Hero With A Tragic Flaw

There must be one moment, an instant, when genius is first realized. Almost never can that moment be perceived, and it passes unnoticed, but with Big Bill Tilden it is marked, forever frozen in time.

It occurred during the Wimbledon finals in 1920, when Tilden, who had never won a major championship, was opposing the defender, Gerald Patterson of Australia, the No. 1 player in the world. Patterson had a strong serve and forehand but was weak with a corkscrew backhand, and it seemed curious when Tilden began by playing to Patterson's forehand. The champion ran off the first four games and the set 6-2. But then, as the players changed sides for the first time in the second set, Tilden spotted his friend, the actress Peggy Wood, sitting in the first row. He looked straight at her and, with a reassuring nod, the kind delivered with lips screwed up in smug confidence, he signaled to her that all was well, that it had all come together at last, that finally, at the age of 27, he would be the next champion of the world.

Miss Wood had no notion that she was being used as a witness, but more than 50 years later she still cannot forget Tilden's expression, nor what followed. "Immediately," she says, as if magic were involved, "Bill began to play." He had solved Patterson's forehand, and the champion had nothing but weakness to fall back on. "A subtle change came over Patterson's game," the London Times correspondent wrote in evident confusion. "Things that looked easy went out." Tilden swept the next three sets, losing only nine games, and toward the end, the Times noted, he "made rather an exhibition of his opponent."

Big Bill did not lose another match of any significance anywhere in the world until a bad knee cost him a victory more than six years later. During this time he won every singles match he played at Forest Hills and Wimbledon and in the Davis Cup. For his whole career, he won seven U.S. titles—six in a row—and three at Wimbledon and led his country to seven straight Davis Cup titles (his Challenge Round singles record was 16-4). He liked to disparage himself as a doubles player, but, in fact, he won five U.S. titles with three different partners (one a 15-year-old boy).

No man ever bestrode his sport as Tilden did during those years. It was not just that he could not be beaten, it was as if he had invented the game of tennis. Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Bobby Jones, Red Grange and the other fabled athletes of the times stood at the top of more popular sports, but Tilden simply was tennis in the public mind: Tilden and Tennis, it was said, in that order. He ruled the game as much by force of his curious, overbearing personality as by his proficiency. But he was not merely eccentric, he was the greatest irony in sport: to a game that suffered a "sissy" reputation he gave a swashbuckling, virile, athletic image, although he was, in fact, a homosexual, the only great athlete we know to have been one.

He was the proudest of men and the saddest, pitifully alone and shy, but never so happy as when he carried his rackets into the limelight or walked into a room and took it over. He often lost first sets and appeared to trap himself in defeat so that he could prolong his afternoon, the center of all attention, prancing and stalking upon his chalked stage, staring at officials, fuming at the crowd, toying with his opponent, playing the game and reveling in it.

An utterly scrupulous sportsman, obsessed with honor, he would throw points with grandeur if he felt a linesman had cheated the other player—and would become enraged if he was not paid in kind when he thought the point was owed him. "Peach!" he would cry in delight, saluting an opponent who made a good shot. And if inspired, or mad enough at his rival or the crowd, he would serve out the match by picking up five balls in one hand, pounding out four aces and then throwing the fifth ball away in disdain. "He is an artist," Franklin P. Adams wrote. "He is more of an artist than nine-tenths of the artists I know."

More than any other champion of any time, Tilden made himself great. Only a few years before he reached the pinnacle, he was unable to make his college team at Penn.

Highborn, wealthy, well-read, an accomplished bridge player, a connoisseur of fine music, he considered himself a writer and actor as well, but these vanities merely cost him great amounts of money and held him up to mockery. For all his intelligence, tennis was the only venture at which Bill Tilden could ever succeed until the day he died at age 60 in his walk-up room near Hollywood and Vine, a penniless excon, scorned or forgotten, and alone, as always. He died, it seems, of a broken heart.

To the end, through the good times and bad, he searched for one thing above all: a son. He could not have one, and so he would find one, make one, as he made himself a great player in tribute to the dead mother he worshiped. But the boys he found, whom he loved and taught, would grow up and put away childish things, which is what a game is, what tennis is and, ultimately, what Bill Tilden was.