Three weeks ago Conor Neylan received £30,000 for winning the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, double the biggest prize of his seven-year professional tennis career.
This neatly encapsulates what Neyland’s award-winning book Racket is all about – the reality of being a tennis player outside the elite. For a player like Nyland, who reached a career-high ranking of No. 129 in the world and never got further than the first round of a major, the allure of the majors gives way to The training of the second echelon (challengers) and the third echelon (ITF).
Racket covers a side of tennis that is often overshadowed by bigger events and better-known names, and it’s the part that has captured the imagination not just of fans of the sport itself, but of the wider sporting public. reason. “It’s easy to pick up for people who don’t like tennis, but it doesn’t dilute it in any way for people who know and understand the game,” Niland said during a Zoom interview in early December.
Part of what makes the Irish Davis Cup captain’s book so compelling is his discussion of the psychological challenges of tennis, which are varied and intense. Nylander sees the book as a counterbalance to eight-time Grand Slam champion Andre Agassi’s brutally honest 2009 autobiography “The Open,” which dealt with similar themes but focused on tennis’ top competition. It also has strong ties to the Zendaya tennis movie Contenders, which centers on a top professional tennis player trying to return to glory on the Challenger Tour.
“You think about it a lot in your head, that’s for sure,” Niland said, explaining that musicians and actors who wanted to “make it” reached out after feeling a connection to his story. “You’re on your own. And you have a lot of time to reflect… Tennis demands so much of you.
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Niland, 43, turned pro in 2005.
He qualified for two majors, losing in the first round both times. At Wimbledon in 2011, he led Frenchman Adrian Mannarino 4-1 in the final. If he wins, he will face Roger Federer in the next round. He then had to withdraw from that year’s U.S. Open due to food poisoning while trailing Novak Djokovic 6-0, 5-1 at Arthur Ashe Stadium. Those two losses were the biggest of his career – until winning the William Hill Award last month – before winning the 2010 Israel Open Challenger.
Nylander, a 12-year-old from a country with humble tennis origins, defeated Federer in a friendly match at the 1994 Winter Cup youth tournament. He studied English literature and language on the college tennis circuit at the University of California, Berkeley, where he trained with Serena Williams.
He retired in 2012 at the age of 30 due to a persistent hip injury, but spent the next eight years working on a book. Niland started jotting down some thoughts during the Covid-19 lockdown and found them flowing out of his head; a few weeks later, he received a book proposal from publisher Penguin. Irish sports writer Gavin Cooney was a ghostwriter on the project, but much of the work is Niland’s own.
He believes tennis is a misunderstood sport: about 100 men and women each year can make a decent living in the profession, while thousands of others play for little reward. “It’s not good enough that there aren’t 300 to 400 people in the world, men and women, making a very decent income,” Nyland said, pointing to golf as an example of a sport with a better pay structure. Ultimately, only 128 men and women are eligible for any Grand Slam draw, making it even more difficult to secure a bigger payday.
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This creates a brutal class system that is at the heart of The Racket. Nyland offers a vivid portrait of the haves and have-nots in tennis, chronicling training with his idol Pete Sampras, and portraits of countless figures in the sport. While Nyland’s peers crave support and success, the likes of Agassi and Sampras occupy an alternate universe; he recalls the time Agassi was surrounded by so many diners at a tournament that he accepted a drink he didn’t Not really wanting the water, just to give them something to do.
What Nylander also captures is that players, even great ones like Sampras and Agassi, don’t breathe rarefied air from the get-go; He cited Grigor Dimitrov, currently ranked No. 10 in the world, as an example of how the tennis hierarchy has changed. He recalled getting along well with Dimitrov when the Bulgarian was a wide-eyed teenager, proudly declaring “(Maria) Sharapova likes me, man,” before explaining, As Dimitrov moved up the food chain, he became more distant. “By the time he got to the top 20, he had completely ignored me,” he wrote.
However, the level of friendliness between players at the same level is also not very high, especially on the Challenger and ITF circuits, where people are fighting for their livelihood and ranking points. “The mini-tour locker rooms are filled with strangers with bad tattoos,” Niland wrote. “Everyone is polite enough not to call each other a jerk, but selfishness is rewarded. Everyone is competing against each other and looking for weaknesses in everyone else.
Conor Neylan’s only main draw match at Wimbledon ended in heartbreaking fashion as he lost in five sets (Clive Mason/Getty Images)
These power structures are understandable to those who have never been exposed to tennis, whether on the corporate ladder or within social groups. In tennis, as in all areas of life, “you need to be constantly analyzing yourself,” Nylander said.
The tensions inherent in these hierarchies have boiled over the past few months as high-profile doping cases involving men’s world number one Jannik Sinner and women’s world number two Iga Swiatek have boiled over. Tennis players and fans generally view it as a hierarchical sport: top players not only receive higher pay on and off the court, but also receive preferential treatment in court allocations and appearance fees.
Lower-tier players entering major tournaments won’t be picked to compete in show venues equipped with roofs when it rains; they’re less likely to make deep runs and therefore have little idea of when their games will be scheduled or how long they’ll be in the tournament . An early defeat could mean a panic about changing flights, while a series of unexpected wins could mean a scramble for a new hotel room. Challenger and ITF or “future” tour events are played in small venues with poor facilities and few spectators.
Racket reports that Nylander recounted Federer summoning British player Dan Evans to his Dubai base for a few weeks of offseason training and insisting that every practice session be played at 7pm local time. Federer knew three weeks before the tournament that he would play the first game of the next tournament.
Players accept these privileges. Things get heated when people realize the double standards accepted in other fields.
Several of Sinner’s colleagues expressed their displeasure in August when he was not suspended after twice testing positive for the banned substance lotibol, despite the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) following due process throughout the investigation. procedure, resulting in a “without fault or negligence” verdict. Sinner was served a provisional ban for each positive test, but both appeals were swift and successful, meaning he could continue playing without a public ban until the ITIA investigation was completed.
“They have one rule and we have another” is the top complaint. In November, Swiatek tested positive for trimetazidine (TMZ) in contaminated melatonin (sleeping pill) medication, resulting in a one-month ban for the company. Swiatek also quickly and successfully appealed the interim suspension issued by the ITIA in September.
This time, lower-ranked players stress that only elite players like Sinner and Swiatek can afford the swift legal and medical advice and testing required to appeal interim bans. Players only have a 10-day window, and ITIA chief executive Karen Moorhouse acknowledged that players with more resources are better equipped to deal with such an incident.
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Nyland believes the isolation of the Challenger and ITF tours “lowers” tennis rankings outside the top 100 and “makes us look like we are not legitimate professionals,” describing Swiatek’s case Why tennis is seen as the “perfect example” of becoming a two-tier sport.
“The fact that they were able to announce it to the world on their own terms on their own Instagram page…Tennis has a bad habit of thinking that the best player in the sport yes They are bigger than the sport. It’s the way these things are managed and how the rich and poor feel,” he said.
Niland never directly witnessed doping, but he was once contacted by an anonymous caller trying to fix a match. He hung up.
Unable to afford the entourage and support team of the best players, Nyland described the “suffocating” loneliness and isolation of being a lower-ranked tennis player.
“In seven years on tour, I made few lasting friendships, even though I met hundreds of players my own age and living the same lives as me,” he wrote. Players who do form a connection, such as Dane Sweeny and Calum Puttergill, two Australians who documented their seasons on YouTube, take the time to reflect Whether you can afford to lose the game.
Nylander also recalled an unhealthy obsession with rankings — numbers that measure a player’s sense of self-worth. He said he still gets an “adrenaline rush” when he sees the number 129 on the digital clock, remembering the constant annoyance of losing points won the previous year.
“By September, you’re already thinking about the points you might have lost in February,” he said.
“You’re constantly facing failure, constantly striving to be better, and comparing yourself to the best in the world,” he said. Results, he explained, are intertwined with self-esteem as the worst part of the job. part.
The best? “It’s nice to wake up every day with a dream – my dream is to play in a Grand Slam. The fact that I got to do that is awesome, even though it’s bittersweet.
Nyland hopes Racket will humanize players ranked below the top 100 in the sport, explaining that one of the biggest misconceptions about tennis is the belief that there is a talent gap between the elite and those ranked slightly lower. . The gap is much smaller than people think, he said, and a small gap can determine a player’s career trajectory.
Today, Nyland is Ireland’s Davis Cup captain, but his main job is with a commercial real estate company.
He lives in Dublin with his wife and children, Emma, eight, and Tom, six, who all play tennis but which he rarely plays now. Full-time coaching had no appeal, but he was keen to keep writing, and working on the book helped him through his grueling first career: “I think some of the ‘failures’ in the book make it more compelling In fact, I don’t necessarily have a happy ending in tennis and I think this book is the happy ending.
“Tennis can give you something – you might get bits and pieces out of it, but it won’t necessarily save you.”
(Top: Getty Images; Design: Dan Goldfarb)
