When Conor Niland received £30,000 for winning the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award three weeks ago, it was double his biggest paycheck in his seven-year professional tennis career.
This neatly encompasses everything in Niland’s award-winning book “The Racket”: the realities of being a tennis player outside the elite. For players like Niland, who is ranked a career high of No. 129 in the world and has never advanced further than the first round of a major, the glamor of the Grand Slams gives way to the second tier (Challenger) and third tier (ITF). Tours, travel across the world on cheap flights and hair-raising drives through the Uzbek countryside without seatbelts.
Racquets covers an aspect of tennis that is often overshadowed by bigger events and more famous names, which is one of the reasons it has captured the imagination of not only sports fans but the wider sporting public. “It’s very accessible to people who don’t follow tennis, but it’s not diluted in any way for people who know and understand the sport,” Niland said in a Zoom interview in early December.
One of the things that makes the Irish Davis Cup captain’s book so fascinating is his discussion of the varied and intense mental challenges of tennis. Niland sees the book as a counterweight to “Open,” eight-time Grand Slam champion Andre Agassi’s brutally honest 2009 autobiography, which covered similar topics but focused on the top of tennis. It also ties in with Zendaya’s tennis movie ‘Challengers,’ which centers on top professional tennis players trying to regain glory on the challenger circuit.
“It’s clear you have a lot on your mind,” says Niland, explaining that musicians and actors hoping to ‘make it’ have contacted him after identifying with his story. “You are on your own. And you have tons of time to think. “Tennis demands so much from you.”
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Niland, 43, turned professional in 2005.
He qualified for two Grand Slams, but lost in the first round on both occasions. He blew a 4-1 final set lead against Frenchman Adrian Mannarino at Wimbledon in 2011. Had he won, he would have faced Roger Federer in the next round. He had to retire from that year’s US Open due to food poisoning while trailing Novak Djokovic 6-0, 5-1 at Arthur Ashe Stadium. Those two losses were the biggest prizes of his career until he won the William Hill Award last month, ahead of winning the 2010 Israel Open Challenger event.
Niland, a promising 12-year-old from a country with minimal tennis pedigree, beat Federer in a friendly match at the 1994 Winter Cup youth tournament. He trained with Serena Williams at the Nick Bollettieri Academy in Florida before competing in the US competition. He studied English literature and languages on the college tennis circuit at the University of California, Berkeley.
He retired at the age of 30 in 2012 due to a persistent hip injury, but did not begin writing a book for another eight years. Niland started jotting down some thoughts during the COVID-19 lockdown and found them flowing out of him. A few weeks later he received a book offer from publisher Penguin. Irish sportswriter Gavin Cooney was the project’s ghostwriter, but much of the writing was Niland’s own.
He believes tennis is a misunderstood sport. Tennis is a profession that allows about 100 men and women every year to make a decent living, while thousands more play for little compensation. “It’s not good enough that there aren’t 300 or 400 men and women in the world who can make a very decent income,” Niland says, pointing to golf as an example of a sport with a better compensation structure. Ultimately, only 128 men and women can enter the draw for a Grand Slam event, making it more difficult to win larger prizes.
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This creates the brutal hierarchy that is at the heart of The Racket. Niland paints a vivid picture of the rich and poor in tennis, documenting training sessions with idol Pete Sampras among other portraits of various figures in the sport. While Niland’s peers crave support and success, people like Agassi and Sampras occupy another world. He recalled Agassi being surrounded by so many passers-by at a tournament that he accepted a glass of water he didn’t really want. Just to give them something to do.
What Niland also captures is that even great players like Sampras and Agassi don’t breathe that rarefied air to begin with. He uses current world number 10 Grigor Dimitrov as an example of how the tennis hierarchy works. He recalled getting along well with Dimitrov as a teenager, when the Bulgarian would open his eyes wide and proudly declare “(Maria) Sharapova likes me,” and explained that they grew increasingly distant as Dimitrov moved up the food chain. “When he got into the top 20, he was completely ignoring me,” he wrote.
But there is no greater intimacy between players of the same level. This is especially true on the Challenger and ITF tours, where people fight not only for ranking points but also for a living. “Locker rooms on small tours are full of strangers with bad tattoos,” Niland wrote. “Everyone is polite enough not to call each other trash, but selfishness is rewarded. “Everyone is competing with each other and looking for other people’s weaknesses.”
Conor Niland’s only main draw match at Wimbledon ended in heartbreak, losing in five sets. (Clive Mason/Getty Images)
This is a power structure that people who have never been near tennis can relate to, both within companies and in social circles. In tennis, as in all areas of life, “you’re constantly self-analyzing,” Niland says.
The tensions inherent in this hierarchy have heightened over the past few months due to high-profile doping cases involving men’s world number one Jannik Sinner and women’s world number two Iga Swiatek. Tennis players and fans mostly acknowledge that tennis is a stratified sport. Top players not only receive higher salaries on and off the court, but also receive preferential treatment in terms of court allocation and appearance fees.
Lower-level players who advance to larger tournaments are not selected for show courts, which have roofs in case it rains. Since they are less likely to make deep runs, they have little idea when games are scheduled or how long they will be in the tournament. An early loss could mean panicking about changing flights, and a series of unexpected wins could mean scrambling to find a new hotel room. The Challenger and ITF or ‘Futures’ circuits are played in small venues with modest facilities and few spectators.
The Racket sees Niland tell the story of Federer summoning British player Dan Evans to his base in Dubai for several weeks of off-season training and insisting that all practice matches be held at 7pm local time. Federer knew he would be playing his first match of the next tournament three weeks before it started.
Players embrace this kind of privilege. Things get heated when people become aware of the double standards that are acceptable in other areas.
Several of Sinner’s colleagues accused him of testing positive twice for the banned drug clostebol last August, despite the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) saying it followed due process throughout the investigation and found “no negligence or negligence”. He later expressed his frustration when he was not banned. verdict. Sinner received temporary suspensions after each positive test, but he quickly and successfully appealed both cases. This meant that they could continue playing without the ban being made public until ITIA’s investigation was concluded.
‘One rule for them, another rule for us’ was the fundamental complaint. Last November, Swiatek was banned for a month due to a positive test for trimetazidine (TMZ), a tainted drug melatonin (sleeping pill). Swiatek also quickly and successfully appealed the temporary suspension ITIA issued in September.
The lower-ranked players took this opportunity to highlight that only elite players like Sinner and Swiatek can afford the prompt legal and medical advice and testing required to appeal an interim suspension. Players only have 10 days to do so and ITIA chief executive Karen Moorhouse acknowledged that players with more resources are better placed to deal with incidents like this.
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Niland feels the separation of Challenger and ITF Tours “downgrades” tennis out of the top 100 of the rankings and “makes us look like we’re not legitimate professionals,” calling the Swiatek case a “perfect example” of why tennis is perceived as such. Explain. It becomes a second level sport.
“The fact that they can show the world how they do it through their Instagram page… Tennis has a bad habit of thinking about the best players in the sport. is Sports and that they are bigger than sports. That’s how these things are managed, the feeling that there are haves and have-nots,” he says.
Niland never witnessed doping himself, but was approached by an anonymous source to confirm the match. He hung up.
Unable to afford an entourage and support team of top players, Niland describes the “oppressive” loneliness and isolation of being a lower-ranked tennis player.
“In my seven years on tour, I have formed virtually no lasting friendships, despite meeting hundreds of players my age who are living the same lives as me,” he wrote. Bonding players, like Australians Dane Sweeny and Calum Puttergill, who document their seasons on YouTube, spend time figuring out whether they can afford to lose a game or not.
Niland also recalls an unhealthy obsession with rankings, the numbers that measured a player’s self-esteem. He still gets “an adrenaline rush” when he sees the number 129 on a digital clock, for example, and remembers his constant nervousness about losing the points he had won the previous year.
“By September, you’re already thinking about the points you could lose in February,” he says.
“You’re constantly dealing with losing situations, you’re constantly trying to get better and comparing yourself to the best in the world,” he says, explaining that having results and self-esteem intertwined was the worst part of the job. .
And the best? “It was nice to be able to dream every day. My dream was to play in a Grand Slam. “Even though it was bittersweet, I really enjoyed the fact that I actually got to do it.”
Niland hopes The Racket covers the players in the top 100 with humanity, explaining that one of the biggest misconceptions about tennis is the perceived talent gap between the elite and those just below them. He says the gap is much smaller than people think, and that even the tiniest difference can determine the trajectory of a player’s career.
These days, Niland is Ireland’s Davis Cup captain, but his main job is working for a commercial real estate company.
He lives in Dublin with his wife and children (Emma, eight, and six-year-old Tom), all of whom play tennis, although he rarely plays any more. Full-time coaching doesn’t appeal, but he wants to continue writing, with work on this book helping him deal with his difficult first career. And the fact that in the context of tennis there is no necessarily a happy ending for me. I think this book has a happy ending.
“Tennis can offer you something. You might get some benefit from it, but it can’t necessarily save you.”
(Top photo: Getty Images, design: Dan Goldfarb)
