Customer Reviews

Big Bill Tilden: The Triumphs and the Tragedy

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Thirty plus years ago I read two articles in Sports Illustrated by Frank Dedford that stunned me. The subject was the man voted the greatest athlete of the first half of the twentieth century, tennis player Bill Tilden, and I had never heard of him. When I saw the play Big Bill at Lincoln Center years ago, written by A.R. "Pete" Gurney, I already knew many of the details. Yet it was only recently that I decided to buy this book.

This book is an expanded version of those two Sports Illustrated articles, and is written with Dedford's care and wit. I can almost hear him reading it to me, like one of his commentaries on NPR. Mr. Dedford brings Big Bill back to life, describing his ego as well as his intellect and style. None of Tilden's tennis books are in print, but used copies are available here at Amazon. Mr. Dedford gives as a motivation for Tilden's pursuit of boys in later life as a search for the son he could never have.

There is no memorial to this athlete who out-polled Babe Ruth, and his small, flat, rectangular gravestone in the Ivy Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia, states, simply, "William T. Tilden 2nd, 1893-1953." There is no mention of tennis. Actually there is a memorial to Bill Tilden, THIS BOOK. And we can thank Frank Dedford for that.

This book from 1976 is still a great book. The person of Bill Tilden comes alive. Mr Deford did a very well job not to let take bias over and wrote an excellent, honest and well documented biography. One of the best I've ever read.

This is an excellent study of the tragic life of the greatest tennis player of the 20th century, a man rich and famous, associated with the University of Pennsylvania (as a student), and destroyed and shunned almost overnight, dying in disgrace. Sound familiar? The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Not Sampras. Not Fed. Not Rafa. Bill was the man.

Every tennis player should know about Big Bill Tilden.