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 def. 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 the intellectual

Tilden may have spent more time analyzing the game of tennis than anyone before or since. He wrote two books about the game, The Art of Lawn Tennis and Match Play and the Spin of the Ball, the latter of which 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.

Another of his party pieces, when serving for the match against lesser opposition, was to 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 draconicaly 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.

Place in sports history

For approximately 35 years, from about 1920 to the mid-1950s, Tilden was generally considered the greatest player who had ever lived, his only rivals being Vines, Budge, and Jack Kramer. In the mid-1950s many people began to think that 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 perhaps to Roger Federer. 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.^[1]

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. In 1950, in spite of his legal record, which caused him to be shunned by much of the tennis world, 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.

Pedophilia convictions

Tilden was first arrested on Nov. 23, 1946 on Sunset Boulevard when he was caught fondling Bobby, the fourteen year old son of a studio executive, a boy with whom he had been carrying on a consensual relationship. He could have been charged with a felony ("lewd and lascivious behavior with a minor"), but was charged only with a misdemeanor ("contributing to the delinquency of a minor"). He was sentenced to a year in prison and served 7 1/2 months.

He was arrested again on Jan. 28, 1949, after picking up a 16-year-old hitchhiker and making advances. 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.^[2]

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 [1] . The last part of his life was spent quietly and away from his family, occasionally participating in celebrity tennis matches. He died penniless in Los Angeles, California, at the age of 60. He was preparing to leave for the United States Professional Championship tournament in Cleveland, Ohio, when he fell dead of a stroke.

Tilden was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1959.

Grand Slam record

French Championships
- Singles finalist: 1927, 1930
- Mixed champion: 1930

Wimbledon Championships
- Singles champion: 1920, 1921, 1930
- Doubles champion: 1927

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

Professional Tennis Championships wins

Wembley, England
- Finalist, 1935, 1936, 1937, 1938

United States Professional Championship
- Singles, 1931, 1935

French Professional Championship
- Singles, 1934

Other notable wins

Cincinnati
- Singles, 1926

Los Angeles
- Singles, 1927
- Doubles, 1927

References

^ Writing in 1979, Kramer considered the best ever to have been either Don Budge (for consistent play) or Ellsworth Vines (at the height of his game). The next four best were, chronologically, Bill Tilden, Fred Perry, Bobby Riggs, and Pancho Gonzales. After these six came the "second echelon" of Rod Laver, Lew Hoad, Ken Rosewall, Gottfried von Cramm, Ted Schroeder, Jack Crawford, Pancho Segura, Frank Sedgman, Tony Trabert, John Newcombe, Arthur Ashe, Stan Smith, Björn Borg, and Jimmy Connors. He felt unable to rank Henri Cochet and René Lacoste accurately but felt they were among the very best.
^ Frank Deford, Big Bill Tilden pp198-207

Big Bill Tilden, The Triumphs and the Tragedy - Frank DeFord, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1976, ISBN 0-671-22254-6

External links

International Tennis Hall of Fame profile
ESPN article about Tilden http://espn.go.com/sportscentury/features/00016511.html
Bill Tilden - article at Citizendium that includes a good number of photographs of Tilden

Pre Open Era Wimbledon men's singles champions*

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

Donate to Wikimedia

Join the WikiAnswers Q&A community. Post a question or answer questions about "Bill Tilden" at WikiAnswers.

Copyrights:

		Biography. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved. Read more
		Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more
		US History Companion. The Reader's Companion to American History, Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors, published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more
		Quotes By. Copyright © 2008 QuotationsBook.com. All rights reserved. Read more
		Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Bill Tilden". Read more

Search for answers directly from your browser with the FREE Answers.com Toolbar!
Click here to download now.

Get Answers your way! Check out all our free tools and products.

On this page: Print Link

	How long is the flight from Melbourne Australia to Rabat Morocco?
	Why do dogs bark and cats meow?
	How do snails eat their food?
	Which reptiles live in the desert?
	What is a jumping spider?