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Conor Niland laughs and, without hesitating, rejects the idea that he misses the intensity of competition which shaped and sometimes deformed his life as a professional tennis player who reached a high of No 129 in the world. “No,” he exclaims. “I found myself waking up with butterflies in my stomach on the morning of the William Hill [Sports Book of the Year award] and thinking: ‘I haven’t felt this in a while, and I don’t particularly miss it.’ I don’t think anyone enjoys butterflies that much.”
Niland scrabbled around on the Futures and Challengers tours, those brutal circuits of hell for players outside the top 100 where intensity is often defined by the need to win a match to earn enough money to pay a hotel bill or book a plane ticket out of Astana or Delhi and fly to the next tournament in the hope of climbing the rankings. The dream of becoming an ATP regular has now been replaced for Niland, who retired from tennis in 2012, by a very different dream which saw him deservedly win the Sports Book of the Year last month for The Racket.
“The book has brought an element of intensity back into my life,” Niland suggests, “and has brought back that word ‘dream’. I had some dreams for this book and they have replaced the dreams I had as a tennis player. But they’re very different because tennis is relentless. You’re defining yourself against a ranking and constantly having to do battle over [the consequences of] a win or a loss. It’s not something I miss.”
Niland writes about the loneliness and absurdity of life on tour with an elegance and immediacy which makes readers feel as if they are alongside the battered pro trying so hard to reach a better life for himself. Niland was a seriously good tennis player – who beat Roger Federer as a junior and was told by Wayne Ferreira, the former world No 6 who coached Frances Tiafoe and Jack Draper, that he had the talent to reach the top 50. But he came from Ireland, where he received little support from tennis administrators, and he also chose to take a scholarship to a public school in England when he should have accepted a counter offer to move to the Nick Bollettieri Academy in Florida where players such as Andre Agassi, Maria Sharapova, Venus and Serena Williams and Andy Roddick blossomed as juniors in a searing hothouse of unrelenting application.
I ask Niland if he might have cracked the top 50 if he had made different choices and received the kind of financial backing which helped Andy Murray, the one leading player with whom he felt a real affinity. “We’re in dangerous territory and I could sound a little facile,” Niland says, “but I don’t think that’s a big stretch. A better tennis environment for me, for longer, would have really helped.”
If he had made the top 50 he probably wouldn’t have won the William Hill because his book would have been so much less interesting. Niland smiles on a winter morning in Dublin. “I’d have been too satisfied and happy to be writing a book. I needed the tension and vantage point of being where I was in the rankings. I also don’t think it would have worked if I had written it as world No 500. Where I got to meant that I got to see the very top guys and know and understand that world, but also understand the world below.”
Niland won £30,000 for the William Hill and he explains how that prize money was double the amount which accompanied his biggest victory in tennis. “I remember winning €14,000 when I won the Israel Open [in 2010]. But I made more when qualifying for the first round at Wimbledon and the US Open in 2011 – which was about €19,000 or €20,000 each. The first round at Wimbledon has pretty much doubled its prize money but, for me, the William Hill was my biggest win by quite a distance. It’s tough work, writing a book, but it’s not as arduous as being a tennis pro.”
The book is also an affectionate portrait of the way his parents drove him hard in a bid to help him make it as a tennis pro. This entailed a suspension of reality as his dad, in particular, devised an unlikely training and psychological regime which included trying to convince the 12-year-old Conor in Limerick that he was already good enough to beat Boris Becker who was then the world No 1. How would his dad, who died in 2013, have reacted to his book’s victory?
“He would have been crying like my mum,” Niland says with a grin. “When they announced my name, my wife, Síne, gave a little shriek and mum was prostrate on the table. She was sobbing. Part of that was because I’d won the William Hill but it was also because of how much my dad is a part of this story. Dad had stacks of sports books growing up and he was a big fan of Yogi Berra [baseball] quotes and he had a real feel for international sport, even though he was a Gaelic footballer. He would have been so proud.”
The Racket is different to a typical ghost-written sports book. It is a literary collaboration with Gavin Cooney, the skilled Irish journalist, who tells me that Niland’s involvement as a serious co-writer elevated the book. Niland wrote numerous sections himself including one of the most affecting which, at the end of the book, features him and his dad leaving Kyoto after his final tournament as a pro “before the cherry blossom began to bloom. It seemed fitting: the Challenger Tour always felt a little out of season; the show happened somewhere else.
“On the Nozomi bullet train from Kyoto to Tokyo, Dad and I didn’t speak much, except to note the anagram of the two cities, and the clock on the platform counting down to departure in seconds, not minutes. John Updike’s book Due Considerations, all 700 pages of it, served to distract me from my loss and render something productive from the dead travel day ahead … Dad and I both knew that something was wrong – perhaps irretrievably wrong – with the arc of my career. Six months earlier I had been smack in the centre of the grand slam party, but now I felt I had been sent to an obscure outpost to serve more time.”
Niland says that “the first thing I wrote was my dad leaving Japan on the train. It captured the fact that the Challenger tour can be a melancholy place on the margins of the world and of tennis itself. That episode pretty much stayed intact even if we shifted its location in the book. Gavin was a brilliant partner but some scenes are my own and don’t come through the filter of a ghost writer. This was more personal.”
The book builds to a climax as Niland plays Adrian Mannarino in the first round at Wimbledon in 2011. It was a gruelling match and, after many hours on court, Niland was about to serve for a 5-1 lead in the final set, knowing that victory would seal an appearance against Federer in the second round on Centre Court.
It’s not too much of a spoiler to reveal that Niland crumbles and loses. “I wonder what a Centre Court showing against Federer would have done for me,” Niland says now. “It would have been quite a big moment in Ireland. I played Novak Djokovic on a major court a couple of months later [in the US Open when Niland was stricken with food poisoning and had to retire in the second set] and, while people were interested, it didn’t have that crowd-round-the-TV moment in Ireland. Federer at Wimbledon would have been special.
“But I don’t think I would have qualified for the US Open if I’d done that. I also don’t think this book would have been written. The two incidents – at Wimbledon and the US Open – are such a crescendo in terms of a narrative. It’s created this story and I think if it had been given a happy ending of me playing Roger it wouldn’t have had the same impact.”
Some critics, who also loved the book, have described it as a study in failure. This seems wrong to me – and also to Niland. “If you’re reading it as a study in failure you’re not realising how much success you need to play in the biggest tournaments. But I’ve had messages from musicians and actors on the periphery. They’re trying to break in and haven’t quite made it and they say they see a lot of themselves in the book. I suppose it’s how you define failure.”
One of the most moving passages unfolds when Niland has a long practice session with Richard Gasquet, “ranked 15th in the world, and a beautifully elegant player who had been winning matches on the main ATP Tour since the age of 16. I didn’t know Gasquet and he didn’t know me.”
As Niland recalls now: “I’d signed in as a qualifier and he was in the main draw. Maybe he wanted a better practice partner but at 130 in the world I felt I was able to play with him. He walked on court, put his bag down and, without saying hello, walked straight to the baseline. Maybe he was having a bad day, but I just thought a hello would have been normal.”
Niland decided that “I wasn’t going to miss. Our first rally was almost comically long. Saying it lasted three or four minutes doesn’t sound that impressive. But it’s a very long time to rally and eventually Richard caught the ball because it was getting fluffed up. He gave it to his coach and picked another ball. So the rally didn’t stop, technically, ever. That was a little victory for me and I had a big battle then with his compatriot [Mannarino] a few months later at Wimbledon.”
The level of talent and determination needed to reach that point of excellence is more important than the fact that, when they played a practice set, Gasquet won 6-0. Did he at least acknowledge Niland’s presence on the court, and thank him for the hit, when they parted? “I think so. I would have remembered if he didn’t.”
There is no bitterness towards tennis in Niland today – despite the fact that he gave so much of his life to the game for meagre rewards. He no longer plays in any capacity but he remains Ireland’s Davis Cup captain while working full-time in commercial property. “I’m still involved in tennis and my kids play, even if not overly seriously. I found professional tennis extremely challenging and felt much more could have been given to the players outside the top 100 to make that life a lot more enjoyable. But you know what? I woke up every day with a dream in my mid-to-late 20s to try to get to Wimbledon. That is a privilege in its own way. So I’ve reframed it and turned it into something really positive.”
Conor Niland’s book The Racket: On Tour with Tennis’s Golden Generation – and the other 99%, is published by Sandycove. You can buy it in the Guardian Bookshop.
