Big Bill

In the heady 19205, when the world of sport boasted such immortals as Babe Ruth. Jack Dempsey, Earl Sande. Bobby Jones. Red Grange, Walter Hagen and Man o' War, the gentlemanly game of tennis came out of the private clubs into the national limelight. The man responsible for this revolution was a lanky, hunch-shouldered, hawk-faced competitor named William Tatem Tilden II. He was the greatest tennis player the world has ever seen, the one man in any U.S. sport who was without a peer. He did not always look as good as he really was. Determined never to be bored, Big Bill often deliberately made a match close, simply for the theatrical pleasure of a last-ditch stand.

In the 1921 Davis Cup matches, Japan's Ichiya Kumagae sat in the stands at Forest Hills and excitedly watched his countryman, Zenzo Shimizu, whip Tilden in the first two sets 7-5, 6-4. Shimizu got within two points of match in the third set. Then Tilden shifted out of second gear. Playing faultlessly, he got off smashes, drop shots, over-spins, undercuts, volleys and cannonball serves the like of which the Japanese had never seen. He pulled out the third set, 7-5, romped through the next two, 6-2, 6-1. The Japanese went home without the cup, beaten five matches to none.

Unmatched Record. Big Bill was the John Barrymore of the courts, and the crowds loved it, even when he hurled his racket skyward shrieking. "Ye gods! Is there no justice?" after a linesman made a close call against him. Hands on hips, defying all tennis convention, Big Bill would glower at the offending official and ask coldly: "Would you like to correct your error?"

When he was not haggling with the U.S.L.T.A. over his amateur expense account or browbeating officials, Big Bill was taking on all comers on the courts. A self-made athlete who did not reach the top until he was 27, some 20 years after he first picked up a racket as a youngster in Germantown, Pa., he piled up a record unmatched: 31 U.S. titles, including a singles sweep from 1920 to 1925, three Wimbledon titles (he was the first American to win in England), eleven Davis Cup teams, including a phenomenal stretch from 1920 to 1925 when he never lost a match. Only one player ever got under Tilden's weather-beaten skin: France's Rene Lacoste, one of the famed "Four Musketeers" who wrested the Davis Cup from the U.S. in 1927. Remarked haughty Bill Tilden: "The monotonous regularity with which that unsmiling, drab, almost dull man returned the best I could hit ... often filled [me] with a wild desire to throw my racket at him."

"Tennis Genius." Making a comeback, Tilden won the U.S. title in 1929, the Wimbledon in 1930, and then, at 38, turned pro. He beat the pros of his day: Vinnie Richards, Karel Kozeluh, Bruce Barnes. At 47, in 1940, Big Bill was still touring, and was still good enough to come from a hospital bed to trounce a 25-year-old redhead named Donald Budge, the 1938 U.S. amateur champion. Budge called Tilden "the only genius tennis has produced." Even in his late 505, grey and spare, he was still at it, still able, for one set, to summon up flashes of a great game.

But the flamboyant ham who once sent $400 worth of flowers to Pola Negri, who appeared in Broadway plays and a series of movies, was beginning to go stale. The prolific writer who turned out reams of vitriolic newspaper copy, five books and a play, was beginning to run dry. He served two terms in jail on morals charges brought by young men. Recently he was reduced to giving tennis lessons on the private courts of Charlie Chaplin and Joseph Gotten, and gratefully accepting the few dollars it brought him.

Big Bill once said: "The only thing I fear is being bored. When the capacity to enjoy life goes, it's time to die." Last week, at 60, alone in his little Hollywood apartment, Big Bill was getting ready to go to another tournament when it came time to die.

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