page_title: Bill Tilden
section_title: Place in sports history
hierarchical_section_title: Bill Tilden / Place in sports history
caption_attribution_description: English: American tennis player Bill Tilden at the 1921 World Hard Court Championships in St. Cloud, Paris.Français&#160;: [Portrait de William] Tilden [St Cloud, championnat du monde de tennis, juin 1921]
context_page_description: William Tatem Tilden II, nicknamed "Big Bill," was an American male tennis player. Tilden was the World No. 1 player for six years from 1920 through 1925. He won 14 Major singles titles, including ten Grand Slam events, one World Hard Court Championships and three professional majors. He was the first American to win Wimbledon, in 1920. He also won a record seven U.S. Championships titles.
  Tilden dominated the world of international tennis in the first half of the 1920s, and during his 20-year amateur period of 1911–30, won 138 of 192 tournaments. He owns a number of all-time tennis achievements, including the career match-winning record and the career winning percentage at the U.S. National Championships. At the 1929 U.S. National Championships Tilden became the first player to reach 10 finals at a single Grand Slam event. His ten finals at a grand slam tournament remained a record until 2017, when Roger Federer reached his eleventh Wimbledon final. Tilden, who was frequently at odds with the rigid United States Lawn Tennis Association about his amateur status and income derived from newspaper articles, won his last Major title in 1930 at Wimbledon aged 37.
context_section_description: Tilden is often considered one of the greatest tennis players of all time.
  Allison Danzig, the main tennis writer for The New York Times from 1923 through 1968, and the editor of The Fireside Book of Tennis, called Tilden the greatest tennis player he had ever seen. "He could run like a deer," Danzig once told CBS Sports. An extended Danzig encomium to Tilden's tennis appears in the July 11, 1946 issue of The Times, in which he reports on a 1920s-evoking performance in the first two sets of a five-set loss by the 53-year-old Tilden to Wayne Sabin, at the 1946 Professional Championship at Forest Hills.
  In his 1979 autobiography, Jack Kramer, the long-time tennis promoter and great player himself, included Tilden in his list of the six greatest players of all time. Kramer began playing tennis with Tilden at age 15 at the Los Angeles Tennis Club (LATC).
  Tilden was one of the most famous athletes in the world for many years. During his lifetime he was a flamboyant character who was never out of the public eye, acting in both movies and plays, as well as playing tennis. He also had two arrests for sexual misconduct with teenage boys in the late 1940s; these led to incarcerations in the Los Angeles area. After his convictions he was shunned in public. Philadelphia's Germantown Cricket Club, his home court, revoked his membership and took down his portrait. Tilden's criminal record has cast a long shadow: in March 2016, a proposal to honor him with a historical marker at the club was voted down by the state of Pennsylvania panel charged with evaluating nominations. In 1950, in spite of his legal record and public disgrace, an Associated Press poll named Tilden the greatest tennis player of the half-century by a wider margin than that given to any athlete in any other sport (310 out of 391 votes).  He was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1959.
  In the United States' sports-mad decade of the Roaring Twenties, Tilden was one of the six dominant figures of the "Golden Age of Sport", along with Babe Ruth, Howie Morenz, Red Grange, Bobby Jones, and Jack Dempsey.
caption: Bill Tilden at the 1921 World Hard Court Championships in Paris.
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