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Starting at age 12, Erik won a total of 12 national junior titles. He beat Charlie Pasarel, Guillermo Vilas, Stan Smith, Arthur Ashe, Illie Nastase, and Jimmy Connors. He beat John McEnroe on grass in 5 sets at Wimbledon. With Stan Smith, he won a critical Davis Cup doubles match in 1972 versus Romania in a hostile environment in Bucharest, part of what been called the greatest Davis Cup tie of all time. He was also the only American junior player ever to win national titles in the 12s, 14s, 16s, and 18s in both singles and doubles. Is Erik Van Dillen, the greatest unremembered player in U.S. tennis history? Erik was born in 1951. His parents were Dutch. His mother grew up in Indonesia where his father was a resistance fighter against the Japanese in World War II. He was on the court for the first time in the spring of 1952. His mother would bundle him up and bring him over to the Peninsula Tennis Club in Burlingame, California, where she’d park him by the side of the court while she played. Nobody minded. She’d done the same with his older brother Paul. Erik was six when he…