Great athletes are a joy to behold, carrying with them a sense of destiny that makes people want to participate, if only by watching. The first man to bring that spirit to American tennis was Bill Tilden.
From 1920 through 1925, he competed in eight Grand Slam tournaments and won them all.1 He also led the United States to seven Davis Cups, from 1920 to 1926.2 In 1924 he won 95 straight matches.3 He was the first man to win 10 Grand Slams.
Tilden was a late bloomer; at college, he failed to make the team. But he steadily built his game. By 1918, at age 25, he had reached the finals at Forest Hills, and he did so again in 1919. He spent that winter refining his backhand drive and studying the game with the analytic intensity of a Talmudic scholar, a scientist, or an artist.
Tilden would have appreciated the analogies. He saw tennis as many people see religion: something that gave meaning to his life. He brought his considerable intellect to bear on teasing out the intricacies of the game. His 1925 book, Match Play and the Spin of the Ball, was a great leap forward in terms of sophisticated analysis; future tennis greats Jack Kramer and John Newcombe swore by it.4 And he brought an artistry and showmanship to men’s tennis that had never been seen before.
In a sense, “Bill Tilden” is American for “Suzanne Lenglen” (see 1926 entry). Both had temperament, style, and charisma in buckets. Both made fortunes, and lost opportunities, by going pro. Both had arrogance leavened with charm. Both were adored for their play, but alone in life. Both could be imperious on the court; Tilden’s glare was legendary. Lenglen attracted royalty and decayed aristocrats; Tilden attracted Hollywood. Naturally, they detested each other.
Most important, both lifted their sport to new heights on the basis of otherworldly play and blazing personality. Lenglen drew so many fans to the cozy little grounds on Worple Street that the All-England Club created a new facility down the road in Wimbledon.5 Tilden did the same in New York, leading the West Side Tennis Club to build the Forest Hills complex, which would host the American championships until 1978.6 In spite of his WASPy Main Line Philadelphia roots, Tilden made people see tennis as a sport that demanded mental and physical excellence, not as a genteel pastime for rich dilettantes.
Tilden used this racket below at his last Wimbledon triumph in 1930, at age 37. He is still its oldest champion.7 The victory came almost exactly a decade after he won his first, and over those 10 years, Tilden stamped his game and his personality on the sport.
At the end of 1930, he turned professional. Well into his forties and fifties, he was capable of taking sets off the likes of Don Budge and Bobby Riggs in their prime.8 Tilden made a good deal of money after he turned professional; one estimate is $500,000 in the first six years.9 It disappeared in good living, greedy friends, legal woes, and bad stage plays. As his competitive career wound down, he turned to giving lessons, including to the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks.10
But when he died of a coronary in a small walk-up apartment in Hollywood in 1953 at age 60, poor financial management and scandal had left him just about destitute.11 What he left behind—besides the few trophies he had not yet pawned—was a reputation as the greatest player of his time. In 1950 an Associated Press poll of sportswriters named him the greatest tennis player of the first half century, and the vote wasn’t close. Don Budge, the next American to dominate the sport, put it simply. Big Bill Tilden, he said, was “the only genius tennis has produced.”12
