Bill Tilden Print, Vintage Tennis Poster, USA Retro Wall Art, Sports Gift, Black and White Sports Print

BILL TILDEN — a LostTeams editorial print telling the existing story of Bill Tilden, 1920-1930.

Bill Tilden is the most awkward great champion in the history of sport, and the honest way to write about him is to say both halves plainly.

The first half. Between 1920 and 1926 he did not lose a match that mattered. Seven United States championships, three Wimbledons, and seven consecutive Davis Cup victories for a team he effectively led. He was the first American to win Wimbledon. In 1920 he had lost the previous year's US final on his weak backhand, spent an entire winter in a Rhode Island court rebuilding the stroke from nothing, and came back and won everything for six years.

He wrote about it too. Match Play and the Spin of the Ball, published in 1925, is a genuine technical text: spin, tactics, the geometry of the court. Coaches still quote it. When people say tennis owes him its grammar, that is what they mean.

He was also a showman who treated a match as theatre, sometimes giving away sets to make the finish better, which infuriated opponents and delighted crowds.

The second half. In 1946 Tilden was arrested and convicted of a sexual offence involving a fourteen year old boy, and served roughly seven months. In 1949 he was convicted again, on a similar charge involving a sixteen year old, and served around ten months.

These were crimes against children. They are not a matter of interpretation and they were not a moral panic about his sexuality, which is how the story is sometimes softened.

What followed was total exclusion. Clubs revoked his membership. The United States Lawn Tennis Association removed him from its publications. Men who had played beside him for twenty years stopped speaking to him.

He died of a heart attack in a rented room in Hollywood in June 1953, aged sixty, with a packed suitcase by the door for a tournament in Cleveland.

The record is the record and the convictions are the convictions. Both belong in the same account.

Hang it. One day someone will ask you what it is, and you will know where to begin.