Conor Niland laughs and, without hesitating, rejects the idea that he misses the intensity of competition which shaped and sometimes deformed his life as a professional tennis player who reached a high of No 129 in the world. “No,” he exclaims. “I found myself waking up with butterflies in my stomach on the morning of the William Hill [Sports Book of the Year award] and thinking: ‘I haven’t felt this in a while and I don’t particularly miss it.’ I don’t think anyone enjoys butterflies that much.”
Niland scrabbled around on the Futures and Challenger tours, those brutal circuits of hell for players outside the top 100 where intensity is often defined by the need to win a match to earn enough money to pay a hotel bill or book a plane ticket out of Astana or Delhi and fly to the next tournament in the hope of climbing the rankings. The dream of becoming an ATP regular has now been replaced for Niland, who retired from tennis in 2012, by a very different dream in which he deservedly won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award last month for The Racket.
