Memory Lane: When 'Big Bill' Tilden drew tennis fans to the Everglades Club

When four of the world’s best tennis players in 1940 converged on Palm Beach for a friendly court battle at the private Everglades Club, hundreds of spectators, including members of the public, filled a flanking seating gallery built for the headline-making occasion.

The showy spectacle on a February afternoon featured international tennis champs Don Budge, Fred Perry and Vincent Richards, but the fourth and much-older player was the biggest star and a favorite in Palm Beach: William Tatem “Big Bill” Tilden II.

Tall, blond and lean with clothes-hanger shoulders and powerful and balletic on the court, the then-beloved Tilden had dominated tennis in the 1920s in the way Babe Ruth did baseball; Bobby Jones, golf; and Jack Dempsey, boxing.

He’d won seven consecutive U.S. national championships, helped return the Davis Cup to the United States, and took the singles championship at the celebrated center court in Wimbledon, England, in 1920, 1921 and 1930.

When he and the other three players hit the courts at the Everglades Club for singles and doubles exhibition matches — such matches helped spread the gospel of tennis and pro-circuit players earned extra money — the crowd cheered for Tilden.

Playing against the 25-year-old Budge in what was billed as their first singles match against one another, the 47-year-old Tilden lost 6-3, 6-3. “But see how they still turn out (for me)?” he reportedly was overheard saying on the sidelines. “Probably expecting to see me topple over."

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The 1940 tennis event wasn’t the first of its kind at the Everglades Club, which had hosted previous exhibition matches with various players. But it was one of the last appearances there of Tilden, who’d been coming to Palm Beach for years.

It also marked the end of a golden tennis era on the island, which had been home to tournament play during the 20th century’s early decades.

The tournaments took place at the now-gone lakefront Hotel Royal Poinciana, a sprawling six-story property built in 1894 by Palm Beach developer and railroad tycoon Henry Flagler. Its eight clay courts, flanked by a two-tiered spectators’ promenade, were part of the Palm Beach Tennis Club.

The club hosted the annual State of Florida Championship, sanctioned by the United States Lawn Tennis Association, and the annual Southern Professional Championship, sanctioned by the Southern Lawn Tennis Association.

While the Royal Poinciana’s day-to-day head pro was none other than George Agutter (one of England’s best lawn-tennis players who became founder of the United States Professional Tennis Association), its Palm Beach Tennis Club was led by society movers and shakers.

One of them: Anthony J. Drexel Biddle, Jr., who excelled at tennis and in 1927 founded the Bath & Tennis Club in Palm Beach before later serving for decades as an American diplomat.

Tennis buffs of all stripes relished playing at the Royal Poinciana, where “climatic conditions are admirably suited to the game” and courts are “always in the pink of condition,” a 1920s hotel brochure noted.

Count among them Tilden, whose patrician Philadelphia upbringing included tennis, although he didn’t get serious about it until age 19.

He played in tournaments at the Palm Beach Tennis Club in between playing in the U.S. Open, Wimbledon and other tournaments he dominated in the 1920s.

Between matches at the Florida Championship at the Palm Beach Tennis Club in 1925, for instance, he hit The Breakers’ beach, where he routinely “was greeted by many friends and admirers,” observers noted.

“People often fawned over him,” according to Tilden biographer Frank Deford, who noted in his book “Big Bill Tilden” how Tilden favored the best hotels and counted the Royal Poinciana among them. “Playing for himself, for his country, for posterity, he was invincible. Tilden simply was tennis in the public mind.”

After Tilden turned pro in 1931, he won pro tournaments while also barnstorming around the country in exhibition matches, including in Palm Beach.

Though not in his prime when the 1940 exhibition occurred at the Everglades Club — which had featured tennis since the club’s 1919 debut — Tilden’s fame fueled excitement as club members and the public snapped up tickets priced from $1.65 for general admission to $4.40 for box seats.

By then, his homosexuality wasn’t entirely a secret, but wasn’t talked about, which generally erased it from public consciousness as fans admired Tilden’s talents, which also included writing about tennis; playing bridge; and acting in theater plays he produced.

But a handful of years after the 1940 exhibition match, Tilden’s stardom imploded. In 1946, he served a jail term after being charged in Beverly Hills, California for “contributing to the delinquency of a minor” in connection with having sex with an underage teenage boy.

Three years later, he was charged with violating probation terms after he picked up a male teenage hitchhiker. At the age of 60 in 1953, Tilden died of heart complications in Hollywood, California, where he had rented an apartment.

“Tilden was the (Roger) Federer of the flapper era,” a 2009 article in The New York Times noted. “Tilden had an arsenal that included a rocket serve and every shot in the instruction books as well as a few more he invented on the run. … (But he) would remain largely forgotten, his tennis legacy overshadowed by his vices. He was attracted to young boys in his later years. Shunned by tennis, he died virtually penniless … "

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Memory Lane: 'Big Bill' Tilden's Palm Beach tennis matches drew crowds