One Summer: America, 1927

couldn’t even make the tennis team at the University of Pennsylvania. But after his brother’s death from pneumonia in 1915, Tilden decided to become a great player, and devoted himself tirelessly, obsessively and without the help of a coach to improving his game. He hit balls against a wall over and over until he was flawless from every position on the court. When he emerged from his four years of intensive preparation, he was not just the best player in the world, but the best who had ever lived.
    Beginning at the advanced age of twenty-seven, he was world number one for seven straight years and was not beaten in a significant tournament in the whole of that time. America under his leadership won the Davis Cup seven times in a row. He won seven US clay court titles and five US doubles championships. In 1924 he didn’t lose a match, and in the summer of 1925, aged thirty-two, he reeled off fifty-seven consecutive winning games – a feat as rare as Babe Ruth hitting sixty homers or Joe DiMaggio hitting safely in fifty-six straight games.
    On the court his grace was balletic. He didn’t run so much as glide, and had an uncanny knack for being perfectly positioned for every return shot. It often looked as if the ball was following himaround the court rather than he the ball. When serving, his favourite trick was to hold five balls in his hand, firing off four aces in a row and tossing the fifth ball aside as obviously unnecessary. His manner was arrogant and insufferable. He was widely hated by other players, but his skills on the court broadened tennis’s appeal greatly.
    Tilden’s career almost ended before it began. In September 1920, he was playing for his first national singles title at Forest Hills before an audience of ten thousand when a plane carrying a pilot and photographer approached to take aerial pictures of the contest. As the plane neared the stadium, its engine sputtered and then cut out altogether. For several seconds, Tilden and his opponent, Bill Johnston, and all the people in the grandstands watched in eerie silence as the plane, itself silent, headed straight for them. The plane just cleared the court and crashed in an open area a short distance beyond. The pilot and photographer were killed instantly. Tilden and Johnston looked uncertainly at the referee, who nodded for them to resume. Tilden served and won the point en route to winning the set and match 6–1, 1–6, 7–5, 5–7, 6–3. It was the start of a streak in which he did not lose a significant match for five years.
    Tilden’s unbroken run of achievement was made all the more remarkable by the fact that in the midst of it, in 1922, he suffered an injury that should by any reckoning have ended his career altogether. While playing in a tournament of absolutely no consequence in Bridgeton, New Jersey, he lunged for a ball and caught the middle finger of his racquet hand on the perimeter fence. The injury itself was trifling, but it became infected and two weeks later the top joint of the finger had to be amputated. Today the problem would be resolved with a course of antibiotics. In 1922 he was lucky not to lose his arm, or even his life. (Calvin Coolidge’s son would die from a similar infection the following year.)
    Tennis in the 1920s was a much more innocent pastime. In a thrilling men’s singles final at Wimbledon in 1927 Henri Cochetbeat ‘the Bounding Basque’ Jean Borotra with a dubious shot in which Cochet appeared to hit the ball twice, which should have cost him the point. The umpire asked him if that was in fact so, and Cochet, with a look of childlike innocence, replied, ‘ Mais non .’ So the point, match and championship were awarded to Cochet on the grounds that tennis was a gentleman’s game and no gentleman would lie, even though it was pretty clear to all concerned that Cochet just had.
    To win a major tournament in the 1920s, a player had to win five or six matches in as many days, so it was a highly taxing sport. Yet it was also an amateur one. Competitors didn’t receive prize money and had to pay their own expenses, so tennis was a sport confined to the wealthy. Those who didn’t fall into that category – and Tilden, his father dead, didn’t quite – had to make money elsewhere. At the peak of his career, Tilden decided to become a Broadway impresario. He began to write, produce and award himself starring roles in plays that always lost a fortune. In 1926, he launched and starred in a