Bill Tilden

Bill Tilden
Born	February 10, 1893 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Died	June 5, 1953(1953-06-05) (aged 60) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Nationality	United States

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, he won 14 Majors including ten Grand Slams and four Pro Slams. Bill Tilden dominated the world of international tennis in the first half of the 1920s. During his 18 year amateur period of 1912-30, he won 138 of 192 tournaments, and had a match record of 907-62, a winning percentage of 93.6 percent.

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 18 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 loss at 22 of his father and older brother marked him deeply. After several months of deep depression, and with encouragement from his aunt, tennis, which he had taken up starting at age five, 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.

Tilden was a graduate of Peirce College in Philadelphia.

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.^{[citation needed]}

Early tennis career

Tilden 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^{[citation needed]}, 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

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 six dominant figures of the "Golden Age of Sport", along with Babe Ruth, Howie Morenz, Red Grange, Bobby Jones, and Jack Dempsey.

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. 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

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 1920s-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. Kramer began playing tennis with Tilden at age 15 at the Los Angeles Tennis Club (LATC).

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.

Sexuality and morals charges

Tilden was arrested in November 1946 on Sunset Boulevard by the Beverly Hills police and charged with a misdemeanor ("contributing to the delinquency of a minor") for soliciting an underage male, a 14-year-old boy with whom he was having sex in a moving vehicle. Because of his vanity he did not carry his glasses with him and signed a confession without reading it. He was sentenced to a year in prison, but served 7½ months. His five-year parole conditions were so strict they virtually erased all his income that he earned from private lessons. He was arrested again in January 1949, after picking up a 16-year-old hitchhiker who remained anonymous until years later, when he filed a lawsuit claiming he had suffered severe mental, physical and emotional damage from the encounter. The judge sentenced a year on probation violation and let the punishment for the charge run concurrently. Tilden served ten months. In both cases, apparently, he 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 incarceration he was increasingly shunned by the tennis and Hollywood 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. Chaplin allowed Tilden to use his private court for lessons to help him after the run of legal and financial problems.

According to contemporary George Lott, a player and later tennis coach at DePaul University, and authoritative biographer Frank Deford, Tilden never made advances to players, whether other adults or his pupils. Art Anderson of Burbank, who took lessons from Tilden from the age of eleven and remained a lifelong loyal friend, reported nothing of Tilden's sexual advances “Bill had all the rumors floating around about his sexuality,” Jack Kramer said. Question remain if Tilden's prosecution was based on the rumors, many published, and heterosexual biases of the time. California did not repeal its sodomy law until 1976. Because he lived in an era when homosexual sex was illegal and was not tolerated socially, some suspect that Tilden was a victim of the homophobic society of the era. More shocking than Tilden's being caught was the revelation that "sports and homosexuality were not mutually exclusive".

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.

Career statistics

Main article: Bill Tilden career statistics

According to Bud Collins, as an amateur (1912–1930) Tilden won 138 of 192 tournaments, lost 28 finals and had a 907–62 match record, a 93.60% winning percentage. Bill Tilden joined professional tennis in 1931, making him then ineligible to compete in the Grand Slams tournaments.

																	Titles / Played	Career Win-Loss	Career win %
Grand Slam tournaments	Amateur career																10 / 23	114-13	89.76
	1915	1916	1917	1918	1919	1920	1921	1922	1923	1924	1925	1926	1927	1928	1929	1930
Australian	A	Not Held			A	A	A	A	A	A	A	A	A	A	A	A	0 / 0	0-0	N/A
French	Not Held					Only for French players					A	A	F	A	SF	F	0 / 3	14-3	82.35
Wimbledon	Not Held				A	W	W	A	A	A	A	A	SF	SF	SF	W	3 / 6	31-3	91.18
U.S.	A	1R	3R	F	F	W	W	W	W	W	W	QF	F	A	W	SF	7 / 14	69-7	90.79
Pro Slam Tournaments	Professional career																4 / 19	36-17	67.92
	1931	1932	1933	1934	1935	1936	1937	1938	1939	1940	1941	1942	1943	1944	1945	1946
French Pro	A	A	W	W	SF	A	SF	F	SF	Not Held							2 / 6	10-4	71.43
Wembley Pro	Not Held			3rd	F	A	F	A	3rd	Not Held							0 / 4	8-6	57.14
U.S. Pro	W	SF	A	A	W	A	A	A	SF	SF	QF	A	QF	N.H.	SF	1R	2 / 9	18-7	72.00
Total:																	14 / 42	150-30	83.33

See also

• List of male tennis players
• Tennis male players statistics
• List of gay, lesbian or bisexual people

Sources

• Deford, Frank (1976). Big Bill Tilden: The Triumphs and the Tragedy. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-22254-6
• Joyce Milton, Tramp: The Life of Charlie Chaplin[1] - Da Capo Press, 1998.
• Keith Stern, Queers in History: The Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Historical Gays, Lesbians and Bisexuals[2] - Canzoneri, 2009.
• Marshall Jon Fisher, A Terrible Splendor: Three Extraordinary Men, a World Poised for War, and the Greatest Tennis Match Ever Played[3] - Random House, Inc., 2010.
• Robert Hofler, The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson[4] - Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2006.
• Sam Kashner, Jennifer Macnair, The Bad and the Beautiful: Hollywood in the Fifties[5] - W. W. Norton & Company, 2003
• Los Angeles Tennis Club
• Jack Kramer, The Game, My 40 Years in Tennis, (1979)
• Caroline Seebohm, Little Pancho, (2009)
• Pancho Gonzales, Man with a Racket, (1959)
• Bobby Riggs, Tennis is my Racket, (1949)
• Gardnar Mulloy, As It Was, (2009)

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 978-0-307-39394-4

External links

• International Tennis Hall of Fame profile
• ESPN article about Tilden
• Bill Tilden - article at Citizendium includes photographs