「经济学人」What a racket

A new book chronicles the grim reality of chasing sporting success

The Racket: On Tour with Tennis’s Golden Generation—and the other 99%. By Conor Niland. Sandycove; 320 pages; £20

The women’s and men’s finals at Wimbledon on July 13th and July 14th, respectively, are the biggest events in tennis. They each feature two of the world’s best players competing for the oldest and most prestigious prize in the sport. But at around the same time, a dozen or so other professional tournaments will take place worldwide in far less glamorous settings, including Iasi, Romania and Tianjin, China.

These small-fry competitions are crucial because they cater to tennis’s masses: players ranked anywhere between 100th and 2,000th in the world. They may be lowly ranked, but they are highly skilled. Tennis demands remarkable speed, hand-eye co-ordination and mental fortitude. It is played by some 90m players globally, making anyone in the top 2,000 a stellar talent.

Yet those outside the top 100 rarely feel like stars. Life in professional tennis’s outer orbit is drudgery, writes Conor Niland. He would know. Between 2005 and 2012, the Irishman tried to escape the “purgatory” of lesser tennis tours. He could only briefly reach the rank of 129. His courtside account of these efforts serves as a crushing reminder of the grist from which sporting greatness emerges.

It all starts with a “horrifying gamble”. To become a professional, childhood must be sacrificed, which is why Mr Niland’s parents started him at the age of five. But beginning young is no guarantee of success. As a 12-year-old playing in a European under-14 competition, Mr Niland defeated a Swiss boy called Roger Federer. Mr Federer would go on to enjoy a legendary career, winning 20 grand slams; Mr Niland would struggle to qualify for them.

While studying and playing tennis at the University of California, Berkeley, Mr Niland earned a degree in literature, which he puts to good use in describing his toil with humour and without self-pity. The life of a journeyman is quite literally that. Fringe tennis tournaments take place in the periphery. At one stage of his career, Mr Niland travelled from Granby, Canada, to Wrexham, Wales and on to Bukhara, Uzbekistan within weeks.

Uncertainty and boredom compound the pain. Tournaments often entail more time spent waiting on the sidelines than playing. Players do not know when they will lose, and an early exit triggers costly last-minute bookings. Tennis is an intensely lonely pursuit even for its champions. There are no teammates; coaches are not allowed on the court.

In the lower tour few players can afford a coach, let alone the masseuse and other staff who make up a top player’s entourage. The common struggles do not instil any camaraderie among journeymen; they are loth to do anything that may hand their rivals a boost. Despite seven years on tour, Mr Niland made no lasting friendships.

Why then do lower-ranked players keep playing? It is not for the money, which is trivial at smaller tournaments. The winners of Wimbledon’s singles titles this year will receive £2.7m ($3.5m) each; the winner of the tournament in Tianjin will score just $3,600. During his career Mr Niland earned a total of around $250,000. But after accounting for travel and other costs, he would have made more by coaching. Shortly after Mr Niland retired, tennis’s global governing body estimated that less than 5% of all professionals broke even. Since then there have been efforts to make the sport more equitable, but it remains heavily skewed towards the wealthy.

Lower-ranked players carry on out of a combination of passion and hope—as Mr Niland did. A string of good performances can boost rankings, which can have a cascading effect. Higher-ranked players can enter bigger tournaments, but a drop in performance or an injury can be disastrous, precipitating a collapse in ranking. Few persevere for that long. The average tennis professional retires at the age of 27.

At least on that measure, Mr Niland’s career was a success. He retired at the age of 30, after fulfilling a deeply held ambition: he played at Wimbledon in 2011. He may have lost in the first round, but given his sacrifices and the odds, even getting there was a grand slam.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “What a racket”(July 11th 2024)

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