Make a list of the great (male) tennis players you know. Sampras. Federer. Nadal. Agassi. Borg. McEnroe. Connors. Nastase. Tilden. Lendl. Becker. Edb… eh? Tilden? Who the hell is Tilden?
Bill Tilden, actually. And to answer your question, he’s one of the greatest players to pick up a racquet, notching up six successive US Opens in the 1920s and becoming the first American to win Wimbledon. But he’s also one of the most interesting and, if you will, tragic players ever to pick up a racquet – plagued by personal problems, he had a predilection for dalliances with teenaged boys and died without a penny to his name.
Oh yeah, and he was also a novelist, playwright, musicologist, actor and a contract bridge champion.
So you can see why producer Howard Baldwin wants to make a film about Tilden’s life, then.
The film in question is based on a biography of Tilden, entitled Big Bill: The Triumphs And The Tragedy, written by Frank Deford.
Deford is adapting his own novel into the screenplay, which jettisons the subtitle and will simply be called Big Bill. He’s got form with sports movies – his novel, Everybody’s All-American, was made into a movie in the ‘80s, starring Dennis Quaid.
Tennis, of course, has rarely translated well to film – see the recent Wimbledon for proof – but Tilden’s life is certainly interesting enough to warrant the biopic treatment. And from the sound of things, the tennis may well be kept to a minimum…