TILDEN, William Tatem, Jr. ("Bill")

(b. 10 February 1893 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; d. 5 June 1953 in Hollywood, California), champion tennis player and author who dominated the game during the 1920s, but whose career ended in disgrace.

Tilden 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. Herbert was his father's favorite; 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 (she died three years later), 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 age 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. It was said that "nobody worked as hard at anything as Tilden did at tennis." 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." Tilden's appearance splendidly complemented his energy, enthusiasm, and intelligence. As his many writings about tennis attest, he gave a great deal of thought to dealing with competitors. For Tilden, as he wrote in The Art of Lawn Tennis, "The primary object … is to break up the other man's game." Tilden was a formidable opponent.

In 1913 Tilden began coaching tennis without pay at the Germantown Academy. Not a completely natural player, he worked hard at improving himself and overcoming flaws in his playing. Unranked in 1914, he advanced to the group ranked between sixty-one and seventy in 1915, and to those ranked between eleven and twenty in 1916, the first year he competed unsuccessfully in the U.S. singles championship tournament. He was eliminated in the first round. Tilden enlisted in the U.S. Army in mid-1917, and while a private, played with some success in various tournaments.

In 1918 and 1919 Tilden did reach the final round of the U.S. singles championship, but lost in 1919 to William ("Little Bill") Johnston, who was among his most serious competitors in the 1920s. The defeat to Johnston led Tilden to modify his game, and he perfected a hard topspin backhand to accompany his awesome "cannonball" serve. Tilden mastered every kind of stroke and spin, using his canny ability to great effect. He became a super champion, and for much of the 1920s dominated the game as no one has ever since. Between 1916 and 1930, except for 1928 when he was suspended, Tilden played 80 matches in U.S. championship tournaments: he won 73, lost 7; he won 203 sets, lost 59; with 1,591 games won and 975 lost.

In 1920 Tilden was the first player from the United States to win the Wimbledon men's singles championship, winning again in 1921 and 1930. Between 1920 and 1925 he won the U.S. men's championship each year and led the U.S. Davis Cup team to victory, despite losing the middle finger of his racket hand to gangrene as the result of inefficient medical treatment. Other national titles won by Tilden during these years include: indoor (1920); doubles-U.S. (1921 to 1923), twice with Vinnie Richards and once with "Babe" Norton; and mixed doubles-U.S. (1922 and 1923), with Molla Bjurstedt Mallory. His biographer Frank Deford argues convincingly that "no man ever bestrode his sport as Tilden did for those years." But Tilden was more than just a great tennis player; like Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey he was one of the American sports idols of the 1920s whose glory transcended their profession and captured the popular imagination.

After 1925, although still a master of the game, Tilden was no longer invincible. In 1926 he lost to Rene La Coste in the Davis Cup and to Henri Cochet in the U.S. final. In 1928 the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association, which governed the sport and with which Tilden was constantly at odds, barred him from Davis Cup play for flaunting a rule prohibiting amateurs from writing about tennis for pay. There was a huge outcry, especially from the French, who had just built a new stadium for the competition. Government officials, including the U.S. ambassador to France, intervened, and Tilden was allowed to play. Until 1929 he retained the top U.S. ranking. In 1930 he was beaten in the U.S. championship singles semifinal and turned professional.

Tilden was often testy on the courts with other players and officials and displayed a distinct apathy towards the tennis establishment. He was not much loved by his peers, but he was very popular and attracted large audiences. Tilden toured with expert players he recruited from the ranks of the amateurs such as Cochet, Ellsworth Vines, and Fred Perry. He continued to be a most vigorous and difficult opponent for men who were years younger; in his early forties Tilden beat former world champion Vines, aged twenty-two.

Tilden enjoyed writing, often listing "newspaperman" as his vocation, and had actually worked briefly as a reporter with a Philadelphia newspaper after leaving college. Unlike many celebrities whose only contribution to their byline was a name, Tilden actually wrote what was published in his name. Over the years Tilden authored plays, a novel, instructional books, magazine and newspaper articles, and short stories. His handling of tennis subjects was first-rate. Match Play and the Spin of the Ball (1925), and How to Play Better Tennis (1950), are classics. The Art of Lawn Tennis (1921), was reprinted a number of times. Other such books include Singles and Doubles (1923), and The Common Sense of Lawn Tennis (1924). Tilden's memoirs, My Story (1948), are mediocre.

Most of Tilden's fiction, such as the 1930 novel, Glory's Net, was indifferent pap, as was his boy's fiction collected in books such as It's All in the Game (1922). His plays, understandably, were brutally criticized. Tilden wasted much of his inheritance and earnings in backing stage productions of his plays and those of others, in which he acted with great lack of success. His appearances on stage and in the movies usually elicited much criticism.

A loner, in part because of his increasingly indiscreet homosexuality, Tilden, although maintaining a residence in Philadelphia until 1939, spent much of the year on tour both as an amateur and professional, hanging out at tennis clubs across the country. His status enabled him to stay on the cuff at leading hotels. He enjoyed playing bridge (he was an expert), and loved classical music, once declaring, "if I had to give up tennis or music, I would give up tennis."

Tilden moved to Los Angeles in 1939 and found work as a tennis instructor and support from personalities such as Charlie Chaplin and the actor Joseph Cotten. During World War II he organized and played in many exhibition tournaments for the benefit of the war effort. After the war he took the lead in organizing the Professional Tennis Players Association, and went on tour in 1946, playing well, and the assumption was that he would do well in the post-war boom.

However, in November 1946 Tilden was arrested for "contributing to the delinquency of a minor," after police found him engaged in sexual activity with a fourteen-year-old. Sentenced on 16 January 1947 to one year in prison, Tilden was released 30 August 1947 on probation with the stipulation that he "never associate with juveniles, as coach or friend." Seemingly unable to control his penchant for younger boys, he later told a judge, "I can't help myself," and was again arrested on 28 January 1949. The charge was reduced to violation of probation, and Tilden was again sentenced to one year in prison on 10 February 1949. He was released early for Christmas on 18 December 1949.

A virtual pariah as the result of his convictions, living in reduced circumstances because of his profligacy and inability to earn a living, Tilden was dependent on the charity of a few close friends. When he failed to turn up for a dinner his hosts went to check on him and found Tilden dead from a heart attack in his small, sparse Hollywood apartment. Few attended memorial services for him in Los Angeles and Philadelphia. His ashes were buried in the family plot in Philadelphia.

Since his death Tilden has been named in various polls of tennis writers as the best tennis player of the twentieth century. Certainly he was among the most charismatic, exciting, dramatic, and intelligent. Tilden has correctly been called "the finest all-around player in history." Whatever his flaws, he had an extraordinary impact on the sport.

There is material on Tilden at the University of Pennsylvania and at the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island. In addition to his autobiography, My Story: A Champion's Memoirs (1948), Tilden wrote about his life in Aces, Places, and Faults (1938). An interesting biography is Frank Deford, Big Bill Tilden: The Triumphs and the Tragedy (1976). There are lengthy biographical profiles of Tilden in the Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 5 (1977), and American National Biography Online at http://www.anb.org. Alison Danzig and Peter Schwed, eds., The Fireside Book of Tennis (1972), contains substantial excerpts from Tilden's writings. Arthur Voss, Tilden and Tennis in the Twenties (1985), splendidly places Tilden in context of the expansion of the sport in the 1920s, when it became a much more commercial operation. An obituary is in the New York Times (6 June 1953).

Daniel J. Leabm