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Philadelphia-native Bill Tilden (1893-1953) was the first international tennis superstar, and is still considered among the greatest players ever. He transformed the nature of the sport, and blazed a trail which helped tennis become what it is today - a global phenomenon. He was the Federer of tennis before Federer. Recognized as an intellectual, author and teacher, he even acted occasionally in Broadway plays - a true Renaissance Man. His flamboyant life and record-setting career are meticulously chronicled in the masterful book American Colossus: Big Bill Tilden and the Creation of Modern Tennis, by Allen M. Hornblum (University of Nebraska Press, 2018).
"[T]ennis, like pool, requires geometric thinking, the ability to calculate not merely your own angles but the angles of response to your angles. Because the expansion of response-possibilities is quadratic, you are required to think n shots ahead, where n is a hyperbolic function limited by the sinh of the opponent's talent and the cosh of the number of shots in the rally so far." Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley (An essay), David Foster Wallace from On Tennis: Five Essays, (Little, Brown: New York 2014)
