Conor Niland clearly has some bitterness toward his time on tennis tours, but he still presents a clear-eyed picture of the harsh realities of being a low-seeded player, struggling to improve your ranking. It’s a hard life: to work toward a dream that remains just a little out of reach. I appreciated hearing about the graft of those struggling to make it—a story we rarely hear.
There are three tiers in the hierarchy of men’s professional tennis. The ATP Tour is the sport’s top division, the preserve of the top 100 male tennis players in the world. The Challenger Tour is populated mainly by players ranked between 100 and 300 in the world. Below that is the Futures tour, tennis’s vast netherworld of more than 2,000 true prospects and hopeless dreamers.
I wasn’t schlepping my way through the lower ranks of the professional tour for the money or the prestige, both of which were in short supply. I, like everyone else, was there to remove myself from the clutches of the lower tiers. The Futures tour 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.
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