past his prime, but he was capable of playing excellent tennis in patches. Tilden lost easily to Don Budge in the 1941 World Series. Budge said of Tilden "Bill could invariably manage to keep things close for a while. It was seldom, however, that he could extend me to the end, and I swamped him on the whole tour". In 1945, the 52-year-old Tilden and his long-time doubles partner Vinnie Richards won the professional doubles championship—they had won the United States amateur title 27 years earlier in 1918. After playing the pro tournament circuit in 1946, the 53-year-old Tilden served a jail term. He returned to pro tennis briefly in 1948, playing a short series of matches against Wayne Sabin. Tilden's final farewell came in 1951. He faced George Lyttleton Rogers in a tour in April and May. Tilden lost in the quarterfinals to Frank Kovacs at the Cleveland tournament in June 1951. Tilden was 58 years old. It had been 35 years earlier, in 1916, that he had made his singles debut at the US (Amateur) championships. Davis Cup coach Tilden coached Germany's tennis team in the 1937 Davis Cup. In the inter-zone finals, the U.S. team won after the deciding singles clash between Gottfried von Cramm and Don Budge, a match which has been called "The Greatest Tennis Match Ever Played". Place in sports history Tilden often is considered one of the greatest tennis players of all time. Allison Danzig, the main tennis writer for The New York Times from 1923 through 1968, and the editor of The Fireside Book of Tennis, called Tilden the greatest tennis player he had ever seen. "He could run like a deer," Danzig once told CBS Sports. An extended Danzig encomium to Tilden's tennis appears in the July 11, 1946 issue of The Times, in which he reports on a 1920s-evoking performance in the first two sets of a five-set loss by the 53-year-old Tilden to Wayne Sabin, at the 1946 Professional Championship at Forest Hills. In 1975, Don Budge ranked his top five players of all time and rated Tilden number four behind Vines, Kramer and Perry. In his 1979 autobiography, Jack Kramer, the long-time tennis promoter and great player, included Tilden in his list of the six greatest players of all time. Kramer began playing tennis with Tilden at age 15 at the Los Angeles Tennis Club (LATC). In 1983,