Bill Tilden was an American tennis player who dominated the game for more than a decade, winning seven United States championships (now the United States Open), three Wimbledon Championships, and two professional titles. His overpowering play and temperamental personality made him one of the most colorful sports figures of the 1920s.
Background
Ethnicity:
Bill Tilden was born into a family with deep Anglo-Saxon roots.
William Tatem Tilden, Jr. was born on February 10, 1893, at the family mansion, Overleigh, in the wealthy Germantown section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. He was one of five children born to William Tatem Tilden, a successful businessman and local Republican political leader, and Selina Hey Tilden, a homemaker. Their first three children died from diphtheria in 1884. Tilden's idolized brother Herbert was born in 1887 and died in 1915.
Education
Tilden was very close to his mother. Because of the first children's deaths, Tilden's mother had him tutored at home. When she became ill in 1908, he was sent to live with his spinster aunt Mary Elizabeth Hey and her niece, and he kept quarters with them for thirty years. Tilden began playing tennis at the age of seven at the Onteora (New York) Club in the Catskill Mountains where his family summered. He followed the serve-and-volley style of his brother, a successful competitor who introduced him to the game.
Tilden enrolled at Germantown Academy in 1908 and played on the Academy's tennis team for two years. He served as team captain in his senior year before graduating in 1910. Tilden then entered the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he played for three years without distinction. Tilden left for a year after the death of his mother in 1911. His formal schooling ended during his senior year in 1915; he withdrew from the university after the deaths of his father and brother. Tilden was the only surviving member of his family. Although his father's fortune had suffered reverses, Tilden did inherit a fair sum. Around the time of his twenty-fifth birthday, he legally changed his name, dropping the "Jr." to become William Tatem Tilden II.
After his father and brother died, tennis became Tilden's life, and he worked at competing with determination, studiously and efficiently. Although only six feet, one-and-a-half inches, he seemed taller given his slim appearance, and early in his career he earned the nickname "Big Bill."
Bill later graduated from Peirce College.
Career
Despite his early tennis trophy, there was little about Tilden's game as a youngster to suggest that he would be the greatest player of the century. He played on the Academy team as well as on the University of Pennsylvania team, but was a star on neither. He also continued to play tennis, winning the United States mixed doubles in 1913 and 1914. After his father and then his brother died in quick succession in 1915, Tilden's life utterly changed. He left the university, took a reporting job for the Philadelphia Evening Ledger, and determined to devote his life to his one enduring passion: tennis.
Tilden was ranked for the first time in 1915, in the top 70. By the summer of 1916, he had begun playing major tournaments, accepted at Forest Hills for the United States singles, but losing in straight sets in his first round. He began to concentrate on the game of tennis not only on the court, but off, as well, examining the game from the standpoint of geometry and physics, figuring out angles and lines of direction. He also became a student of the psychological aspects of the game, determining that it must be part of his strategy to get into the head of his opponent and disrupt that person's own game plan. Such studies were in part due to an unpaid position he took as a tennis coach to his former alma mater, the Germantown Academy. Tilden's ranking in the amateur standings steadily rose, elevated to the top twenty by the end of 1916.
With the advent of United States involvement in the First World War in 1917, Tilden joined the Army Medical Corps, but was stationed in Pittsburgh, where his commanding officer, a tennis enthusiast, decreed that the young man should continue to play as many tournaments as possible. His time in the military actually saw a boost in his game as a result of this time spent playing. In 1918, out of the Army, Tilden won his first major singles title, the United States Clay Court, and his first major doubles at the National Doubles, but lost in the finals at Forest Hills. The following year, Tilden again lost in the finals of the United States singles at Forest Hills, this time to Bill Johnston, who became his Davis Cup teammate and rival for much of the next decade. He decided that something radical had to be done with his game or else he would remain forever a talented player who could just not break through to number one.
In 1919, Tilden, at the age of 26, decided to overhaul his game, in particular his backhand. He knew that he needed more than a defensive slice and he spent the greater part of the fall and winter of 1919 and 1920 developing a backhand drive, a flat, powerful shot that could equal his forehand. In the era before California and Florida tennis camps, he needed to find an available playing surface for the winter months, and thus took a job for an insurance company in Providence, Rhode Island, where part of his duties was tutoring the son of the local manager, thus gaining the use of that man's indoor court. He worked daily on his stroke production until he felt confident with his new backhand. By the late spring of 1920, he was ready. Chosen for the Davis Cup team as a replacement player, he sailed for England, where first he would play the tournament at Wimbledon. To the surprise of everyone there, Tilden won Wimbledon and even won over the British crowds with his showmanship on the court. He was the first American to win this title in several decades and his victory in England thrust him into the first rank of Davis Cup players. He and Johnston were chosen to play both singles and doubles, beating the English and the French teams later that summer without losing a match.
Back in America, Tilden faced Johnston again in the finals at Forest Hills, a match that is generally considered to be one of the greatest in the history of that tournament. After splitting the first two sets 6-1 each, Tilden took the third at 7-5 and then Johnston stormed back to take the fourth 7-5. Tilden pulled out all the stops with his new backhand, mixing it up with both defensive slices and driving flat shots from both sides. He also confused Johnston with his serve, hitting not only his trademark cannonball, but also high kicking serves and sliders, serving up 20 aces overall. With the match even, the drama was heightened even more by the crash of an airplane just outside the grounds. The players continued the game, and Tilden won the final set 6-3, securing for him the number one position in the world, a ranking he would maintain for the next six years. He and Johnston were then chosen to lead the Davis Cup team to New Zealand where they were victorious, bringing the Cup back to America for the next seven years. The Tilden era in tennis had begun.
Tilden continued his dominance in world tennis in 1921, successfully defending his Wimbledon and United States singles titles. At Wimbledon that year he beat a South African newcomer, Brian "Babe" Norton, in what many viewers have termed the strangest match in Wimbledon history. Exhausted from previous play and suffering from boils, Tilden had to get out of his sickbed for the Norton match. During the course of play, Tilden employed his drop shot, a stroke he had not invented but had perfected and was the first to use in major competitions. The British crowd started booing him, finding the shot unsportsmanlike. Tilden's opponent, Norton, infatuated with the great Tilden, became as angry with the crowd as Tilden did. Down two sets, it looked as though Tilden would not regain his title. But suddenly he came back, or as some observers mention, Norton began to throw points his way. Later that summer, in the United States singles championship, Tilden won the United States singles title on his home turf, at the Germantown Cricket Club where he had played as a youngster, as a new stadium was being built at Forest Hills. Tilden attracted record crowds of 12,000 people to see him demolish his opponents. In 1922, Tilden again faced Johnston in the finals of the United States singles. As each had won the title twice by this time, this match determined who would be able to keep the trophy permanently. Played again at Germantown in front of overflow crowds, the match became a trademark Tilden affair. Down two sets, Tilden came roaring back to with the match in the final three sets. He then took the trophy to his Auntie Hey's house on nearby Hansbury Street where he placed it in a prominent position in the living room. Shortly thereafter, Tilden was playing an exhibition match in New Jersey when he scratched the middle finger of his right hand on some chicken wire that was part of the backstop. Gangrene set in and he almost lost the entire finger. Finally amputated above the second joint, the finger was a setback for Tilden, but he adjusted his grip and in time was able to compensate for it, playing better than ever.
Tilden maintained his number one position throughout the first half of the 1920s, winning the United States singles titles six years in a row and leading his Davis Cup teams in an unprecedented run against worldwide challengers. It was not only his stroke production that made Tilden such a strong competitor, but also his psychological read on the game. As early as 1920, while sitting in his London hotel room in preparation for that year's Wimbledon, he began putting his thoughts on technique down on paper in the book The Art of Lawn Tennis. Another classic title from Tilden is Match Play and the Spin of the Ball in which he not only describes his amazing ball spin technique, but also informs readers of the importance of impressing one's personality on the opponent. Tilden was always the first to throw his racquet down before the match to decide who would begin serving, and always the first to call out to see if the opponent was ready to begin play. With such tactics, he subtly put himself in charge of play even before it had begun. A gentleman on the court, Tilden was also a master of gamesmanship.
As Tilden's fame grew, his other aspirations came to the fore. Always a frustrated actor, he began to spend his family fortune on Broadway plays featuring him in the lead, one time even playing Dracula. Such shows were generally failures and a drain on his resources and time. He lived high, spending money easily, and continued to write books and articles. Such activities got him in trouble with the United States Lawn Tennis Association in 1924. His threatened resignation from the Davis Cup team in protest forced the USLTA to reconsider its new rules banning players from writing about the sport. More arguments ensued between Tilden and the USLTA in 1928 when he was suspended from play for his writing. The intercession of powerful political friends in the United States and in France allowed him to play Davis Cup that year, but he was barred from the Forest Hills championships.
Tilden continued his string of victories until the fateful year of 1926 when, in a match with the Frenchman Rene Lacoste, part of the famed French Musketeers, he injured the cartilage in his knee and lost his first Davis Cup match. Later that summer, he was defeated in the quarterfinals at Forest Hills by Henri Cochet, another member of the French Musketeers who had been gunning for him for years. The following year, he was determined to become number one again, but lost a heartbreaking match at the French Championships at St. Cloud to Lacoste 11-9 in the fifth set, and again lost to Cochet in a world-famous semifinal at Wimbledon after being up two sets and 5-1 in the third. The power balance had shifted to the French, and though Tilden continued to play world-class tennis, he would not win another major until his 1929 victory at Forest Hills and his final 1930 win at Wimbledon. He was 37 when he took the Wimbledon title for the third time, the second oldest man to win that title.
Tilden retired from amateur tennis in 1930 and immediately went on the new professional circuit, touring around the country with other tennis stars such as Karel Kozeluh, Vinnie Richards, Ellsworth Vines, and Fred Perry. In 1939, he finally moved from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, where he made friends with movie folk including Charlie Chaplin and Joseph Cotton, both of whom allowed Tilden to use their courts to teach. By this time, he was already experiencing money problems and was forced to give lessons and continue the relentless tour schedule just to make ends meet. During World War II, he played exhibition matches to raise money for the war effort, and following the war, he was instrumental in forming the Professional Tennis Players Association.
After playing the pro tournament circuit in 1946, the 53-year-old Tilden served a jail term. Thereafter, he barely scraped by, living on what he could make on his occasional lessons or on a professional tour. On June 5, 1953, preparing to leave for a tournament in Cleveland, Ohio, Bill Tilden died in his small Hollywood apartment.
Views
Tilden was a fervent 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.
Quotations:
"Never change a winning game; always change a losing one."
"In these days of modern tennis a player is as strong as his weakest stroke."
"To play mixed doubles: hit the girl whenever possible."
"Tennis is more than just a sport. It's an art, like ballet. Or like a performance in the theater. When I step on the court I feel like Anna Pavlova. Or like Adelina Patti. Or even like Sarah Bernhardt. I see the footlights in front of me. I hear the whisperings of the audience. I feel an icy shudder. Win or die! Now or never! It's the crisis of my life."
"Every girl ran a personal best. Usually, they don't make improvements until the cooler weather kicks in."
Membership
Bill Tilden was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon.
Personality
Tilden's personal life was complicated by his homosexuality. At the height of his career, tennis officials who knew of it made a determined, and generally successful, effort to keep the facts from the public, but as Tilden grew older and began to fade from the limelight he became less discreet.
Besides his great physical abilities, Bill 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.
Physical Characteristics:
Tilden was 6 ft 1 1⁄2 in (1.87 m) tall. He also had one of the best tennis physiques - tall and broad-shouldered, with long, thin legs - and was remarkably nimble and quick.
Tilden almost never drank, but he smoked heavily and disdained what today would be considered a healthy lifestyle. His diet consisted of three enormous meals a day of steak and potatoes, with, perhaps, the occasional lamb chop.
Tilden died from heart complications at the age of 60.
