The Lonely Life of a Low-Ranking Tennis Pro
Also: The family that made France, revisiting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age, “Napoleon Dynamite” at 20, the return of Parisian rock, and more.
At the top of his tennis career in 2010, Conor Niland was ranked 129th. His professional record when he retired in 2012 was 10 wins and 16 losses. He writes about the hierarchy and loneliness of professional tennis and what it was like to be a low-ranking professional in The Guardian:
I was 10 when I first told my folks that I wanted to give up playing tennis. They didn’t yield then, and they never did. Tennis was our family business. I first picked up a racket at the age of three, and spent 15 years of my life travelling the world in pursuit of entry into major tournaments.
I spent all of September 2005 – including my 24th birthday – alone in Switzerland, playing four week-long tournaments back to back. After 20 matches and with two trophies under my belt, I was ready for a rest. But I had already entered a tournament in Edinburgh – not knowing Switzerland would be quite so intense – for my ninth tournament in 10 weeks.
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.
More:
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 . . . The greats in tennis often become known by their first names – Roger, Rafa, Serena – but the rest of us are known by a number, our world ranking. To a greater extent than in any other sport, world ranking determines who you play, where you play and how much money you make. Tennis players have a deep and lasting relationship with their highest ranking. (Mine was 129.)
Your ranking determined your social status on tour. The guy ranked at number 90 in the world doesn’t get as warm a handshake from the Slam champion as the guy ranked at 20. The Williams sisters didn’t linger to have a chat with me when Serena and I were 16-year-olds training at the Bollettieri tennis academy in Florida, but a girl I hit with who was ranked 50 in the world did stop and talk. Where a player sits in the hierarchy determines how they act, and everyone knows it.
At a later Challenger event in Marburg, Germany, a then 18-year-old Grigor Dimitrov was new to the men’s tour and latched on to me before the delayed arrival of his coach. He knew that I was also travelling alone, and he rang my hotel room a few times. “Hey, wanna grab a pizza?” He was cocky, but friendly, and he knew he needed to earn his stripes at the Challengers. I liked him. He had won Junior Wimbledon and US Open Juniors the year before, and did not know many of the senior players.
As Dimitrov climbed the rankings, he and Niland spoke less and less frequently. “By the time he had cracked the top 20,” Niland writes, “he was ignoring me completely.”
In other news, Carl Rollyson writes about what he learned from indexing Sylvia Plath’s life: “In the index for volume one of Sylvia Plath Day by Day, I have over 100 entries on shopping—by herself, with her mother, with boyfriends, with a boyfriend’s mother, with girlfriends, with her grandparents, with the children she babysat. Shopping was essential for her well being on trips to Filene’s and Bloomingdale’s, for example. Volume two, which tracks her life right up to its final days, contains another 100+ entries for shopping . . . So far as I can determine Ted Hughes never went shopping with Sylvia Plath. He thought her flair for fashion, and her materialistic desires, frivolous. ‘I need to curb my lust for buying dresses,’ she wrote to herself on May 9, 1958 while the married couple were living in Northampton, Massachusetts. Four years later, on her own in London during her last days, she shopped like mad, threw away her country duds, reveled in a new hairdo, and enjoyed wolf whistles on the street. She had repressed a good deal of herself to please the man whose unkempt, often dirty appearance she had schooled herself to tolerate. Indexing Plath’s life helped me to more deeply appreciate why this troubling man won her over.”
Jada Yuan talks to the makers of Napoleon Dynamite for the film’s 20th anniversary: “Few directorial debuts have hit as hard as, or had the kind of life cycle of, Napoleon Dynamite, the nerd-comedy classic made by Mormon film students that turns 20 this month. But how did this little deadpan romp, directed by Jared Hess and co-written with his wife, Jerusha, become such a sensation?”
John Banville takes stock of the painter Francis Bacon’s letters and career: “In his brief foreword to Francis Bacon: A Self-Portrait in Words, Colm Tóibín writes that Bacon’s letters ‘add to our sense of his mystery, his complexity’. It is hard to see the evidence for this assertion – well-intentioned though it surely is – in the couple of hundred dashed-off missives, scribbled postcards and scraps of notes that make up the bulk of this curious ragbag of a book.”
The family that made France: Charlotte Allen reviews Justine Firnhaber-Baker’s history of Hugh Capet’s medieval dynasty: “From 987 to 1328—the death year of King Charles IV, Hugh’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson—every single king of France didn’t just boast Capetian blood, but was the biological son of a preceding French king. This stretch of eleven generations (some of the Capetians succeeded their older brothers) and more than 300 years of father-to-son succession was astounding given the high infant and childhood mortality rate of the Middle Ages . . . the Capetians, far from being kings in name only—as I had incorrectly surmised—actually built the country we now know as France, wrestling it into a nation by dint of warfare, strategic marriages, and delicate political negotiations with the powerful regional princes who’d controlled most of its territory quasi-independently. As Firnhaber-Baker writes, ‘By 1300, Capetian France was not only the most powerful kingdom in Christendom but also the most prestigious . . . It was they who transformed muddy Paris into a splendid metropole and they who are responsible for some of the city’s most cherished tourist attractions, including the Sainte-Chapelle and the Louvre.’”
Steven Poole reviews Geoffrey K. Pullum’s The Truth About English Grammar. On the one hand, he writes: “Pullum is an engaging and friendly writer, always on the side of the ordinary Joe against the nitpickers. A particular delight is how he shows that many “rules” beloved of self-appointed grammar constables were simply made up quite recently by irritable ink-stained wretches.” On the other: “Pullum constantly insists that all modern lexicographers, as well as all grammarians not called Pullum, are wrong about everything, which lends his book a slightly crazed tone of ‘Who are you gonna believe, me or your lying dictionaries?’”
Joseph Bottum revisits F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 collection of short stories Tales of the Jazz Age. “There’s artistry” in the collection, Bottum writes, “but it’s the artistry of an artist adrift. At sea. At a loss for how to steer himself from the fog bank into which he’d sailed.”
The French singer Claude Nougaro, who reinvented himself after a trip to New York in the 1980s, never learned English because he didn’t want it to dilute his French. English subsequently overtook French music, but now, Digby Warde-Aldam reports in The Spectator, Parisian bands are bringing French back:
The small number of musicians in Paris reclaiming their language form a large percentage of its most interesting performers. The improbably danceable indie combo Pleasure Principle are a gripping live act, complete with basslines that meet the twain between early Led Zepplin and classic Chic. Then there is the faintly terrifying DIY electronica of Gino Rotten, which somehow manages to sound both utterly beguiling and much as you might imagine Cherie Blair’s inner monologue would if she were a goth with an unhealthy passion for analogue synths. Most famously, there is the effortfully eccentric rock group La Femme, the only band of the bunch to have made an impression outside the Francophone world. They are intermittently brilliant, but weirdly determined not to let their listeners forget quite how much time they spend on vacation in Los Angeles.
One difference performing in French makes, Orphée says, is that the language lends itself to lyrical choruses and spoken verses, themselves rendered musical by the impossibly complex rhyme schemes drummed into every Republican schoolchild’s head. Loiseau agrees, likening the approach of certain Anglo-imitators — many of whom signal their Anglophone influences via sartorial cosplay — to the affectations of a literary hipster who insists on communicating exclusively via vintage typewriter.
Barton Swaim reviews a new book on the Continental Army’s southern campaign during the Revolutionary War:
“If they succeed against Charles Town,” wrote Gen. George Washington to Gen. Benjamin Lincoln, in command of the garrison in that city, “there is much reason to believe, the Southern States will become the principal theatre of the war.” The siege of South Carolina’s chief port lasted 42 days and ended, on May 12, 1780, in fiery destruction. William Moultrie, a rebel general, recalled “cannon-balls whizzing, and shells hissing continually amongst us; ammunition chests and temporary magazines blowing up; great guns bursting and wounded men groaning along the lines.” A Hessian soldier remembered walking through the town and seeing bodies everywhere, many of them badly burned, some still alive.
Washington was right. Since the Battle of Saratoga in October 1777, in which the colonists achieved a shocking victory in New York that persuaded France to enter the conflict on the American side, the fighting had nearly become a stalemate. For more than two years neither side won a decisive major battle. The fall of Charles Town opened a new front: The British army, under the command of Gen. Charles Cornwallis, would sweep through the Carolinas and into Virginia, enlisting loyalist Americans to take up arms against their neighbors.
The southern campaign of 1780-81, Alan Pell Crawford asserts in This Fierce People, has tended to be overlooked or at least de-emphasized by historians. Even educated Americans, he writes, think of the war “almost exclusively in terms of stirring stories about its beginnings—Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, Washington crossing the Delaware, the cruel winter at Valley Forge.” In fact, the war’s decisive battles, the ones that brought about Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown in 1781, took place in the south.
Elizabeth Corey reviews Timothy Fuller’s Michael Oakeshott on the Human Condition: “Not every essay in this book will appeal to the new reader of Oakeshott, but many of them are lucid introductions to Oakeshott’s intellectual world, much like the sober but brilliant forewords Fuller has written as editor for other collections of Oakeshott’s essays . . . Part of what makes this collection of essays special is that Fuller and Oakeshott were longtime friends. They first met in 1974, when Oakeshott visited Colorado College to deliver an eloquent lecture about liberal education, ‘A Place of Learning.’ They remained close until Oakeshott’s death in 1990, and throughout those sixteen years had ongoing conversations about everything from politics and religion to history and literature.”
Joseph Epstein reviews Antoine Compagnon’s A Summer with Pascal, “a small and slender volume that serves as an excellent introduction to a complex yet intellectually enticing writer”: “Compagnon, who teaches at both Columbia and at the College de France, has written similar Summer with volumes on Montaigne, Baudelaire, and Colette along with longer works on Proust and on French literary history. His Summer with Pascal is a distillation of Pascal’s two chief works, his Pensées and his Provincial Letters.”
The tallest building in America is set to be built in Oklahoma City: “Legends Tower recently gained approval from the city to have an unlimited height, and after a series of changes, the skyscraper is now slated to reach 581 metres (1,907 feet), making it the tallest in the world outside Asia and more than double the height of Oklahoma City’s second-tallest building.”
Pedro Gonzalez reviews the terrible “anti-woke” animated sit-com on X: “Imagine if an endless stream of cringeworthy Boomer Facebook memes were to congeal into an anti-woke Family Guy-style sitcom. You’d get something like The New Norm Show, which is billed as the ‘first animated sit-com on X,’ formerly known as Twitter.”
Redbox files for bankruptcy: “Redbox’s owner, Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, filed for bankruptcy protection overnight. This comes at the tail end of a month in which the DVD rental company defaulted on loans, saw an order for its cars to be repossessed, and missed payroll for employees.”
