There is a story at the beginning of Conor Niland’s excellent book The Racket – On Tour with Tennis’s Golden Generation and the other 99% about when he was at school in England. Millfield in Somerset, one of the most expensive boarding schools in the UK, attracts the best sporting talent from around the world and Niland attended on a partial scholarship.
In his second year he shared a room with a kid whose parents were high-powered lawyers in Hong Kong and whose one link with Ireland was touring the city in a helicopter with an Enya song blasting in his earphones.
Over a weekend on his own after his roommate had left to go clubbing in Bristol, the Limerick teenager, in an idle moment, furtively rummaged through his friend’s closet. He pulled out some designer clothes and decided to try on one of the Armani suits.
When his roommate returned, he asked Niland “have you been trying on my things?”. Taken by surprise, the young Niland brazenly lied before his schoolfriend held up the Armani jacket declaring “well this jacket is on a metal hanger, I only ever put it on a wooden hanger.”
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Chastened and tutored in how to correctly curate designer wear, Niland’s story of proximity to great wealth also speaks to the rest of his career as a professional tennis player, whose ranking peaked at 129 in the world.
As he tells it, he was often the guy on the periphery looking to the inside, forever getting up close and personal with its elite clientele but ultimately remaining part of its outer circle. From the beginning Niland understood how it worked, what it was and although he met the people, was unable to step into the epicentre of its world.
When he went to the Nick Bollettieri Academy in Florida at the expense of a sponsor, whose name he still doesn’t know, he hit with the Williams sisters, brushed shoulders with Andy Roddick and Maria Sharapova and from the beginning seemed to understand that although they all played the same sport and spoke the same tennis language, the worlds were barely connected.
In those balmy, palm-tree days at the “tennis factory” – as many called it – his memory of the interactions, recall of the minor slights and the constant reminders of his place are all captured with dry amusement.
In wry cameos of meeting parents of phenoms or fake coaches, Niland encapsulates the cavernous divisions of a fully functional tennis caste system.
He walked to court with his stuff, Venus Williams arrived with nothing, her team bringing everything she needed for a morning hitting session. The American stars would fly in to hit with handpicked partners, who might improve their game, while Niland and another talented Irish player Stephen Nugent, wandered over to the canteen to eat lunch off polystyrene plates.
He says he “doubted the environment every day of my professional career and I still do” but was fortunate to achieve what he did as he strode the globe like a latter-day tennis anti-hero, capturing the character and mood and occasional weirdness on the road, its lack of glamour and the brutal, Darwinian theme of survival and guile that underscores the life.
His parents driving ambition for him are also pinned in the pages with the skill and precision of an entomologist.
Niland describes Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal and Novak Djokovic as having skin that was so healthy and radiant to be other worldly, “a gilded quality.” He played against Djokovic in New York and beat Federer as a kid but never faced Nadal.
His one opportunity for relative fame came at 29 years old on a sunny afternoon in June 2011. I remember watching from the corner of Court 17, one of a nest of five courts between Number One court and Centre Court.
There the players can see people walking by and hear their chatter and the roars.
A small group of Irish people gathered, a few Irish flags appeared and at one stage they sang The Fields of Athenry. There are many ways to see the match. Niland took a 4-1 lead against Adrian Mannarino in the final set and was on serve. If he held his next two service games he was through to the next round. But he didn’t.
[ Sporting Upsets: Niland comes agonisingly close to a date with FedererOpens in new window ]
A shroud of disappointment settled over the court and all but a few close to him filtered out.
Afterwards he reflected on a match he spent his “whole life waiting for”. Why? Because Federer was the winner’s next opponent on Centre Court.
“Now when I fall into small talk on my life or tennis comes up, I can say I played at Wimbledon,” he writes. “I still think about my defeat to Mannarino almost every day. It just pops into my head intruding at random times. Perhaps I’ll never get over not being able to add the postscript: ‘Yeah I played at Wimbledon on Centre Court against Roger Federer.’”
Like Paul Kimmage’s book A Rough Ride, Niland’s The Racket, written with sports journalist Gavin Cooney, is seminal. The only two Irish books to have won The William Hill Sports Book of the Year, both speak, in part, of the journey to attain goals ultimately out of reach. In the telling we all become richer. That’s quite an achievement.
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