The Forgotten Era of Tennis:
Bill Tilden

Peter Underwood

Until the late 1960s professional tennis players were banned from competing in the world's major tournaments. Professional players were forced into a traveling circus playing each other in long and often tatty tours that took them all over the world.

My book, The Pros: The Forgotten Era of Tennis (Click Here), tells this story through the lives and careers of eight champions who dominated these tours.

In these exclusive excerpts for Tennisplayer, I tell the stories of the first and last of these champions, Bill Tilden and Rod Laver, starting in this first article about Tilden's amateur career.

A Stumbling Apprenticeship

Bill Tilden was far from a prodigy. Born into money in Philadelphia, he had started tennis at high school and continued playing a little at university--there, says biographer Frank Deford, he wasn't good enough for the "very ordinary" university team. Following a couple of desultory years - coincident with a series of family traumas to be explored in future articles--he began playing the local East Coast tennis circuit to fill in time.

Then came a crucial turning point. Overnight, tennis became his life. By now, aged 22, in what appeared an inexplicable about-face, he was entering `"every rinky-dink tournament that would have him." And began playing every day. To mark this metamorphosis, he changed his name. Christened William Tatem Tilden Junior, he became William Tatem Tilden 2nd.

During the five years from aged 22 to 27, the young patrician embarked on an extraordinary quest--to become a tennis champion. His first step was to make a bottom-up analysis of the whole game. Before long, Tilden was telling anyone who would listen how tennis should be played.

Although the distinctions are common now, Tilden was the first to class players into three broad groups according to their style. First was the net rusher, who aims for the net as soon as possible after serve or approach, attempting to finish off the point by a volley or smash. Second was the baseliner, who stays back and out maneuvers, or who passes or lobs opponents if they attack the net. Last was the all court player who, depending on circumstances, does both.

Tilden's analysis began by noting that, deplorably, the choice of style was usually governed by fashion, not effectiveness. He himself had seen fashions come and go. When Tilden began his analysis, both the net rushing and baseline style had had their day.

Tilden concluded that a game centered purely on net or baseline was for fools. He began championing a method that would possess the virtues of forecourt and backcourt games, the all court style.

But his true tennis player had to possess more than control of net and baseline. He also needed to master spin and pace, which meant allowing the shot or rally to be conducted at any speed from fast to slow.

In his 1928 classic, Match Play and the Spin of the Ball, (Click Here) Tilden explained that as night follows day, his multi-sided maestro, the Tennis Player, will always triumph over those hoi polloi who can only drive or only volley, or who only employ one pace or one spin.

In Tilden's eyes, such one dimensional souls seem to inhabit a lower moral universe. Unless they saw the light, Tilden's light, they would likely languish there forever.

In his own eyes, he had become Messiah. Yet for many years, his own ideal remained beyond him. Worse, he realized that his less than authoritative performances and know it all opinions made him an object of derision. Reason for him to also assume the mantle of martyr.

However, during the latter stages of his uncomfortable apprenticeship, Tilden took one crucial leap on his road to mastery. In 1919, on his fourth attempt at the US Singles, Tilden had reached the final for the second time.

But once again he was mauled. His nemesis was William Johnston. To the adoring public, Johnston was Little Bill to Tilden's Big Bill. Although of small stature, Johnston possessed a huge western grip topspin forehand.

And he knew where to put his firecracker-- straight into Big Bill's weaker backhand side. Little Bill would then follow this crunching drive into net—and, volleying surely, finish off the point. Though by then Tilden was equal to the smaller man in every other department of the game, this sequence sealed Tilden's fate.

After this defeat of 1919, Tilden decided that he had only one chance left. What he needed was a backhand that could fight fire with fire. If he added an attacking backhand drive to his growing arsenal of style, stroke, spin and pace, he might realize his ideal. And beat Little Bill.

In one of the most famous moves in sports history, Tilden stopped playing competitively for six months. He located an indoor court, found a couple of sparring partners and rebuilt his backhand from scratch. When he emerged his new stroke was fireproof.

Tilden's choice of action is astonishing to our own age. We bow in humility before his craft and are astounded to discover a player in the top ten taking himself out of the circuit for months in order to perfect a single stroke. How much more leisurely, how much less commercial, was the age of Tilden. (For Ed Atkinson's classic Tennisplayer article on Tilden,, Click Here.)

Breakthrough

In summer of 1920, his retreat behind him, Tilden had reason to believe that mastery was within his grasp. Nevertheless, it was not until the Wimbledon of that year that Tilden managed to validate his years of struggle.

Deford provides a luminous description of what happened on that day on the Centre Court. He prefigures this moment by telling us that he believes that "for any (great) artist there must be one moment, an instant, when genius is first realized, when a confluence of God's natural gifts at last swirl together with the full powers of endeavor and devotion."

The Wimbledon Final of 1920 was between Tilden and an Australian, Gerald Patterson. Patterson was confident. He was a star, out of a stable of stars.

The nephew of one of the world's greatest opera singers - the famous Dame Nellie Melba - he was defending Wimbledon champion and lynchpin of the Australian team that held the Davis Cup. Patterson was tough, at his peak, and fighting to keep his crown.

In the way stars are expected to shine, so shone Patterson: he breezed through the first set, 6-2. His opponent was a little-known, 27-year-old American. William Tatem Tilden 2nd, who had never gotten close to winning a major singles championship. Now he had scrambled into a final of a very big one, was a set down, and being "clobbered by the best player in the world."

Then it happened. Biographer Deford gives the picture as seen by Peggy Wood, a spectator in the gallery's front row. Changing ends after the second game of the second set, Tilden caught sight of Ms. Wood. She was an actor friend, present by courtesy of a ticket Big Bill himself had provided.

As Deford tells it, Tilden caught Ms. Wood's eye and threw her a special glance. To this he added "a reassuring nod, the kind delivered with lips screwed up in smug confidence." This "signaled to her that all was quite well and the match was in the bag." The recipient of the coded signal, Ms Wood, admitted to being astonished. Indeed, this perplexity--how could the challenger be so confident?--remained with her for the rest of her life.

Nor did she ever forget what followed. She told Deford: "Immediately, Bill began to play." The biographer explains that there was such wonder in her voice that she seemed to imply that "magic was involved."

Tilden proceeded to win the next three sets straight - and the championship. Can the "magic" ever be explained? Superficially following the first set, Tilden was better, Patterson worse.

But the reason was deeper: during the losing first set Tilden had worked out Patterson's game. He had then devised a response, and carried it out.

Tilden himself helps us to understand more of this process. At the time, the budding master was engaged on the first of his several books of tennis instruction.

In The Art of Tennis, Tilden states his credo pithily: "the primary object in match play is to break up the other man's game." As it happened, Tilden had so exposed Patterson's powerful but lopsided game that towards the end of the match the correspondent for The Guardian noted dryly: "the Philadelphian was making rather an exhibition of his opponent."

Yet the essence of his progression to maestro was more than the incremental acquisition of skill. Writer Henry Miller speaks of moments of integration such as Tilden's, and of "the grand tuning of the instrument" that precedes them. By the Wimbledon of 1920, the means came together to make great music.

From then on, the transformation was so deep that Tilden himself--and generations of observers came to see him--as a different person.

As for Little Bill? Johnston remained competitive with Tilden for the next seven or eight years, but was never able to beat Tilden in an important match again.

In 1922 Johnston defeated Tilden three times out of four occasions but Tilden beat Johnston in the final of the U.S. Championships in five sets. In 1923, despite Johnston winning both the World Hard Court Championships and Wimbledon, he again failed to beat Tilden at the US Championships, losing in three one-sided sets.

Johnston again threatened to get closer to beating Tilden on the big stage in following years, but memorably lost the 1925 US Championships final in five sets to Tilden.

A Further Triumph

There was a further triumph of Tilden's, not celebrated but highly significant. In 1922, at his top, he suffered an injury that nearly killed his career. In a minor game, Tilden crashed into the backstop, cutting the middle finger of his right racket hand. With his aversion to greens and vegetables, Tilden was susceptible to bacterial infections, and an apparently trivial injury turned septic.

In this pre-antibiotic era, surgery was required to save his hand and, perhaps, his life. His finger was amputated just above the first joint above the knuckle. It left what Deford calls a "rather grisly" stump.

Tilden's career appeared to be over. But before long he was back on the practice court. Then, to everyone's astonishment, with only a minor modification to his grip he was as good as ever.

Mentally Superior

During a playing career that lasted until the day he died, Tilden believed he was mentally superior to any opponent: he felt that he could always out think them. During his long peak--and even when age caught up--he also held an unchallengeable faith in his physical arsenal to exploit the weaknesses detected. When he lost—even in a single point--he tells us that he invariably found himself "surprised."

Here then, is a picture of the emerging master that Patterson would have seen opposite him in the 1920 Wimbledon Final.

Tilden's serve was magnificent, with three variations: the cannonball, slice and twist. His ground strokes were impeccable in attack or defense, and various with spin and speed. On either wing he could hit out hard for a winner, or abruptly change pace, returning the ball deep with a hanging slice.

Then there was one of his pets: softening up the net rusher with a ball sveltely rolled or chipped gently across their body and into their feet.

His net game was sure, his court-craft velvet, and his stamina such that, when not in a tournament, he would play five sets of singles in the morning and five in the afternoon. All court, all stroke, all speed: his game was complete. And he knew it.

The result? Deford puts it neatly: `Playing for himself, for his country, for posterity, he was invincible." (Click Here for rare footage of Tilden's strokes, exclusively on Tennisplayer.)

Colossus

From 1920, at the age of 27, until 1926, at 33, he won at will. In that period, he never lost a single match of any significance.

He won the US Nationals, the championship he considered the most important, every year for six years from 1920 to 1925, and then again in 1929. In the Davis Cup he led the US team to victory from 1920 to 1926. It was not until the later twenties, with Tilden well past thirty, that his star began to wane.

But in 1930, ten years after his first triumph over Patterson, the 37-year-old Tilden won Wimbledon for the third and last time. For Big Bill there was a blunt lesson in the Wimbledon victory: along with the burdens of age and injury, he had had enough of the amateurs and their hypocrisy.

For years he had feuded incessantly and often publicly with their Pooh-Bah administrators. Thus, despite loftily disparaging professional tennis throughout his entire amateur career, he abruptly announced his retirement from the amateur ranks and a change of status to professional.

When he had arrived at the technically perfect game, his dominance—and his celebrity status--mushroomed.

From the time Tilden walked onto the court--exploiting his undoubted charisma with a carefully rehearsed ritual--his focus was to dominate, to hold the cards, to be in all-knowing control. He tells us something of this aim of psychological domination in his Match Play and Spin of the Ball, where he states, "It may sound unsporting, but it is my belief that no man is defeated until his game is crushed."

Even to the present age, besotted with celebrity, it is hard to imagine how much the amateur tennis world was dominated by Tilden's chameleonic persona.

Dramatically, Tilden had declared his change of status on the very last day of 1930: apparently he was off to star in Hollywood. However, not very long after his sudden exit, there he was back again on his real stage--playing tennis as a pro.