Conor Niland calls from Heathrow. 

His voice is understandably hoarse, but his mood is clearly buoyant. 

It is less than 24 hours since his memoir, The Racket, On Tour with Tennis’s Golden Generation — and the other 99%, was announced as the William Hill Sports Book of the Year for 2024, and Niland is preparing to make the journey home from London to Dublin. 

Niland knows the accolade will boost book sales in the UK. But for him, winning is more important than selling a few extra thousand copies After all, he knows he will not retire on the back of his royalties. Instead, it is a validation of a story he wanted to tell, and how he wanted to tell it.

Bookshops are crammed with sporting memoirs. Most are dull, sanitised portraits of dull, sanitised athletes, the majority of whom are multi-millionaires. Niland’s book is exceptional for its exceptionalism. It is his unvarnished truth of life as a journeyman tennis professional, a player who flirted with the elite but who never truly became one of them.

The one per cent of his peers retire as household names with fabulous wealth. Niland, who earned $247,686 (€237,863) during his seven years on tour, left tennis for a job with a commercial property advisory company. He is a manifestation of the 99 per cent he refers to in the book’s title, the vast majority of supremely talented players who operated on the margins.

Niland told me last week that he knew he was on to something during the writing process, that he felt he was creating something that bit different. His publishers at Penguin could see it too. 

He did not want to write just another sports book. And he knew from the beginning that he did not want to hand over his voice to a ghostwriter. He had heard tales of athletes talking into a dictaphone, and a writer coming back with volumes of prose, and he decided that was not for him.

With Gavin Cooney, a sports writer with The 42, he found a kindred spirit. They worked in unison; Niland would feed Cooney with copy, and Cooney would polish it. And vice versa. “It was a genuine collaboration,” Niland told me. “I like to write, and I think that comes across in the book.”

Niland says The Racket is a counter to Open, Andre Agassi’s compelling autobiography that tells the story of a man operating within the elite. He believes that is why it has resonated with so many people. It is the story of a normal man whose extraordinary talent was enough to make his career extraordinary.  

He says that people look at the grand slams, the glitz and the glamour, and they tend to misunderstand the life of a rank-and-file athlete. He wrote the book because he wanted people to know the truth. 

“It is a different story, a story that is rarely told,” he says. 

And that story is rarely told because, as Niland puts it, “no one ever asks to hear it”.

It is easy to cast this book as the story of an underdog. But that would be wrong. The word underdog evokes notions of upsetting the odds. Niland did not do this.

He made it to the main draw of the US Open and Wimbledon. But never made it past the first round; the former was against Nojak Djokovic on the main Arthur Ashe court (he was forced to pull out due to food poisoning) and in the latter, he lost a match he really should have won, a game that is captured beautifully in his memoir. He retired shortly after that loss, having reached a peak world ranking of 129.

At that point, he had enough. “It is no coincidence that I played Wimbledon and the US Open in the summer of 2011, and I was finished in April 2012. I had hip issues. I was managing those. But it was like I had ticked those boxes. I had gotten what I was striving for the few years before. Circumstances changed. I’d met Sheena, my now wife. The idea of going off on the road, 30, 35 weeks at the age of 30. I potentially needed surgery. It just wasn’t a legitimate prospect for me at that stage,” he told me during a revealing podcast earlier this year.

Regrets? No. Niland was happy with his lot. “When you retire from a team sport, a lot of these guys really struggle, because they’ve everything done for them. They’ve got an inbuilt bunch of mates. They go to train with them every day, and they don’t have to think about anything. And for me, my life improved when I finished on the tour.”

Niland had the confidence in himself to tell his story. He was aware of his abilities, and where he stood in the ecosystem around him. “I have a very good handle on where I am in the tennis world, and very proud of the things I did. But I think it was going to be really interesting for a reader to understand the guy who’s just a little bit off the big-time,” he told me.

The book has struck a chord. Niland told me last week that he had messages from musicians and actors in recent months, who operated in the periphery of their worlds. They saw a little bit of themselves in his story, he says.

In truth, most people will see a touch of themselves in the story. 

A rare few get to the elite level of playing at Wimbledon and the US Open. But most of us know what it is like to see dreams and ambitions slip away, replaced by the cold realities of life itself. 

Niland has told his story, his truth.   

If his sports career was ordinary, how he told it has marked him out as extraordinary. It is, in effect, his revenge on the hierarchies and elitism of the game he played for so long. 

And he, along with Cooney, has authored a terrific read on the process.

Elsewhere last week…

We continued our coverage of the upcoming election. Thomas spoke with Pearse Doherty, the Sinn Fein spokesman on finance, who, despite the perils of a Trump administration in the US, remains confident Exchequer surpluses will fund his party’s “catch-up programme” on housing and other capital spending.

Thomas also sat with Minister for Public Expenditure Paschal Donohoe, who teased through the details of Fine Gael’s spending and taxation priorities. I also conducted a deep dive into the party’s election arithmetic. 

Alice interviewed the Labour finance spokesman, Ged Nash, who explained the party’s plans to increase wealth taxes and invest in infrastructure while moving away from windfall corporate tax.

Our economic columnists Dan O’Brien and Colm McCarthy also looked at the spending promises made by the various parties. 

She’s moved on from Ryanair’s board and left Phelan Energy Group, but Louise Phelan is far from idle. As a mentor and investor, she loves working with female leaders and family businesses. She spoke with Alice.

Francesca, meanwhile, reported on a row over money allegedly due to creditors from two multi-million euro payouts to Siac in Polish litigation after a major roads project went wrong and derailed the business, now in liquidation.