Wimbledon’s starched whites, manicured flower beds and hushed silence enable tennis to present itself as a genteel sport. But Wimbledon only represents tennis in the way that an Olympic 100m final represents athletics. It is the best players in the best setting for a brief period. Actual tennis, the day-to-day life of a regular player on the circuit, is very different. It is relentless, stingy and unsentimental. The most surprising thing about The Racket, Conor Niland’s bruising account of his career as a good (but not great) tennis player, is that he emerges with both his sanity and his compassion intact.
Tennis is not an easy game to break into. Niland, born in Birmingham but brought up in Ireland, would appear to have had a fortunate start: his parents were sporty and his older sister, Gina, had some success as a junior player. The Nilands built a court in their garden for daily practice. But, as Conor discovers, even these leg-ups left him trailing in the wake of the true elite. Aged 13, he was being trained by his dad on their home court for an hour after school. At the same stage, Rafael Nadal was hitting balls with Carlos Moya, a former world number one. Niland later wins a scholarship to Millfield, a private school with an excellent reputation for producing athletes. He later notes that Roger Federer, Andy Murray and Nadal all left school at 16 to focus purely on tennis.
For budding professionals, the promised land is the ATP Tour, a series of lucrative, well-organised tournaments, contested by men ranked in the top 100.
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