Conor Niland after losing to Adrian Mannarino at Wimbledon 2011.
Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images.
The life of the concert soloist may seem glamorous, though the routine of airports, hotels, concert halls, and receptions must wear thin. Still, it contrasts with that of rank-and-file orchestral musos (cf. Mozart in the jungle, and Ecstasy and drudge). Apart from The Money, I note the irony of the soloist being condemned to churning out the same three or four concertos all their lives while the orchestral musos are constantly playing a variety of wonderful music (Mahler—you know that’s who I meant).
By the same token, following Vincent Goossaert’s search for “ordinary Daoists” (theme of his The Taoists of Peking, ), it’s not all about the Du Guangtings and Chen Rongshengs, or about the elite mystical sages of yore. Hence my own search for household Daoist groups like the Li family.
Nor is tennis all about the superstars, the Federers and Świąteks, with their ritzy entourages. An interesting Guardian Long Read by Connor Niland, “I’m good, I promise: the loneliness of the low-ranking tennis player”, describes life at the bottom of the top. Formerly No.1 Irish player, he tells a sad story.
He outlines the three tiers of men’s professional tennis: the ATP Tour for the top 100 male tennis players in the world, the Challenger Tour, mainly by players ranked between 100 and 300—and the Futures tour, “tennis’s vast netherworld of more than 2,000 true prospects and hopeless dreamers”, which
sometimes felt like a circle of hell, but in practical terms it’s better understood as purgatory: a liminal space that exists only to be got out of as quickly as possible.
As he explains,
Surviving on the Futures and Challenger tournaments isn’t just about being good at tennis. It’s about being able to cope with the strange bedfellows of regular boredom and constant uncertainty. Not many succeed.
He felt trapped:
I phoned Mum from the airport in Geneva, telling her I was tired and would skip Edinburgh and fly home instead. She wasn’t having that. “This is your job now, Conor,” she said. “You can’t just not turn up because you’re tired.” I remembered my friend and one-time tennis partner Pat Briaud’s words: “Your parents don’t mess around.” I turned up and made the semi-final, losing a feisty two-and-a-half-hour match to Britain’s Jamie Baker. It was my 24th match in five weeks. Exhausted, I collected my prize money: $480, before 20% tax.
By contrast with the constant media exposure the stars have to endure, loneliness and isolation are the fate of the rank-and-file.
I made virtually no lasting friendships on tour through my seven years, despite coming across hundreds of players my own age living the same life as my own.
And he describes the difficulty of finding a practice partner. At least the life of orchestral musos is leavened by an embattled camaraderie—and they share a bond in maestro-baiting and deviant behaviour.
I almost never went sightseeing on a day off. That was partly to conserve energy, partly because I had nobody to go with. And in many of the one-horse towns that hosted Futures events, there weren’t any sights to see. […]
I would return to Ireland from three-week trips to these exotic places with no notable stories or experiences. “How was Morocco?” I would be asked. “Fine,” I would say, with nothing else to add. […]
The true unfortunates, though, were the ones who were talented enough to rationally hope to advance. These were people who grew up as the best tennis players in their country, but were stuck between 300 and 600 in the world, not quite contending for the Challenger Tour nor the qualifiers at grand slams, but winning just often enough to keep their tennis dream faintly alive. A Futures tournament referee in the US became infamous for his straight-talking to 28-year-old players: “C’mon man, what are you still doing here?” He was straying out of his lane, but his intentions were good. And he was usually right.
Niland ends with a depressing account of a fruitless Challenger event in Uzbekistan. It all sounds a bit like doing a Messiah in Scunthorpe for a jolly good tea. Whether in music, religion, or sport, ethnographic perspectives like this are always valuable.
Under Sporting medley: ritual and gender I list several posts on tennis.
Stephen Jones: a blog 