Erik van Dillen:
A Tennis Life
Lee Tyler
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 first held a racquet. At 12 he won his first national championship. Two years later, his father died of cancer. He went on the win 11 more national junior titles.
He was an All-American at the University of Southern California. While still in college he was number 1 in the U.S. in doubles with Tom Gorman for two years.
In 1971 he reached the final of the US Men's Doubles with Stan Smith, facing John Newcombe and Roger Taylor. Because of darkness, the players agreed to play a tie-breaker at 6 all in the fifth set. In retrospect, that could have been a mistake since they lost the breaker.
But the more amazing part was that it even happened. Think players today would have the leverage to make that decision by gentlemen's agreement?
He also played in two historic Davis Cup ties against a Romanian team led by the legendarily ill-behaved duo of Ion Tirac and Illie Nastase. The Romanians won the first year in North Carolina. But the results were different the following year on red clay in Bucharest in 1972. Different and surreal.
The rematch was six weeks after the murder of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the Munich Olympics. The Romanian government was known to support the Palestinian cause, and there was concern for two American Jewish players on the team, Harold Solomon and Brian Gottfried.
The referee, Enrique Morea of Argentina, went on record saying it was the worst cheating he had ever witnessed, with Ion Tirac dictating calls to the linesmen. Morea slept with a bodyguard outside his hotel room. After the first day he told U.S. Davis Cup Captain Dennis Ralston "Please try not to hit any of the lines because it will make things easier."
The xenophobia of the Romanian fans created an atmosphere of threatened violence. When Nastasie lost the first singles match to Stan Smith, it was reported that fans left the venue hoping to find - and burn - Nastasie's car.
After Nastase's loss, Tirac came back from two sets down to beat Tom Gorman and square the tie at one-all. In addition to the rigged line calls, Tirac sat in a chair in the center of the court during changeovers and pretended not be ready when Gorman hit unreturnable serves. It got so bad Dennis Ralston threatened Tiriac with a racket, but later thought God had restrained him since his team would have been attacked by fans.
So with the tie riding on the doubles what happened? Smith and Erik dominated Tiriac and Nastase in straight sets, 6-2, 6-0, 6-3. It took 68 minutes. Tiriac held serve just once in the match. Nastase, still reeling from his singles loss, wandered around in the middle of points, seemingly uninterested in the outcome. Some say he was never the same.
So could Smith defeat Tiriac in the all-important fourth match the following day? Yes, 6-0 in the fifth. Following the meaningless final match (which Nastase won over Tom Gorman), the Americans and the umpire fled Bucharest. It may have been the greatest American win in Davis Cup history.
Forty-two years later, Tiriac, a renowned agent and international deal maker, was voted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. "Not for oncourt behavior however," Erik commented.
There were many other highlights, including a Wimbledon doubles final with Charlie Pasarell, also in 1972. From 1971 to 1982 Erik won 13 doubles titles with 8 different partners.
Erik retired as a professional player in 1982. He completed his finance studies at USC, followed by an MBA at San Francisco State, then went to IMG where he worked with Joe Montana, Arnold Palmer, Kristi Yamaguchi, Martina Navritalova and Chris Evert, among others. After the death of IMG's founder, Mark McCormack, Erik left IMG in 2003 to start Van Dillen Partners, where he handles sports, entertainment and educational events.
Unlike many high level players he continues to play and compete. In 2008, at the age of 57, he won the California State Seniors Tournament with his close friend from Atherton, California, Buz Walters, then 52. Says Buz, "We entered the nationals in Palm Springs where they put us out on court 25 for our first match and 40 or 50 guys came over to watch us."
At Wimbledon in 1971, Erik bought a trophy for $800 and named it the Paul van Dillen Trophy in memory of his father. Three years later it was put into service as an annual tournament at the Pennisula Tennis Club in Burlingame. Today, playing with his son Hague, a former college player, he's won his dad's trophy many times.
