HERE WE GO: The fight of our top tennis player continues, but there are no lack of positive signs, as

The fight of our top tennis player continues, but there are no lack of positive signs, as he is already preparing in the Chinese metropolis for his reverse step on

Iwas 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.

This is your job now, Conor.

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.

I had my first closeup of the big time when the main ATP event rolled into San Jose, California for a week while I was a student at Berkeley. I was allowed to sit in the players’ lounge despite the fact that I was not a competitor. Our team had been brought down to the event by our coaches and given access-all-areas passes, with a view to soaking up the atmosphere and gaining inspiration.

All ATP tournaments need big names to draw crowds and media interest, and the top players can make seven figures simply for showing up for the first round. In San Jose, Andre Agassi was the big name. I was sitting in the players’ lounge when I looked up to see him walk past, surrounded by a gaggle of tournament organisers. I felt a surge of adrenaline seeing him up close for the first time. Some things about him were familiar – his brisk walk, pigeon-toed stance and rounded shoulders, as though permanently setting himself to return serve. Some others were unfamiliar. I’d never noticed his vacant gaze before, which was presumably the product of a long-practised avoidance of eyes staring at him.

“Can we get you anything, Andre?” the gaggle circling him asked earnestly. “Uh, sure, I’ll have some water,” he replied half-heartedly, even though he was standing a few paces from a fridge full of bottled water. He wanted to give them something to do. One of them was dispatched and quickly came back with a plastic glass full of chilled water. Andre took a small sip and put it down on the table beside him, the one I was sitting at. He didn’t pick it back up. After a few moments, Andre and his entourage moved on.

I couldn’t stop staring at the glass of water he had left behind, and considering what it represented. I stared at the smudges left in the condensation by his fingers, and then watched the water marks slowly bleed out to the bottom of the glass. Agassi later wrote in his autobiography of how lonely he found tennis. I understood what he meant, of course – I found it lonely, too. But remembering the sight of him besieged by help in San Jose, I think I’d have preferred his kind of loneliness.

All serious tennis players – from gods such as Agassi to college players like I was at the time – have to grapple with isolation. For people who are comfortable with it, pro tennis can be a refuge: they find it behind a hotel door, with headphones on in a far-flung airport and, above all, inside the white lines of the court. The downside is that the victories are often private, too. When you remove the headphones, there is probably no one around to talk to; and even if there is, you probably don’t speak the same language. We were a strange cohort: sharing courts, canteens and coaches around the world but remaining ultimately alone.

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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

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.

“I like watches and speak English perfect,” he told me with a huge grin. I chose not to correct him, remembering my Bulgarian was sketchy. He also confided, even more proudly, that “Sharapova likes me, man”.

We practised together for the week. “Hey,” he shouted to me across the court during one hit, his eyes smiling. He went into an impression of my stiff-looking walk, then picked up two balls and did an impression of my serve. It was very accurate. And funny. Professional tennis players are usually very good physical mimics. It’s how they got good in the first place, by copying what they saw on TV and processing physical cues from their opponents. And Dimitrov, a world-class talent, was really good at it. They called him “Baby Fed”, because his style was nearly identical to Federer’s. I laughed back to him across the court, but suddenly felt my age.

Several years later, I watched Maria Sharapova, now officially his girlfriend, cheering him on courtside at Wimbledon. I bumped into him occasionally, but his greeting to me became less and less effusive as his ranking climbed higher.

By the time he had cracked the top 20, he was ignoring me completely.

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If Andre Agassi was lonely but never alone, players on the Futures tour are both. Whereas the top 100 repeatedly come across each other at the same events every year, there is nowhere near the same level of consistency in the lower ranks. There are one or two Tour events staged every week across the world for the top guys, but roughly four or five Challenger events a week, and between 10 and 12 Futures events. The usual message of farewell among players is, “See you somewhere.”

The loneliness of my early years on the Futures tour could be crushing, and it made the time spent not playing tennis more difficult than the tennis itself. You need to conserve energy, and I was obsessed with recovering by staying off my feet. My body invariably ached after a three-set match, so I had to become an expert at passing time. I almost never went sightseeing on a day off. That was partly to conserve energy, partly because I had nobody to go with. And in many of the one-horse towns that hosted Futures events, there weren’t any sights to see.

Some players did go out partying locally, which I always felt was a stupid thing to do. Why put yourself through the budget travel, practice and expense to then go drinking in some remote and isolated corner of the world? Drinking obviously inhibited performance but, apart from that, there was rarely anywhere interesting to go in the vicinity of a Futures event. There were, I’m pretty sure, no good boozers around the Smash Tennis Academy in Cairo.

I staved off the boredom of competing on the fringes of Europe and Asia by sleeping in as late as I could, to limit the number of dull, conscious hours. I often spent entire afternoons and evenings subjecting myself to endless loops of BBC news, punctuated only by the refrain for India’s tourism campaign – Incredible India! – and the BBC’s Lyse Doucet’s peculiar accent. I learned more about Middle Eastern conflicts from her than I wanted to. These were the sounds of my afternoons and evenings. I caught myself occasionally referring to the hotel as “home” when waiting for the tournament shuttle bus to take me back from the courts. And I would return to Ireland from three-week trips to these exotic places with no notable stories or experiences. “How was Morocco?” I would be asked. “Fine,” I would say, with nothing else to add.