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 encapsulates 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.
…and so on.
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