Bill Tilden wearing the mohair sweater that thrilled the Wimbledon crowd on his first appearance
The lonely American
THE PARADOX OF TENNIS WAS that while it was never the most popular sport, its stars were the most famous of all. Babe Ruth, the baseball star, might be a household name in the United States; Max Schmeling’s boxing exploits might dominate the German news; but Suzanne Lenglen and Bill Tilden were international.
The American champion, William T. Tilden II, Big Bill Tilden, equalled Lenglen in every way. Like her, he condensed in his person – and even more dramatically – in all the conflicts resulting from the emergence of tennis as an inherently contradictory sport and spectacle.1
Once he had won Wimbledon in 1920 Bill Tilden rapidly became the most famous sportsman in the world. He took the game forward and indeed was, it has been said, the inventor of the modern game to which he devoted his life. Dan Maskell believed the American’s strength was his enormous versatility: his ‘great variety of stroke, his deadly use of spin, his keen sense of strategy and tactics’. He was not a natural volleyer, but he had so many other weapons – the heavily sliced drives, the vicious kicking top-spin serves or ‘a raking forehand drive into an opponent’s backhand corner’ – that he could choose his moment to hit a volley with precision and win the point.2
He was also, like Lenglen, whom he heartily disliked, the star who sold the spectacle to the fans.
Born into the Philadelphia upper crust of Anglo-Saxon ‘old money’, he was reared almost entirely by his mother, who passed on to him her love of music and the life of culture. After the early death of her first two boys and a girl, she gave birth to two more sons, but she had longed for another daughter. She became especially fearful for William’s health and he was educated at home until the age of fifteen.
Tilden’s appreciation of all things artistic was fostered by the family’s summer holidays in the Onteora Club, a fashionable resort in the Catskills. There Tilden mixed with the writers, actors and musicians who spent their vacations at the club, where they also played tennis. Tilden learned the game there and won his first tournament, the Onteora under-15 boys’ championship, in 1901 at the age of eight.
After his mother died, when William was fifteen, he was sent to live with an aunt and older cousin, although his father was a wealthy man with a large house and a number of servants. They had never been close. Then in his final year at Pennsylvania University first his father and then his older brother died suddenly. His brother was only twenty-nine and Tilden had been deeply attached to him.
He abandoned his degree to become a journalist on a local paper, and now began to work seriously on his tennis. In spite of his precocious win at Onteora, he was a late developer as a player, unremarked at university and unable initially to get into national tournaments. He escaped active service during the First World War because he had flat feet and while serving in the medical corps had plenty of time to improve his game, winning his first national title, the Clay Court Championships in 1918. The following year he reached the final of what was then the National Championships (today the US Open) after defeating Richard Norris Williams in the semi-final.
He was already controversial and unpopular and the young sports correspondent, A. L. Laney watched Tilden with ‘antagonism mixed with fascination’. By contrast his semi-final opponent Richard Norris Williams was the epitome of the gentleman player. He was distantly descended from Benjamin Franklin, his family came from the Eastern seaboard upper crust and he had survived the Titanic disaster in which his father had been drowned. Tilden’s win upset tennis fans, on account of the Philadelphian’s apparent arrogance and ‘distasteful mannerisms’.3
In the final Tilden lost to the popular Bill Johnston, known as ‘Little Bill’. Convinced that the loss was due to his poor backhand, he took a job with an insurance firm in Providence. His real ‘work’, however, was to coach the son of one of the executives, who possessed an indoor court. There Tilden spent the whole winter reconstructing his backhand and in 1920 he won Wimbledon for the first time at the age of twenty-seven.
The Americans adored ‘Little Bill’ (as we saw A. L. Laney was one of them) and never took Tilden to their hearts. But he was a popular sensation in London with his blue mohair teddy bear sweater, gangly figure and blistering tennis. For American audiences his Wimbledon win did not count, because ‘Little Bill’ hadn’t played that year. Tilden’s supremacy was only established when he beat Johnston at the National at Forest Hills. He was now firmly established as the top American tennis player – indeed the top in the world, set to become the winner of six straight US championships, more than any other player, and the only man ever to win his last Wimbledon ten years after his first, at the age of thirty-seven – and was propelled into sporting celebrity.
Tilden dominated world tennis from 1920 to 1926. He was largely responsible for keeping the Davis Cup in the States for seven years, until it was wrested away by the four Frenchmen who in their turn dominated the late twenties, the ‘Four Musketeers’. They were significantly younger, but even as Tilden passed his peak, it took four players to beat him.
Great sporting events of the past – ‘greatest’ matches, memorable defeats, astonishing reversals – resemble dance and theatrical performances in that no film or video can truly recapture them. Nureyev or Fonteyn on celluloid can never convey the magic of what was actually there, physically experienced in ‘the real’; the make-up is all too visible, the sets seem dated, the costumes stiff. The same is true of recorded sporting events; and even more so, since once the match is over, the outcome is no longer uncertain. Old films of pre-Second World War tennis stars in play capture but pale ghosts across grey turf.
The intensities surrounding the personalities of the players can seem equally dimmed in retrospect. The preference of American audiences for ‘Little Bill’ was due to his seemingly better sportsmanship. Yet Tilden himself was almost obsessively sportsmanlike, and would ostentatiously throw points if he felt that a line call had been incorrect. He was also a performer and a showman and it was this that alienated the American public. Typical was the way in which he would serve out a match by somehow holding five balls in one huge hand, then tossing four of them up, one after another, for four cannonball aces, finally throwing the fifth away in disdain.
Coco Gentien was convinced that Tilden enjoyed his lofty yet isolated status: ‘Even more than the moral solitude of which his private life was the reflection, he loved opposition and he was never so happy as when he saw the eyes of the crowd trained upon him like revolvers.’ Gentien perceived Tilden’s pleasure in domination and aggression: ‘You’d have said Mephistopheles had chosen a tennis court on which to reincarnate himself. He never played in the same way. There was something excessive in his manner when he came to the net to shake hands with a defeated adversary, his arm outstretched from the back of the court and a diabolical smile stretching his lips as if to say “you played better than I thought you would”.’ 4 And René Lacoste observed that he seemed to exercise a strange fascination over his opponents as well as his spectators. ‘Tilden, even when beaten, always leaves an impression on the public mind that he was superior to the victor.’ 5
Urbane, with a clipped upper-class accent, he was cultured, loved classical music and literature, was a great bridge player and loved the theatre. He was also belligerent and opinionated, his personality overwhelming so that, as one fellow player put it, it was like a bolt of electricity when he came into a room. There was a sense of his greatness; he was tennis royalty, you couldn’t argue with him and it was a relief when he left.
When in New York Tilden lived in a suite at the Algonquin Hotel, and stayed in the best hotel in whichever city he appeared. He mixed with the stars in Hollywood. He played on Cecil B. de Mille’s tennis court with Douglas Fairbanks Jr and Charlie Chaplin. In Europe he socialised with actresses and aristocrats.
Tilden’s supremacy began to slip in 1926, also the year Lenglen’s reign came to a shocking end. It was the year when the four young Frenchmen, who had been plotting since 1922, with Lenglen’s help, to find a collective way to beat the great American and win the Davis Cup, achieved their first important successes. They travelled to the United States, where Jean Borotra defeated Tilden in the indoor championships. Big Bill hadn’t lost any important match for seven years, but suffered a second defeat when Henri Cochet beat him in five sets at Forest Hills and a third when René Lacoste beat him in the final match of the Davis Cup. Although America retained the cup, Tilden’s defeat by Lacoste – who had also won the championship, defeating Cochet in the final – was another sign that Tilden’s days of total dominance were over.