Three weeks ago, when Conor Nyland received £30,000 for winning the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award, it was double the highest amount he had received throughout his seven-year professional tennis career. .
It perfectly covers the content of Niland's award-winning book, The Racket: the reality of non-elite tennis players. For a player like Niland, who reached a career-high No. 129 in the world but never made it past the first round at a major, the glamor of the Grand Slams is no match for the rigors of second-class (Challenger) and third-weight (ITF) competition. be replaced. Tours, cheap flights across the world, and hair-raising drives through the Uzbek countryside without seatbelts.
“Racket” covers a side of tennis that is often overshadowed by big events and celebrities. This is one of the reasons it has captured the imagination of not only fans of the sport itself, but the wider sporting world. “It's very accessible for people who aren't into tennis, but it's not at all shallow for people who know and understand the sport,” Niland said in a Zoom interview in early December.
One of the reasons the Irish Davis Cup captain's book is so fascinating is his discussion of the varied and intense mental challenges of tennis. Niland compares the book to eight-time Grand Slam champion Andre Agassi's brutally honest 2009 autobiography, “Open,” which deals with similar themes but focuses on the pinnacle of tennis. I think so. It also has ties to Zendaya's tennis movie Challengers, which centers on a top professional tennis player trying to regain glory on the Challenger circuit.
“You're on my mind a lot, that's for sure,” Niland said, adding that musicians and actors who “want to make it happen” have reached out because they relate to his story. I explained. “You are yourself, and you have so much time to think…Tennis demands a lot from you.”
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Niland, 43, turned pro in 2005.
He qualified for two Grand Slams, but was eliminated in the first round both times. At Wimbledon in 2011, he took a 4-1 lead in the final set against Frenchman Adrian Mannarino. Had he won, he would have faced Roger Federer in the next round. Then, at the US Open of the same year, he was forced to retire due to food poisoning while losing 6-0, 5-1 to Novak Djokovic at Arthur Ashe Stadium. Those two losses were the biggest prizes of his career until last month's William Hill Trophy, which preceded his win at the 2010 Israel Open Challenger tournament.
Niland, a promising 12-year-old from a country with little history in tennis, defeated 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 U.S. tournament. She attended the collegiate tennis circuit at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied English Literature and Language Arts.
He retired in 2012 at the age of 30 due to a lingering back injury, but it was another eight years before he began writing the book. Niland started writing down her thoughts during the coronavirus lockdown and realized they were coming from within. A few weeks later, he received a book proposal from publisher Penguin. Irish sportswriter Gavin Cooney served as ghostwriter for the project, but much of the writing is Niland's own.
He feels that tennis is a misunderstood sport. The profession allows around 100 men and women to earn a decent living each year, while thousands of others play for little pay. “It's not good enough that there aren't 300 or 400 people in the world, men and women, who can earn a decent income,” Niland said, pointing to golf as an example of a sport with a better compensation structure. I mentioned it. In the end, only 128 men and women are eligible to participate in the Grand Slam draw, making it even more difficult to get a big paycheck.
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This creates the brutal hierarchy at the heart of The Racket. Niland paints a vivid picture of tennis's haves and have-nots, documenting training sessions with his idol Pete Sampras among countless portraits of characters from the bottom of the sport. There is. While Niland's peers crave support and success, the likes of Agassi and Sampras occupy a different world. He recalls Agassi being surrounded by a large entourage at a tournament and drinking a glass of water even though he didn't really want to, just to get them to do something.
What Niland sees is that even great players like Sampras and Agassi don't start out in that rarefied atmosphere. He points to Grigor Dimitrov, currently ranked No. 10 in the world, as an example of how tennis weight classes work. He recalled being good friends with Dimitrov, when the Bulgarian was a wide-eyed teenager, proudly proclaiming, “(Maria) Sharapova likes me.” Dimitrov explained that as he moved up the food chain, he became increasingly estranged. “By the time he was in the top 20, he was completely ignoring me,” he wrote.
But it's rare to see such camaraderie between players at the same level, especially on the Challenger and ITF tours, where people are competing not just for ranking points but for their livelihoods. “Locker rooms on small tours are filled with strangers with bad tattoos,” Niland wrote. “Everyone is just being polite and not calling each other shit, but selfishness is rewarded. Everyone is competing with each other and looking for weaknesses in others.”
Conor Nyland's only main draw match at Wimbledon ended in heartbreak as he lost in five sets (Clive Mason/Getty Images)
These are power structures on the corporate ladder, in social groups, and even people who are new to tennis can relate to them. As with all areas of life, tennis is “constantly self-examining,” Niland says.
Tensions within these weight classes have boiled over in recent months following high-profile doping cases involving world No. 1 Jannik Sinner and No. 2 Iga Swiatek. Tennis players and fans have largely accepted that tennis is a graded sport. In other words, top players not only receive more compensation on and off the court, but also receive preferential treatment in terms of court assignments and participation fees.
Even when low-level players participate in major tournaments, they are not selected for the show court, which has a roof in case it rains. Because they are less likely to make deep runs, they know little about when their matches will be scheduled or how long they will be in the tournament. An early loss could mean panic and having to change flights, and an unexpected winning streak could leave you scrambling for a new hotel room. Challenger circuits and ITF or “Futures” circuits are held in small venues with modest facilities and fewer spectators.
Racquet reports that Nyland details how Federer called British player Dan Evans to his home base in Dubai for several weeks of off-season practice and insisted that all practice matches be played at 7pm local time. talking. Federer knew he would be playing in the first match of the upcoming tournament three weeks before the tournament began.
Players accept these types of privileges. Things get heated when people realize the double standards that are being accepted in other areas.
Several of Sinner's colleagues tested positive for the banned drug clostebol twice in August, despite due process being followed through a “no fault or fault” investigation by the International Tennis Integrity Authority (ITIA). Even though he received a suspension, he vented his frustration that he was not suspended. verdict. Sinner received provisional suspensions for each positive test, but in each case he appealed quickly and successfully, allowing him to continue playing without the suspensions being made public until the ITIA investigation was completed. became possible.
The essential complaint was that “one rule is for them, another rule is for us.” In November, Swiatek tested positive for trimetazidine (TMZ) from a contaminated melatonin medication, leading to a one-month suspension. Ms. Swiatek also quickly and successfully appealed the provisional suspension issued by ITIA in September.
This is an opportunity for lower-ranked players to ensure that only elite players like Sinner and Swiatek have access to the legal and medical advice and testing they need to quickly appeal their provisional suspensions. He emphasized that. Players only have a 10-day grace period and ITIA chief executive Karen Moorhouse said players with more resources are in a better position to deal with such incidents. I admitted something.
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Niland feels the segregation of the Challenger Tour and ITF Tour has “downgraded” tennis outside of the top 100 rankings and “made it seem like we're not legitimate professionals,” adding that the Swiatek incident raises questions about why tennis is perceived as such. becoming a second-tier sport, which he described as a “perfect example” of what it means to be a second-tier sport.
“The fact that they can announce their will to the world on their Instagram page…Tennis has a bad habit of thinking about who is the best player in the sport.” teeth Sports, and that they are bigger than sports. It’s a way of managing these things, a sense of it being the haves and the have-nots,” he says.
Although Niland has never witnessed doping firsthand, he has been approached by anonymous callers about match-fixing. He hung up.
Unable to afford the best player's entourage or support team, Niland speaks of the “devastating” loneliness and isolation of being a lower-ranked tennis player.
“In my seven years on tour, I met hundreds of players my age who lived the same life as me, but I formed few lasting friendships,” he wrote. Close-knit players, like Australians Dane Sweeney and Callum Patergill, who have been documenting their season on YouTube, are taking the time to figure out whether they can afford to lose games.
Niland also recalls his unhealthy obsession with his rankings, numbers that measure a player's self-worth. He says he still gets an “adrenaline rush” when he sees the number 129 on a digital clock, and recalls feeling constantly anxious about losing the points he earned the previous year.
“By September, you're already starting to think about the points you could lose in February,” he says.
“You have to deal with losing all the time, always trying to get better and comparing yourself to the best players in the world,” he said, explaining that the intertwining of results and self-esteem is the worst part of the job.
And the best? “It was great to dream and wake up every day. My dream was to play in a Grand Slam, and the fact that I actually got to do it was amazing, even if it was bittersweet.”
Nyland hopes The Racket humanizes the sport's top 100 players, saying one of the biggest misconceptions about tennis is that the elite and just below them He explained that this is due to the perceived disparity in talent between the players. He says it's a much smaller difference than people think, and very small differences can determine the trajectory of a player's career.
Niland is currently Ireland's Davis Cup captain, but his day job is in commercial real estate.
He lives in Dublin with his wife and children (Emma, 8, and Tom, 6) and they all play tennis, although he hardly ever does anymore. Full-time coaching doesn't appeal, but working on this book helped him handle his grueling first career, and he hopes to continue writing. And the fact that there's not always a happy ending for me in terms of tennis. I think this book has a happy ending.
“Tennis gives you something. You might get a little bit out of it, but it won't necessarily save you.”
(Top photo: Getty Images, Design: Dan Goldfarb)
