In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!
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Bill Johnston [USA]Born: 2 November 1894
Died: 1 May 1946
Career: 1910-27
Plays: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1919)
Peak Elo rank: 1 (1919)
Major singles titles: 3
Total singles titles: 41
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Bill Tilden played well over 1,000 singles matches as an amateur, and only four opponents managed beat him at least three times. The first two are René Lacoste and Henri Cochet, half of the French Davis Cup squad that ended the reign of the United States in 1927 and held on to the trophy for six years. The third was Vinnie Richards, a Tilden protege nearly a decade his junior, who came into his own in the mid-1920s. Richards won 8 of 22 meetings with his one-time mentor.
The fourth is Bill Johnston. Five feet, eight inches tall, he was compact even for his time, and he spent much of his career literally in the shadow of Tilden, who stood five inches taller. Unlike the patrician Easterners who ruled the sport, Johnston came from working-class stock, and he learned his tennis on the public courts of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. He had plenty of time after the 1906 earthquake left schools closed for months.
The contrast–physical and otherwise–between Johnston and Tilden made nicknames irresistible, especially when the two men joined forces on the US Davis Cup squad. Tilden was dubbed Big Bill, and Johnston became Little Bill.
Johnston was 21 months younger than Tilden, but Big Bill was a late bloomer. Johnston didn’t take so long to become a star. He won five titles on the West Coast when he was 17, and he took over the US National title in 1915, a couple of months before his 21st birthday. Tilden took longer to sort out his game. Little Bill won three of their first five meetings before Big Bill turned the tables, and he probably would’ve built up a bigger lead had their paths crossed before 1919.
Johnston’s story is more than just his head-to-head with Tilden, but Little Bill spent most of his career playing second fiddle to the man who defined tennis for generations to come. A closer look at their encounters reminds us that Tilden’s teammate was a legitimate rival, and Big Bill’s eventual dominance was by no means assured.
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1919 East-West Sectional: Tilden d. Johnston, 6-4 0-6 6-4 6-0
1919 US Clay Courts Final: Johnston d. Tilden, 6-0 6-1 4-6 6-2
The first meetings of the two Bills occurred, fittingly, in the Midwest. Tilden, a Philadelphian, was the quintessential Easterner, as were most of the American champions who came before him. Johnston, hailing from San Francisco, represented the new wave from California that would gradually take over US tennis. Neither player had the advantage of home turf, playing sectional matches in Cincinnati and the national clay court event in Chicago.
In July of 1919, Tilden had yet to win a national championship, though he had reached the final the previous year, where he lost to Robert Lindley Murray. Johnston won the US National Championships at Forest Hills in 1915, beating fellow Westerner Maurice McLoughlin. He was runner-up in 1916. He missed the next two seasons while serving in the Navy, and he was still rusty for his first encounter with Tilden.
Little Bill showed what the Cincinnati Enquirer called “elegant form” in the opening two sets of the sectional match, handing Tilden a rare 6-0 defeat in the second, but it was his first tough match in two years, and he couldn’t sustain such a high level. Tilden won in four.
Just one week later, the two met again in the 1919 Clay Courts final. That’s all the time Johnston needed to shake off the rust and regain his top form. Tilden was the defending champion, but he was barely a factor until the third set. Johnston allowed only seven points in the opener, cruised through the second, and built a 4-2 advantage in the third. Tilden came back and forced a fourth set, and according to the Chicago Tribune, the pair delivered a “corker” of a final chapter. Tilden tried a more aggressive attack, but Johnston’s unplayable passing shots delivered him the match.
Tilden learned his lesson. In his 1925 book, Match Play and the Spin of the Ball, he wrote:
Johnston and I play each other from the baseline because we each fear the other’s ground stroke too much to come to the net indiscriminately, but in every point we are sparring for an opening that will allow us to take the offensive and carry it to the net position.
Not many players in 1919 could pin Tilden to the baseline, but Johnston–particularly on the forehand side–was one of them.
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1919 Newport Casino Final: Tilden d. Johnston, 7-5 8-6 6-1
1919 US National Championships Final: Johnston d. Tilden, 6-4 6-4 6-3
The two players met again only a few weeks later, now on grass. While Tilden was not yet the king of the tennis world that he would become, fans at the Newport Casino got a glimpse of what awaited them. A close match was expected, and both men played well.
Johnston fought hard for two sets, winning 38 points to Tilden’s 36 in a losing effort in the opening frame. The second was nearly as close. Johnston won 48 points to Tilden’s 51, and he served for it at 6-5. He conceded a break only when a Tilden shot bounced off the net cord and ricocheted into his face. Little Bill had little left in the tank for a third set, and Tilden steadily broke down his backhand.
Some tennis observers were already thinking of Tilden as, in the words of the New York Times, “the greatest tennis player of the age, if not of all time.” The evidence–including the victory in Newport–was certainly piling up. But Tilden hadn’t even won a national title yet, and before he could so, he would need to overcome the Californian at Forest Hills.
Playing for the 1919 national title, Johnston demonstrated the topspin forehand that was still too much for the would-be greatest player to handle. Little Bill won the match in straight sets, and thanks to that one-of-a-kind weapon, the result was never in doubt. The Times dug deep in its bucket of superlatives:
The forehand drive of William M. Johnston is unquestionably the greatest single tennis shot in the world, bar none. He seems able to use it with every possible degree of speed, with an accuracy that baffles the fastest court covering, and with a steadiness which has discouraged every opponent he has ever faced. No stroke has ever been developed by any other player to equal its efficiency and general dependability.
Even Johnston’s backhand was in top form in the 1919 title match. It was much softer than his forehand, and unlike most of his contemporaries, he added a bit of sidespin to the slice. Typically only a defensive stroke, it was good enough to attack Tilden’s own fragile backhand with the national championship on the line.
After squandering several chances and dropping the first set, “the Philadelphian played as one who could not quite understand what was going on about him,” as the Times put it. Johnston finished the job before his rival could sort things out, but Tilden took away plenty of lessons from the experience:
Up to and including 1919, my backhand had been a shining mark at which anyone could plug away with impunity. Billy Johnston had smeared it to a pulp in the final round of The Championship in 1919. … [H]ad I not done the work necessary to the mastery of that stroke, Johnston would have continued to defeat me just as decisively after 1919 as he did that year.
Johnston’s overpowering forehand and his natural gift for spin weren’t going anywhere. To become the best player in the world, Tilden needed to get better.
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1920 Queen’s Club Final: Johnston d. Tilden, 4-6 6-2 6-4
The Americans failed to reclaim the Davis Cup in 1919, so they headed to Europe in the summer of 1920 to claw their way back to the Challenge Round. The previous year’s Davis Cup winners advanced directly to the final, while challengers needed to win several rounds to earn a crack at the defending champions. Upon arrival in Britain, Johnston and Tilden quickly served notice on their international rivals. Warming up for Wimbledon and the Davis cup matches, they blitzed the field at Queen’s Club in London, setting up a meeting in the final.
Johnston emerged triumphant in a match that the correspondent for the New York Times called “one of the finest tennis matches ever seen in Great Britain.” Little Bill’s forehand once again proved the difference-maker. As if the singles final weren’t enough, the pair came back on court to take the doubles title in only 30 minutes.
The record-setting crowd at Queen’s Club already knew that Johnston and Tilden were due to meet early at Wimbledon. In 1920, draws were not yet seeded, so there was no guarantee that the two strongest Americans–possibly the two best players in the world–wouldn’t meet in the first round. It was almost that bad. The two men were lined up for a third-round clash.
For Johnston, it turned out even worse. His second-round opponent was the Irish veteran James Cecil Parke, an 1908 Olympic medalist in doubles, not to mention an international rugby player. A few weeks short of his 39th birthday, Parke turned in a careful performance, waiting out the uneven Californian, winning 7-5, 2-6, 6-2, 8-6. The Times correspondent was driven to the extremes of his vocabulary: Parke “was almost invariably safe with his drives, of which the American foozled far too many.”
Tilden had no such problem with the Irishman, beating Parke in the third round, 6-3, 6-2, 6-4. Big Bill went on to win five more matches for the title, the first of his ten majors. Johnston got his personal revenge a month later, defeating Parke in five sets in the Davis Cup semi-final. Presumably, Little Bill foozled a lot less often in the rematch.
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1920 US National Championships Final: Tilden d. Johnston, 6-1 1-6 7-5 5-7 6-3
1920 East-West Sectional: Tilden d. Johnston, 6-2 7-5 5-7 6-4
Johnston didn’t have the chance to deliver a third-round victory and stop Tilden’s title run at Wimbledon, but judging from the battle of the Bills at Forest Hills in September of that year, it would’ve been considerably more dramatic than Tilden’s routine defeat of Parke.
If the breathless New York Times match report is to be believed, the match for the 1920 national title took the sport to unforeseen new heights:
The Tilden-Johnston struggle will go down on the records as the most astounding exhibition of tennis, the most nerve-racking battle that the courts have ever seen. It is not often that such a climax of competition lives up to every preliminary expectation. Yesterday, however, the wildest expectations were actually surpassed….
Tilden and Johnston played five acts of incredible melodrama, with a thrill in every scene, with horrible errors leading suddenly to glorious achievements, with skill and courage and good and evil fortune inextricably mingled, and with a constant stimulus to cheers, groans and actual hysteria, so far as the spectators were concerned.
The tribute goes on, if you can believe it. Spectators favoring either player “went through more varieties of emotional reaction than the supposedly dignified and gentle game of lawn tennis could ever have been blamed for in the past.” Describing the match “would require the superlative of all the adjectives that the journalism of the game has either used up or discarded in the past.” (Clearly!) Big Bill’s win was “a triumph of supertennis,” and Johnston was “the gamest man that ever trod on a court.”
As if the action on court weren’t enough, a fatal plane crash during the match was visible from the grandstand. Without film of the contest, and from a vantage point more than a century in the future, it’s tough to know whether it truly was one of the greatest matches of all time. But it was unquestionably among the most memorable.
The key factor separating the two men at this stage in their careers was the serve. Johnston relied more on spin than speed, and failed to record a single ace in five sets. Tilden dealt out 20, and many more of his cannonball serves virtually guaranteed him points, even when the returns came back. Tilden’s new backhand also came in handy, functioning as an offensive weapon both cross-court and down the line.
Johnston was superior in almost every other category. He won three times as many points than Tilden with volleys, and his smash was more effective. He commanded the better lob, and his famous forehand rarely let him down. In the judgment of the Times, “[T]he tennis that he offered yesterday would have annihilated anyone but a Tilden, and a super-Tilden, at that.”
With the Wimbledon and United States titles in his pocket, Tilden was finally the acknowledged champion of the world. Yet Johnston remained only a step or two behind him. The Bills met again in Philadelphia in the East-West competition five days later, and the Californian once again pushed Tilden to the limit. Even the four-set score of 6-2, 7-5, 5-7, 6-4 understated how close it was, as Johnston won more points than his rival in the second set.
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1921 US National Championships 4R: Tilden d Johnston, 4-6 7-5 6-4 6-3
Tennis administrators in the United States failed to learn their lesson from the 1920 Wimbledon draw, when the two American stars nearly met in the third round. The US National Championships remained unseeded, and the titanic finalists of the 1920 tournament were stuck in the same quarter of the 1921 draw.
12,000 fans packed into the grandstand at Germantown, the tournament’s temporary home while a new facility was constructed at Forest Hills. Whether in New York or Philadelphia, fans recognized that a Tilden-Johnston match was the de facto final. Johnston was recovering from tonsillitis and a bout of food poisoning the previous week, but that didn’t stop him from taking the first set. He matched Tilden’s power off the ground and wasn’t fazed by his rival’s big serving.
Tilden won a close second set to even the match, and seized the third when two bad bounces went his way. Johnston’s physical weakness became apparent in the fourth, and his opponent never let up. It was another four-set victory for Big Bill, his fifth win overall in eight career meetings with his chief rival. Yet the world’s greatest tennis player still couldn’t quite distance himself from the pesky Californian.
Two pieces of news kept tennis chatter alive throughout the offseason. After Johnston’s loss in Germantown, his wife told the press that it was his last trip East. He was retiring from Davis Cup and top-level tournaments to devote more time to his business interests. The other news was that the United States Lawn Tennis Association voted to seed its tournaments, protecting the highest-ranked players from each other until the final rounds.
The first story proved to be wrong, an eventuality that made the second tidbit even more important. The Tilden-Johnston rivalry had many more years to run, and they would never again meet without a title on the line.
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1922 East-West Sectional: Johnston d. Tilden, 2-6 6-4 7-5 5-7 6-3
1922 Pacific Coast Championship Final: Johnston d. Tilden, 7-5 7-9 6-1 6-0
Retirement talk forgotten, the rivalry moved for the first time in 1922 to the asphalt courts of California, where Johnston had developed his game. Tilden quickly adjusted to the surface, but not well enough to stay ahead of Little Bill. The morning after the duo’s first encounter out West, the San Francisco Examiner ran with the headline, “Good Little Man Beats Good Big Man.”
In June’s East-West competition, the two men nearly played to a draw. Tilden won 124 points to Johnston’s 123 over five sets. After the particularly hard-fought third set and a rain delay before the fourth, Tilden struggled to regain his focus. The movement of the crowd distracted him, and he was unaccustomed to slippery hard courts.
Still, the world champion came back, forcing a decider. This time, it was Tilden whose body abandoned him. Unusually, he hit several double faults in the final set. Johnston kept making him work, often feinting one way before hitting in the other direction. The Examiner credited the local hero with “great generalship” and speculated about what would result if a man of Tilden’s physique had the skills and wits of a Johnston.
A week later, Johnston repeated the hard-court victory in Berkeley for the Pacific Coast Championship, the biggest title west of the Mississippi. The byline in the Examiner belonged to Tilden, who now supplemented his income as a journalist. In Big Bill’s telling:
Johnston played the best tennis that he has yet displayed, and after two bitterly contested sets, which we divided, outclassed and outmaneuvered me throughout the remainder of the match.
It was a particularly hot day, and Tilden misjudged his ability to recover. He visibly tanked the third set, saving his energy for the fourth. Yet after scoring 13 points in the third, he won only 5 in the fourth. In four years, the two men had played ten matches. The head-to-head stood even at five apiece.
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1922 US National Championships Final: Tilden d. Johnston, 4-6 3-6 6-2 6-3 6-4
1922 East-West Sectional: Johnston d. Tilden, 6-3 4-6 8-6 6-0
The two men delivered yet another epic for the Germantown fans in the match for the 1922 national title. By now, the crowd expected it. The grandstand was filled to capacity an hour before play began, and more spectators jammed the aisles, the roofs, and even the limited breathing space in the press box.
This time, Tilden had a plan. Big Bill realized that, away from the California heat, his physical reserves were superior to Johnston’s. He opted for a conservative game in the early going, accepting the loss of the first two sets in exchange for their dent in Little Bill’s stamina. Tilden made a push for the third, and he confidently expected Johnston to fade.
The Californian nearly won it anyway. He built up a 3-0 lead in the fourth, and gave everything he had left to finish the match quickly. He reached deuce in the fourth game, but Tilden held on, and as the defending champion became more aggressive, Johnston fell apart. By the end of the set, the Times wrote, he was “tottering from exhaustion.” A pair of bad line calls early in the fifth set made the uphill battle even steeper, but it was clear by that point that Tilden would win his third consecutive national title.
For a man who had nearly retired 12 months earlier, it would have been understandable to call it a season after yet another tough loss in a major final. Yet two weeks later, Johnston was back, besting Tilden in a backhand duel as part of the Eastern installment of the season’s East-West competition. Big Bill apparently lost interest and tanked the final set, but the first three frames were as close, and as well-played, as their higher-stakes confrontations.
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1923 Germantown Academy Exhibition: Tilden d. Johnston, 5-7 6-4 6-3
1923 US National Championships Final: Tilden d. Johnston, 6-4 6-1 6-4
1923 East-West Sectional: Tilden d. Johnston, 8-6 7-5
1924 US National Championships Final: Tilden d. Johnston, 6-1 9-7 6-2
1925 Illinois State Championships Final: Tilden d. Johnston, 6-4 6-3 9-7
1925 US National Championships Final: Tilden d. Johnston 4-6 11-9 6-3 4-6 6-3
Johnston got to the end of 1922 with an even record–six wins each–against his longtime rival. But the Germantown final that year was the turning point when Tilden finally figured out how to beat him. They played for the national title three more times, and Johnston was truly competitive only once.
That isn’t to say that Little Bill’s career faded after 1922. Quite the contrary: He made the trip across the Atlantic without Tilden in 1923, and he took the opportunity to make a strong case that he was the second-best player in the world. He won the title at the 1923 World Hard Court Championships* in Paris, beating René Lacoste in the semi-final. He was even better at Wimbledon, winning the championship with a loss of a single set.
* The tournament was played on clay courts. In Europe, “hard courts”–as opposed to “soft” grass courts–were what we now call clay. The French Championships were limited to French players until 1925, so the World Hard event was the most prominent clay court tournament on the tennis calendar.
Back home, though, he couldn’t keep pace with Tilden. The man who won the premier European titles lasted only 57 minutes against Big Bill in the US National Championships. He turned in some stunning performances against the rest of the field, such as a 6-3, 6-3, 6-3 win against Lacoste in the quarter-finals of the 1924 US Championships, followed by a 6-2, 6-0, 6-0 clobbering of Australian star Gerald Patterson. But that run, like so many others, ended at the hands of the Philadelphian.
Little Bill had one last big challenge left in him, and the two men delivered another gripping battle to decide the 1925 national title. Tilden had struggled throughout the season, and questions about his fitness followed him to Forest Hills. But Johnston had faced him at this tournament for seven years running, and he knew better than anyone the heights that Tilden could reach.
The second set ran to 11-9, the longest single frame the two men ever played. Johnston saved a set point at 5-4, and finally earned one of his own against Tilden’s serve at 9-8. Big Bill thrilled the crowd with an ace to save it, and he repelled two more break chances in an 18-point game. Too many of Johnston’s shots began to find the net, and the set–along with any realistic hopes of the match–went to the five-time champion.
By the mid-1920s, the New York Times argued that winning the US title “amounted practically to earning the world’s championship.” In a span of eleven years, from 1915 to 1925, Johnston and Tilden accounted for eight national titles and another eight runner-up finishes. Had Little Bill’s military service not gotten in the way, it’s likely he would’ve added one or two more to his tally in 1917 and 1918. Except for 1921, when he lost to Tilden in the fourth round, he made the final every time his name appeared in the draw.
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Johnston played on the US Davis Cup squad every season from 1920 onwards, winning 14 of 17 singles rubbers and all four of his doubles matches–each one with Tilden at his side. After 1925, the American duo had less reason to focus on each other. The greatest threat to Tilden–and to American dominance in Davis Cup–came from the outstanding generation of French stars now known as the Four Musketeers.
1926 was the first year since 1918 that the US National title was decided without either Bill. Both men lost in the quarter-finals, Johnston to Jean Borotra and Tilden to Henri Cochet. Vinnie Richards kept the American flag flying into the semi-finals with his final-eight defeat of Jacques Brugnon, but Borotra knocked him out in the next round. René Lacoste beat Cochet and Borotra to become the first player from outside the US and Britain to win at Forest Hills.
The outcome of the tournament was particularly bad news for fans who wanted the Davis Cup to remain in the States. Just one week earlier, Tilden and Johnston had held off the Musketeers with ease to hang on to the Davis Cup. Little Bill took care of Lacoste, 6-0, 6-4, 0-6, 6-0, and Tilden brushed aside Borotra, 6-2, 6-3, and 6-3. The doubles also went to the Americans, and after Johnston beat Borotra in straights, the French scored their only victory with Lacoste’s dead rubber four-set win over Tilden.
By the time of the 1927 Davis Cup Challenge Round a year later, the writing was on the wall. The Musketeers, about a decade younger than the American pair, were reaching their peaks. Tilden went to Europe, only to lose to Lacoste in the French Championships final and fall to Cochet at Wimbledon. Johnston played a limited schedule and arrived in Philadelphia without any recent matches against top-level competition.
Little Bill’s rustiness was evident from the get-go. He won only seven games in the opening rubber against Lacoste. Tilden overcame Cochet and the home side’s doubles duo won a five-setter, but the third day’s play finally sent the cup back to Europe. Lacoste–now the best player in the world–vanquished Tilden in four, and Johnston was outgunned by Cochet in another four-setter.
At Forest Hills the following week, Johnston lost in the semi-finals, once again to Lacoste. Finally, at age 32, Little Bill called it a career, and this time the decision stuck. He hadn’t reached the national title match in two years, and now that the Davis Cup resided abroad, fighting to win it back demanded a significant commitment, and there was little practical hope of reclaiming the trophy from the French.
Johnston died two decades later, in 1946. The obituary in his hometown paper referred to the 1920s as a golden age of tennis, and called his forehand “still unequaled.” Even then, he couldn’t quite get out from under his rival’s shadow. The story mentioned Bill Tilden’s name six times.