On Conor Niland's The Racket, Andrew Porter's Heart on My Sleeve, and the lives hidden behind the scoreboard

I do not read sports books.

I barely watch sport, and when I do, I am extremely hard work. How many are on each side? How long does this last? Why has everyone stopped? Is that allowed? I do not so much watch a match as conduct an unsolicited oral examination of the people beside me. By the end, I may understand one rule and everyone else has lost the will to live.

So when Mick began raving about Conor Niland's The Racket two years ago, it was unexpected. Mick is not a tennis fanatic either. He was recommending it because it was one of the best books he had read that year.

Then came Andrew Porter's Heart on My Sleeve. Again, people kept saying some version of the same thing: it is not really a sports book, it is a human book.

This phrase usually makes me bristle. Every decent book is a human book. It can sound faintly apologetic, as though sport must be disguised as grief, family, money or mental health before the serious reader can be persuaded to pick it up.

Yet I knew what they meant.

Some sports books ask you to care because you already know the score matters. Others show you what has been compressed into that score: childhood, ambition, family sacrifice, bodily fear, private shame, money, luck and timing. By the time the match arrives, it is no longer merely a match.

The Racket and Heart on My Sleeve are very different books. Niland writes from the precarious outer reaches of elite tennis, where someone can be among the best in the world and still travel alone, lose money and remain practically invisible. Porter writes from the centre of Irish rugby, a decorated international whose body has become a public symbol of strength.

Niland lived close enough to the summit to see exactly what separated him from it. Porter reached that summit and discovered that success had done little to quiet the life underneath it. Both books loosen sport's favourite words, winning, losing, toughness, resilience and self-belief, until they become much less certain when applied to a whole life.

The other 99 per cent

The subtitle of The Racket is On Tour with Tennis's Golden Generation and the Other 99%. Most of us understand professional tennis through a tiny number of players. They appear on the courts television chooses to show, surrounded by coaches, physios, agents and family. Their equipment and drinks materialise where needed. Their careers are discussed through titles, rivalries and legacies.

Niland shows the much larger professional world supporting that spectacle.

He reached a career-high ranking of 129. To someone outside tennis, 129 can sound ordinary, as though he was quite good but belonged to a different category from the names we recognise. In fact, it represents an extraordinary level of achievement. Niland won Challenger titles, represented Ireland in the Davis Cup and fought through three rounds of qualifying to reach the main draws of Wimbledon and the US Open in 2011.

What the ranking did not provide was security.

Players below the protected top level arrange much of their own travel, accommodation, practice and support. They often tour without a coach, paying the costs of improving before earning the money that improvement might bring. Niland's career prize money was just under a quarter of a million dollars in singles and doubles combined. That sounds substantial until it is understood as gross income across years, before flights, hotels, equipment, treatment, tax and the weeks when an early loss produced little return.

After The Racket won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year, Niland noted that the £30,000 prize was worth roughly twice what he had received for his biggest tournament victory. Writing about the financial absurdity of professional tennis produced the largest single prize of his life.

The book's humour stops this becoming a ledger of grievance. After winning a Challenger final in Salzburg, Niland is almost immediately travelling to another tournament in Japan. He misreads an itinerary, confuses place names, boards the wrong train and is expected to play after a journey that has consumed the better part of a day. Victory does not bring a pause long enough to feel like success. It simply sends him somewhere else.

He also writes about the smaller humiliations of professional life, including an exhibition set against a sponsor's teenage son, when he must calculate the socially acceptable degree of dominance. The comedy is not decorative. It reveals the constant practical negotiation beneath supposedly glamorous sport.

Niland's memory of Andre Agassi asking for water in a player lounge is especially sharp. Agassi stands beside a fridge filled with bottles, yet someone immediately fetches one for him. Niland describes him as “besieged by help”.

That phrase explains privilege better than a page of statistics. At the top, friction is removed. Someone checks the booking, carries the bag, finds the practice court and notices the injury. Talent remains necessary, but talent does not spend its energy locating the correct train.

Niland was close enough to the golden generation to know them as other players. He beat Roger Federer as a junior, practised with Serena Williams and eventually faced Novak Djokovic at the US Open. He was not a fan looking through the fence. Nor was he protected by the world surrounding the stars. He inhabited the uncomfortable position of the almost-insider.

Achievement misnamed as failure

Calling The Racket the story of a very good player who was not quite good enough would be easy, but it would also repeat the judgement the book is examining.

Almost nobody reaches No. 129 in the world. Yet elite sport does not measure achievement against ordinary possibility. It measures everyone against the small number still above them. The successful person looks upward until accomplishment begins to feel like exclusion.

This is why the book travels beyond tennis. Many professions create the same distortion. There is always another list, prize, room or person whose career appears to validate their entire life.

Niland's career began long before he turned professional. His father built a court in the garden. His mother drove immense distances to lessons and tournaments. Tennis became the organising principle of childhood.

He writes about the love and sacrifice within this without turning his parents into villains. Their commitment made his achievements possible. Still, the adult memoir can examine what a child could not. When unusual ability appears, families begin making decisions on behalf of a future that does not yet exist. Weekends, friendships and alternatives fall away. Refusing to push may waste a gift; continuing may construct a life the child did not fully choose.

Talent also needs an environment. Niland grew up in a country without the depth of elite coaching and high-level competition available elsewhere. He could dominate at home and meet players abroad who had accumulated stronger practice partners, more specialised coaching and a clearer route through the sport. His early belief was not simply an inner flame that burned less brightly than theirs. Belief is reinforced by systems, money and daily evidence.

At eight, he dreamed of winning Wimbledon. By twelve, after encountering juniors who appeared to belong to another level, the dream had contracted to playing there once. That was not merely maturity but information.

When Wimbledon finally comes in the book, the match carries all those years. Niland qualifies in 2011 and faces Adrian Mannarino, with Roger Federer waiting for the winner. He forces the match into a fifth set and moves 4-1 ahead. He is preparing to serve for 5-1 when the future becomes suddenly visible: Federer, Centre Court, public recognition, and the possibility that years of obscure labour may finally become legible to everyone else.

Mannarino wins the next five games.

A few months later, Niland again survives qualifying and draws world number one Novak Djokovic on Arthur Ashe Stadium. He has food poisoning and retires after 44 minutes, physically incapable of giving the occasion the performance it seems to demand.

A career can become condensed into a handful of matches, but those matches remain vulnerable to nerves, illness, injury and one thought arriving at the wrong moment. Years of work are forced through openings narrow enough for luck to become part of the verdict.

The public body and the private child

Andrew Porter's Heart on My Sleeve begins from a different kind of visibility. Porter has played for Leinster, Ireland and the British and Irish Lions. His body is observed, discussed and measured as part of his work. A loosehead prop is expected to look indestructible, a figure of force, weight and appetite for collision.

The memoir complicates that body from the beginning.

Porter's mother, Wendy, died from breast cancer when he was twelve. He was moving into adolescence, already a period of unstable identity, when the person who had organised much of his emotional world disappeared. His father and sisters were grieving too. They knew he was in pain, but much of its depth and form remained hidden.

The silence was not necessarily imposed by people unwilling to listen. It grew inside a wounded family where Porter did not know how to make his pain visible without adding to theirs. He became angry and difficult, disappeared without telling his father where he was and drank vodka alone from a water bottle.

He also began controlling food.

He skipped breakfast, avoided lunch, lied about dinner and reduced an apple to its skin. The behaviour was private, methodical and increasingly consuming. At twelve, he had learned that the central fact of his life could change without his permission. Food offered rules, denial and evidence of will. Hunger could be chosen. The body could be made to obey.

Porter had already been self-conscious about his size and had once asked a pharmacist for weight-loss products. Bereavement deepened an existing unease and gave it another purpose.

Later, professional rugby required the same body to move in the opposite direction. Porter did not simply have to accept being large. He had to become larger deliberately, to eat beyond comfort, train for mass and turn his body into one suited to a highly specialised role. The body once disciplined through absence was now disciplined through intake.

This reversal is one of the richest parts of the book. It resists the easy account in which Porter overcomes an eating problem and becomes strong. Restriction and forced bulking may look like opposites, but both distance a person from ordinary hunger, appetite and physical ease. Both organise the body around control and external demand.

Rugby celebrated the result. Porter became stronger, more effective and more valuable. Yet the body remained where grief, shame, work and identity met.

Strength is not safety

Porter says he did not want the memoir to become a “pity party”. The phrase is revealing. Even while disclosing pain, he anticipates the possibility that speaking about it will be judged as indulgence.

Male sport prizes self-sufficiency, pain tolerance and the ability to continue. A team can offer extraordinary companionship while still allowing a person to remain emotionally hidden. Porter's isolation therefore differs from Niland's. Niland is often literally alone, carrying the travel and defeats of an individual tour. Porter is surrounded by a club, coaches and teammates, yet believes parts of his life must still be solved privately. His isolation occurs inside belonging.

His adult ADHD diagnosis gives him a more compassionate vocabulary for some of the child and adolescent behaviour he had treated as evidence that something was wrong with him. His sister found old school reports, kept by their mother, which seemed to contain obvious signs when read years later. The diagnosis does not excuse everything or turn the memoir into a single explanation. It allows him to replace moral accusation with understanding.

For years, the question had been: why am I like this? The diagnosis allowed him to begin asking how his mind worked and what it needed.

The 2023 Rugby World Cup defeat to New Zealand is where the public and private narratives meet most forcefully. Ireland's exit was a national sporting disappointment. For Porter it became consuming. He replayed his perceived mistakes and subjected himself to a private trial with no possibility of acquittal.

Therapy helped him see that the intensity belonged partly to an older loss. As he describes it, the World Cup defeat activated an emotional pattern laid down after his mother's death. The situations were not equivalent, but both involved something precious being taken away and an inability to prevent it. His mind and body recognised the shape before he understood the connection.

This is more searching than the familiar sporting confession in which an athlete reaches a low point and discovers resilience. Porter begins to understand that accountability does not require total condemnation, and that some of the adult's self-punishment belongs to a boy who had no power over the defining loss of his life.

Many readers will recognise the mechanism even if they have never watched rugby. A criticism, rejection or ending can produce feelings whose scale seems to belong elsewhere. The adult understands the facts while the body has already entered an older room.

Porter has spoken of finding value in a kind of everyday Stoicism, a language of perspective, responsibility and attention to what can be controlled. It is easy to see the appeal for an athlete whose work depends on discipline and acceptance of discomfort.

His life also shows how easily Stoicism can be confused with suppression. Control, endurance, self-denial and independence may look admirable from outside. Taken too far, they become isolation and punishment. Rather than reject toughness, the book asks for a version broad enough to include speaking, accepting help and recognising when an old survival strategy is causing new harm.

The making of the memoir reflects that change. Porter supplied the life material. Richie Sadlier, a former professional footballer and practising psychotherapist, conducted the interviews and helped draw out memories Porter had buried or forgotten. Alison Walsh shaped the material into the finished narrative.

Porter sent the first draft to his family with a warning that it contained things he had never told them. Publication is usually imagined as revelation to strangers. Here, the first shock belonged to the people closest to him, discovering how much had happened beyond their sight.

That vulnerability is sharpened by the fact that Porter is still playing. Retirement memoirs have the safety of an ending. Porter remains available for selection, criticism, injury and defeat. Heart on My Sleeve is not an explanation delivered from the calm of afterwards. It is an attempt to live differently while the story continues.

His work with Tackle Your Feelings, including visits to schools, gives the book a life beyond disclosure. It takes the experience back towards young people who may recognise some version of grief, shame or silence before they possess the language for it.

What kind of books are these?

These are sports books. Entirely.

Tennis is not incidental to The Racket. Its rankings, economics, lonely geography and unequal infrastructure created Niland's particular experience. Rugby is not background decoration in Heart on My Sleeve. It altered Porter's body, rewarded control, offered belonging and supplied the defeat through which an older grief returned.

Calling them human books should not require removing them from sport. It should make us think more seriously about what sport contains.

A sports book may deal in tactics, rivalries and championships. It can also be about labour, parenting, institutions, masculinity, appetite and the consequences of turning the body into the main tool of employment. Sport makes these subjects unusually visible because it provides numbers. Rankings, caps, scores and trophies appear to give clean answers to questions that remain untidy in ordinary life.

Niland was 129, in a global population of 7 billion people, he was ranked no 129 in the world. Porter has won major honours. Both statements are accurate and radically incomplete.

The Racket shows someone accomplishing what almost nobody could and learning to interpret it as falling short. Heart on My Sleeve shows someone acquiring the recognised signs of success while carrying grief and self-punishment that achievement could neither identify nor settle.

I still could not confidently explain the offside rule and would require supervision through a five-set match. These books did not convert me into a sports fan. They made the result intelligible as part of a life.

When Niland reaches 4-1 in the fifth set at Wimbledon, the point contains the court his father built, the journeys made by his mother, the years spent travelling without protection and the possibility that the sport might finally acknowledge what the work amounted to.

When Porter writes about the aftermath of the 2023 World Cup defeat, the match is no longer confined to the pitch. It is entangled with the loss of his mother, adolescent control, adult self-judgement and the long delay before he understood why defeat felt so absolute.

These books do not ask the reader to admire sport from a distance or to excuse an interest in it by claiming the story is secretly about something else. They go far enough inside sport to find the family, the child, the body and the private life already there.

Buy — The Racket (2025) €14.30

Buy — Heart on My Sleeve (2026) €11.99