When Conor Niland picked up £30,000 for winning the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award three weeks ago, it was double his biggest payday throughout a seven-year professional tennis career.
This neatly encompasses what Niland’s award-winning book, “The Racket”, is all about — the reality of being a tennis player outside the elite. For players like Niland, who reached a career high of world No. 129 and never went further than the first round at a major, Grand Slam glamour gives way to the grind of the second-tier (Challenger) and third-tier (ITF) tours, crisscrossing the world on cheap flights — and one hair-raising drive through the Uzbekistan countryside without a seatbelt.
The Racket covers a side of tennis often overshadowed by bigger events and more famous names, which is part of the reason it has captured the imagination not just of the sport’s own fans but of the wider sporting public. “It’s very accessible to people who don’t follow tennis, but it isn’t watered-down in any way for those who do know and understand the sport,” Niland says in a Zoom interview at the start of December.
Part of what makes the Ireland Davis Cup captain’s book so fascinating is his discussion of the mental challenges of tennis, which are varied and intense. Niland sees the book as a counterweight to “Open”, eight-time Grand Slam champion Andre Agassi’s searingly honest 2009 autobiography which deals with similar themes but focuses on the top of tennis. It also has kinship with “Challengers”, the Zendaya tennis movie centered on a top pro tennis player trying to return to glory on the Challenger circuit.
“You’re in your head a lot, that’s for sure,” Niland says, explaining that musicians and actors who are hoping to ‘make it’ have reached out after feeling kinship with his story. “You’re on your own. And you’ve got an awful lot of time to reflect … Tennis asks so much of you.”
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Niland, 43, turned pro in 2005.
He qualified for two Grand Slams but lost in the first round of both. He blew a 4-1 final set lead against Frenchman Adrian Mannarino at Wimbledon in 2011; had he won, he would have played Roger Federer in the next round. He then had to retire with food poisoning while trailing Novak Djokovic 6-0, 5-1 on Arthur Ashe Stadium at that year’s U.S. Open. Those two defeats were his biggest career payouts, ahead of winning the Israel Open Challenger event in 2010 — until last month’s William Hill award.
Niland, as a promising 12-year-old from a country with negligible tennis pedigree, beat Federer in a friendly at the Winter Cup youth tournament in 1994. He trained at the Nick Bollettieri academy in Florida with Serena Williams, before competing on the U.S. college tennis circuit for the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied English literature and language.
He retired, aged 30, in 2012 because of a persistent hip injury but didn’t start writing his book for another eight years. Niland started jotting down some thoughts during the Covid-19 lockdown and found that they were gushing out of him; a few weeks later, he had a book proposal from publisher Penguin. Irish sportswriter Gavin Cooney was a ghostwriter on the project, but much of the writing is Niland’s own.
He feels tennis is a misunderstood sport: a profession in which around 100 men and women can make a decent living each year while thousands of others play for little reward. “It’s not good enough that there aren’t 300, 400 people in the world, men and women, who can make a very decent income,” Niland says, pointing to golf as an example of a sport with a better remuneration structure. Ultimately, only 128 men and women can be in any Grand Slam event’s draw, which makes getting those bigger paydays harder.
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This creates a brutal hierarchy, which is at the heart of The Racket. Niland paints a vivid picture of tennis’ haves and have-nots, documenting a training session with idol Pete Sampras among portraits of the myriad characters all the way down the sport’s rungs. Niland’s peers crave support and success, while the likes of Agassi and Sampras occupy another universe; he recalls Agassi surrounded at a tournament by so many hangers-on that he accepts a glass of water he doesn’t really want, just to give them something to do.
What Niland also captures is that players, even greats such as Sampras and Agassi, don’t breathe that rarefied air from the start; he uses current world No. 10 Grigor Dimitrov as an example of how the tennis hierarchy moves. He recalls getting on well with Dimitrov when the Bulgarian was a wide-eyed teenager who proudly declared that “(Maria) Sharapova likes me, man”, before explaining that Dimitrov became more distant as he rose up the food chain. “By the time he had cracked the top 20, he was ignoring me completely,” he writes.
There is scarcely more friendliness among players of the same level, though, especially on the Challenger and ITF Tours where people are fighting for their livelihoods as well as their ranking points. “Locker rooms on the lesser tours are full of strangers with bad tattoos,” Niland writes. “Everyone is just polite enough not to call one another out for being an a**hole, but selfishness is rewarded. Everyone is in competition with one another and on the lookout for a weakness in everybody else.”
Conor Niland’s only main-draw match at Wimbledon ended in heartbreak as he lost in five sets (Clive Mason / Getty Images)
These are power structures that people who have never gone near tennis can relate to, whether on the corporate ladder or in social groups. In tennis, as in all fields of life, “you’re constantly self-analyzing,” Niland says.
The tensions intrinsic to these hierarchies have boiled over in the past few months in the wake of high-profile doping cases involving men’s world No. 1 Jannik Sinner and women’s world No. 2 Iga Swiatek. Tennis players and fans largely accept that it is a tiered sport: the top players aren’t just paid more on and off the court, but receive preferential treatment in terms of court allocations and appearance fees.
Low-level players who do make it into bigger tournaments won’t get picked for show courts equipped with roofs for when it rains; they are less likely to make deep runs and so rarely know when their matches will be scheduled or how long they’ll be at a tournament for. An early defeat can mean a panic to change flights and an unexpected series of wins can mean scrambling for a new hotel room. The Challenger and ITF or ‘Futures’ circuits are played at small venues with modest facilities and few spectators.
The Racket sees Niland recount Federer summoning the British player Dan Evans to his base in Dubai for a few weeks of off-season workouts, insisting that every practice match be at 7 p.m. local time. Federer knew he would play the first match of his next tournament three weeks before the tournament even started.
Players accept these kinds of privileges. Things get heated when people perceive the accepted double standards in other realms.
Several of Sinner’s peers vented their frustration in August when he was not banned after twice testing positive for the banned substance clostebol, even though the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) followed due process throughout an investigation that led to a “no fault or negligence” verdict. Sinner received a provisional suspension for each positive test, but quickly and successfully appealed on both occasions, meaning he could keep playing without the bans being made public until the conclusion of the ITIA’s investigation.
‘One rule for them, another for us’ was the essential complaint. In November, Swiatek’s positive test for trimetazidine (TMZ) from contaminated melatonin (sleeping tablets) medication led to a month’s ban. Swiatek also quickly and successfully appealed her provisional suspension, which the ITIA issued in September.
On this occasion, lower-ranked players emphasized that only elite players like Sinner and Swiatek can afford the swift legal and medical advice and testing required to appeal their provisional suspensions. Players only have a 10-day window and ITIA chief executive Karen Moorhouse accepted that players with more resources are better positioned to deal with incidents like this.
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Niland feels the segregation of the Challenger and ITF Tours “downgrades” tennis outside of the rankings’ top 100s and “makes it seem like we’re not legitimate professionals,” describing the Swiatek case as a “perfect example” of why tennis is perceived to be a two-tier sport.
“The fact that they’re able to announce to the world on their terms on their own Instagram page … Tennis has a bad habit of thinking the very best players in the sport are the sport and that they’re bigger than the sport. It’s the way these things are managed and the feeling that it’s the haves and the have-nots,” he says.
Niland never directly witnessed doping but was once approached to fix a match by an anonymous caller. He hung up the phone.
Unable to afford the entourage and support teams of the best players, Niland describes the “crushing” loneliness and isolation of being a lower-ranked tennis player.
“I made virtually no lasting friendships on tour through my seven years, despite coming across hundreds of players my own age living the same life as my own,” he writes. Players who do strike up bonds, such as Dane Sweeny and Calum Puttergill, two Australians who document their seasons on YouTube, spend time figuring out if they can afford to lose a match or not.
Niland also recalls the unhealthy obsession with one’s ranking — the digits that measure a player’s sense of self-worth. He says he still gets a “flash of adrenaline” when he sees the number 129, say on a digital clock, remembering the constant fretting about losing points won the previous year.
“By September, you’re already thinking about the points you might lose in February,” he says.
“You’re dealing with losing constantly and constantly trying to get better and comparing yourself with the very best in the world,” he says, explaining that the intertwining of results with self-esteem was the worst part of the job.
And the best? “It was great to wake up with a dream every day — mine was to play at the Grand Slams. The fact I actually got to do it was great, even though it was bittersweet.”
Niland hopes The Racket humanizes the players below the sport’s top 100, explaining that one of the biggest misconceptions about tennis is the perceived gulf in talent between the elite and those just below them. It’s a much smaller gap than people think, he says, and very small margins can determine a player’s career trajectory.
Nowadays, Niland is the Irish Davis Cup captain, but his main job is with a commercial real estate company.
He lives in Dublin with his wife and kids (Emma, eight, and six-year-old Tom), all of whom play tennis, something he very rarely does anymore. Full-time coaching doesn’t appeal, but he would love to keep writing, with the work on this book helping him to process his gruelling first career: “I think some of the ‘failures’ in the book are what makes it more compelling and the fact that there isn’t necessarily a happy ending for me in the tennis context. I guess the happy ending is this book.
“Tennis can offer you something — you might get bits and pieces out of it, but it’s not necessarily going to save you.”
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Dan Goldfarb)
