Tilden: American Twist Serve...

[gzhpcu]

I found this link with Bill Tilden teaching the Twist serve. Look around 7'15"....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUA3Yb66YSQ

[John Yandell]

Whole thing is awesome. Wonder who the kids was?

[gzhpcu]

Here is the second link with grips and groundstrokes. Pretty good slow motion for that time...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMyQk...eature=related

[uspta990770809]

Awesome find, Phil

Phil,
this is really awesome. I wonder what the time frame is. It looks to me like it might be late 30's, maybe mid 40's. I think the courts might be where I teach, Griffith Park in Los Angeles. When I was learning to play there in the 60's the bank of 8 courts had that parquet look constructed of 4 foot squares of asphalt. Just about the toughest courts on shoes I ever played on, really slow. In the 30's there were dozens more courts than there are now instead of the Golden State Freeway, Interstate 5. The layout looks like it fits. Those umpire stands look like the same ones we had in the 60's and they were pretty old then, although they made it probably into the late 80's or 90's. The Spanish style building in the background looks like it could be the current pool building and from one view the tall tree in the background could be the tree that is still there. The outline of the hills beyond the building fit the profile of the Griffith Park hills. And the path next to the courts to the pool building looks about right. And those courts were a large tennis complex back before they put in the freeway. It's the kind of place they might have gone to shoot these films at that time.

As far as the boy goes, if it was mid to late 40's, how about a young Troy Donahue. The kid is ok but I don't think he was a serious tennis player, more likely an actor.

I'm trying to judge Tilden's age. He died at 60 in 1953 after being convicted of molesting teenage boys in the late 40's. This film would probably have been done before that. Although Tilden was reportedly still trying to play professional tennis until shortly before his death. It's amazing how awful the footwork looks. No comparison to the quality of the Bobby Jones golf instructional films done in the early 30's. Maybe it was a low budget production done after Tilden got out of prison.

That's tennis 70 or 80 years ago. It reminds me of the commercials Shaq did about 2000 as a 50 years older "Shaq grandaddy" trying to explain how the players used to play with just 10 foot high baskets, etc. Just think if one of today's players went back to the 30's or 40's.

Maybe someone remembers what the Griffith Park complex looked like in the 30's and 40's.???

don brosseau

[GeoffWilliams]

>>>>>>>

[bottle]

Thanks for the rich history, Don.

[uspta990770809]

Just hoping for some confirmation

Thanks for the rich history, Don.

I was really hoping someone might remember how those courts looked and if my guess was right
don

[bottle]

Homophobia

Thanks, Phil. I've now seen both films-- it's one thing to read Frank Deford's
biography, but to actually hear the timbre of Tilden's voice and mainline Philadelphia accent and see his mannerisms and discover his idea of a tennis teaching film is a great deepening of earlier impression. His stroke technique must always be of first interest to anyone who loves tennis, as well.

I've only played with one of Tilden's students, and it wasn't Troy Donahue, but it was Katharine Hepburn, and she had by far the smoothest, most effective strokes of the four of us on the court (her brother and my brother on one side, she and I on the other and we won).

Geoffrey Williams-- don't be too filled with disgust at Tilden's time behind the walls. At least Tilden was just a tennis pro and not a Catholic priest. And given his celebrity and the homophobia of the time, I would always retain just a little skepticism about the people who were out to get him, the charges and what he actually did.

But, if you want to maintain maximum disgust, you could join Don Budge in saying, "He looks at young boys the way the rest of us look at Esther Williams," and then get Michael J. Fox to help with construction of a time machine and go down to Hades and insist that management build a sub-Hades for Greeks who Greeked.

[llll]

its interesting in the beginner video when he is teaching the serve . it seems he is hitting the ball on its way up!!!

[uspta990770809]

On the way up

its interesting in the beginner video when he is teaching the serve . it seems he is hitting the ball on its way up!!!

Yeah, it looks like he is doing a Roscoe Tanner way before Roscoe. That's one reason I was wondering about the date. It takes a lot of flexibility to be able to get around with real pop of that early serve and he is not hitting it like the guy who could pick up 5 balls and serve out the game with just 4 swings.

Someone out there must have a better take on the age of the film. I couldn't find anything on "Official Films" or the title. I suppose I could Google the director, but I didn't get to that.

don

[GeoffWilliams]

>>>

[gzhpcu]

Yeah, it looks like he is doing a Roscoe Tanner way before Roscoe. That's one reason I was wondering about the date. It takes a lot of flexibility to be able to get around with real pop of that early serve and he is not hitting it like the guy who could pick up 5 balls and serve out the game with just 4 swings.

Someone out there must have a better take on the age of the film. I couldn't find anything on "Official Films" or the title. I suppose I could Google the director, but I didn't get to that.

don

Don, I think he was in his late 40's in the film, so that would put it around early 1940...

[chuck62]

Tilden and Pancho

Phil,

Thanks for posting this thread. I really enjoyed the clips. I'm a big fan of Tilden's and think that he got a bad rap on the pedophile charge. He was never accused of immoral behavior towards any of the boys he coached. The charges were a trumped up byproduct of the homophobia of that time. As per the DeFord book, “Big Bill Tilden”, on page 38, he befriended Pancho by threatening Perry Jones with the withdrawal of all the Tilden pupils from an L.A. Club tourney that Jones would not allow a young Pancho Gonzales to enter. Thus Pancho was allowed to play in one of the biggest junior tournaments in L.A. thanks to Tilden. Pancho probably rode up on his bike and casually started hitting aces with his five and dime racquet. As previously stated it was probably in the early to mid forties that this was filmed at Griffith Park where several of Tilden’s protégés including Jack Kramer had won junior tournaments, so he was familiar with that location and would have had plenty of good choices for the role of the boy. I think the kid was too good to have been just an actor. Per the book Tilden moved to L.A. in 39, continued to head up a tennis tour and did some coaching in L.A. between then and 1946 when the scandal broke. So a time frame of 1940- 45 makes sense. Before that he wasn’t in L.A. that much and after that he was an outcast to all but a few close friends. This puts Tilden, who died at 60 in 1953, at about the age of 50 at the time of the films. Love him or hate him, he’s the guy that put U.S. tennis on the map and dominated the sport for over 10 years.

[gzhpcu]

Chuck,
This is what is so great about YouTube: people are posting more and more old films of players of yesteryear.

They especially ring a chord, when you recognize some courts of L.A. in the 40's and 50's...

Hoping some more films of Pancho Gonzalez, Jack Kramer and Don Budge will start appearing...

[bottle]

Without re-checking the original: "In the last point of a long match, I was finishing off a young Turk with a short-angled forehand three feet beyond his reach when I noticed a young lad watching studiously from the right netpost. "Son," I said, "would you like to hit a few balls?" "Yes I would," he said.

Maybe it's just me but I find this scene hilarious. Of course I know from the Deford biography that Tilden really wanted a career in theater and film just as Hepburn wanted a career as a tennis pro. (She said before she died that she'd like to come back as a tennis pro.)

My second take-away of the day has to do with a principle of serving explained somewhere in Tilden's books, that arm wants to go around a relatively still body (in a rather vertical manner, perhaps). Dennis Ralston makes the same point in his wonderful article on slice serve in this website (http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/...ice_serve.html). To still the body at a certain moment or moments in the serve seems the generalized idea-- and often generality works better in tennis instruction than lots of detail.

One can see independent, horizontal travel of the arm in the serves of Pancho Gonzalez, Rafa Nadal or Stan Wawrinka. But easier to do than that, as Don Brosseau has pointed out to me and no doubt to a thousand others, is to use gravity for an assist, i.e., let the arm drop naturally before it comes up.

People have accused me of "embroidering" good information before, but I don't think that's what I'm doing. I wish to combine Don's information, same as that coming from Virginia Wade in her published instruction, with some coming from Mark Papas at the "Revolutionary Tennis" website.

We hear how Vic Braden tried to include this firebrand in learned conferences but Papas didn't want to be co-opted. The idea here is "arm going around body." Papas makes fun of almost all servers in the world from great to lousy for pointing their racket toward their opponent to start their motion, and I think he's right!

Exactly what does a lot of backward body rotation during one's toss accomplish? My idea is to stand very much sideways with both arms bent and racket pointing somewhat to right of the netpost. One could get hips or shoulders a bit offset in this still position-- I'm still exploring that. Regardless, the two hands can go down together as one starts compressing knees.

Racket can go down and up in very relaxed fashion, but go around body at the same time. One can be transferring weight forward during toss with hitting arm straight. Conscious, delayed bending of the arm to a right angle can be coincident with final loading on front foot.

I see this iteration as similar to Wawrinka even though his arm goes with more pure horizontality around. His is an especially interesting serve to me in that it is very slow when it is slow and very fast when it is fast (if that doesn't sound too trite).