When Conor Niland picked up £30,000 for winning the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award three weeks ago, it was double his biggest payday throughout a seven-year professional tennis career.
This neatly encompasses what Niland’s award-winning book, “The Racket”, is all about — the reality of being a tennis player outside the elite. For players like Niland, who reached a career high of world No. 129 and never went further than the first round at a major, Grand Slam glamour gives way to the grind of the second-tier (Challenger) and third-tier (ITF) tours, crisscrossing the world on cheap flights — and one hair-raising drive through the Uzbekistan countryside
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