Professional Tennis: The Reality Behind the Fery-Tale

They’re calling it the „Fery-Tale.“ Arthur Fery, a 23-year-old ranked outside the world’s top 100, has fought his way to the Wimbledon semi-final . He’ll walk out today in front of close to 15,000 spectators on Centre Court to play Alexander Zverev, for a payday of £900,000, just over €1 million, regardless of the result.

It’s the biggest match of his life, played in the biggest arena in tennis, for more money than most professional players will see in several years combined.

Here’s a strange detail worth sitting with, though: Fery went into this Wimbledon ranked 114 in the world. Conor Niland’s career-high ranking, reached at the peak of his own career, was 129. Yet he spent most of his career not on Centre Court, but on the second and third tier of the sport, playing in small tournaments in provincial Siberia, Uzbekistan, and Bosnia. He wrote a book about it, The Racket, which explains tennis life for what he calls „the other 99 percent“ of the sport’s professionals — the ones who live it far from any spotlight.

„Nobody’s watching“

„We’re all tuned into Wimbledon this week — big crowds, big prize money,“ Niland says, describing life outside the top 100. „But for the guys trying to get into that level, there’s no spectators at the Challenger or Futures level. Often you’re making enough money to cover your flight and hotel for the week, but that’s about it.“

It’s the isolation that stays with him more than the money, though. Professional tennis is one of the only major sports where, most weeks, you’re on your own. „With tennis, you’re almost always on the road,“ he says. „It was 30, 35 tournaments a year, plus training weeks away. You’re living out of a suitcase, in Uzbekistan or India, dealing with new food, culture shock, trying to manage your downtime. You’re spending a lot of time in the hotel, because you’re conserving energy and you mightn’t have anyone to go sightseeing with anyway. It can be quite a one-dimensional, slightly monotonous existence.“

He was, for most of his career, the only Irish player at most tournaments — no small group of countrymen to have dinner with, the way players from bigger tennis nations often do. „I was maybe going out to dinner alone, or with my coach,“ he says. It’s a detail that says more about the sport than any ranking table does: you can be good enough to share a locker room with the best players in the world, and still eat alone most nights.

A Dream Snatched Away

One of those small tournaments happens to have been in Austria. In November 2010, Niland won the ATP Challenger event in Salzburg — a joint career-best title, alongside his Israel Open win earlier that year — and it was that Salzburg win specifically that lifted him to his career-high ranking of 129. On the back on that he was able to enter Wimbledon qualifying in 2011, and made it through. In this first-round match he was two-breaks up in the final set against Frenchman Adrian Mannarino, leading 4-1 and within touching distance of a second round date with on Centre Court with Roger Federer. He could have had his own version of the Ferytale, but nerves and hesitation saw the opportunity slip from his grasp. 10 minutes of his best tennis; the tennis he knew he was capable of, could have taken him through to a dream date. But after all those years of dedication, those he couldn’t find them in the moments he needed them most. „I think about that match almost every day, “ he says.

Back To The Grind

And even a good week doesn’t buy you much time. Niland’s reward for finally qualifying at Wimbledon was a Challenger event in Russia a fortnight later — against the exact same opponent, Nikola Mektić, he’d beaten in the last round of Wimbledon qualifying. „It was a bit like going back to the office on a Monday morning, having had three weeks of holidays,“ he says. „It just was a little bit too much reality all at once.“

It’s a small, human detail, but it’s the one that lingers longest. Rather than the near-miss against Federer, or the prize money numbers, it is the image of a man who’d just played on Centre Court, two weeks later, back in a nearly empty arena on the other side of the world, playing the same guy again like nothing had happened, as if he has dreamed the whole thing.

Can a players’ protest actually fix this?

It’s against that backdrop that this year’s Wimbledon prize money protest played out. Top players, led by Aryna Sabalenka and Jannik Sinner, cutting their media duties in a push for Grand Slams to hand over a bigger share of tournament revenue. Sabalenka’s been clear about who it’s for: „It’s not about me. It’s about the players who are lower in the ranking, who are suffering.“

It’s a fair question to ask, though, exactly how that’s supposed to work; and it’s one Niland is careful, rather than triumphant, about answering. He points to his own numbers as evidence it can move: „When I qualified for Wimbledon in 2011, it was £11,500 for losing in the first round. Now it’s £80,000.“ Grand Slams have deliberately steered recent increases toward the early rounds, rather than the champion’s cheque, because that’s roughly where a protest like this one is aimed.

But Niland is honest about where that money doesn’t reach. The Challenger and Futures (now ITF) tours where he actually lived in for most of his career, and where his Salzburg title came from, sit outside the Grand Slams’ prize pool altogether, funded separately by the wider tennis tour. A bigger slice of Wimbledon’s revenue changes life for players who reach a Slam’s qualifying rounds and beyond.

It does nothing, directly, for a player grinding out a living in a near-empty stadium in Uzbekistan. „It’s really important the top players are behind it, because they’re the ones who can get attention and affect change,“ Niland says. It is a careful way of saying that the players it’s supposed to help mostly aren’t the ones in the room.

The other 99 percent

There’s plenty of pathos in Conor Niland’s excellent book. He finally gets his chance on a Grand Slam, a first round match at the US Open against legend of the game Novak Djokovic. But pork-salad leads to a bout of gastric distress and he spends the night before the biggest moment of his career sprinting to the hotel toilet. He is finally on one of the iconic stages of tennis and he feels dizzy, his attention on his bowels and stomach rather than showing the global TV audience what he is capable of. Like rain on your wedding day, Alanis Morrissette would describe it as „ironic“, the rest of us as tear-triggeringly rotten luck. But it is utterly human, in a sport that focuses on the super-human.

Whatever happens against Zverev, Fery’s fairytale belongs to the tiny percentage of tennis anyone ever sees. Niland’s book is a reminder that behind every one of those stories is a much larger, quieter sport: thousands of players, in hotel rooms in cities most of us have never heard of, chasing something most of them will never quite catch. Not because they’re not good enough. Just because, a bounce of the ball, a sponsorship deal, a wrong decision, a moment of jittering nerves or a bout of food-poisoning can be the difference between glory and anonymity. Fery is feeling the glory, but sweaty, lonely anonymity is what 99 percent of professional tennis actually looks like.