Culture

Conor Niland’s book ‘The Racket’ documents fear and loathing on the tennis tour

Published

1 month ago

December 9, 2024

Conor Niland’s book ‘The Racket’ documents fear and loathing on the tennis tour

When Conor Niland picked up £30,000 for winning the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award three weeks ago, it was double his biggest payday throughout a seven-year professional tennis career.

This neatly encompasses what Niland’s award-winning book, “The Racket”, is all about — the reality of being a tennis player outside the elite. For players like Niland, who reached a career high of world No. 129 and never went further than the first round at a major, Grand Slam glamour gives way to the grind of the second-tier (Challenger) and third-tier (ITF) tours, crisscrossing the world on cheap flights — and one hair-raising drive through the Uzbekistan countryside without a seatbelt.

The Racket covers a side of tennis often overshadowed by bigger events and more famous names, which is part of the reason it has captured the imagination not just of the sport’s own fans but of the wider sporting public. “It’s very accessible to people who don’t follow tennis, but it isn’t watered-down in any way for those who do know and understand the sport,” Niland says in a Zoom interview at the start of December.

Part of what makes the Ireland Davis Cup captain’s book so fascinating is his discussion of the mental challenges of tennis, which are varied and intense. Niland sees the book as a counterweight to “Open”, eight-time Grand Slam champion Andre Agassi’s searingly honest 2009 autobiography which deals with similar themes but focuses on the top of tennis. It also has kinship with “Challengers”, the Zendaya tennis movie centered on a top pro tennis player trying to return to glory on the Challenger circuit.

“You’re in your head a lot, that’s for sure,” Niland says, explaining that musicians and actors who are hoping to ‘make it’ have reached out after feeling kinship with his story. “You’re on your own. And you’ve got an awful lot of time to reflect … Tennis asks so much of you.”

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Niland, 43, turned pro in 2005.

He qualified for two Grand Slams but lost in the first round of both. He blew a 4-1 final set lead against Frenchman Adrian Mannarino at Wimbledon in 2011; had he won, he would have played Roger Federer in the next round. He then had to retire with food poisoning while trailing Novak Djokovic 6-0, 5-1 on Arthur Ashe Stadium at that year’s U.S. Open. Those two defeats were his biggest career payouts, ahead of winning the Israel Open Challenger event in 2010 — until last month’s William Hill award.

Niland, as a promising 12-year-old from a country with negligible tennis pedigree, beat Federer in a friendly at the Winter Cup youth tournament in 1994. He trained at the Nick Bollettieri academy in Florida with Serena Williams, before competing on the U.S. college tennis circuit for the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied English literature and language.

He retired, aged 30, in 2012 because of a persistent hip injury but didn’t start writing his book for another eight years. Niland started jotting down some thoughts during the Covid-19 lockdown and found that they were gushing out of him; a few weeks later, he had a book proposal from publisher Penguin. Irish sportswriter Gavin Cooney was a ghostwriter on the project, but much of the writing is Niland’s own.

He feels tennis is a misunderstood sport: a profession in which around 100 men and women can make a decent living each year while thousands of others play for little reward. “It’s not good enough that there aren’t 300, 400 people in the world, men and women, who can make a very decent income,” Niland says, pointing to golf as an example of a sport with a better remuneration structure. Ultimately, only 128 men and women can be in any Grand Slam event’s draw, which makes getting those bigger paydays harder.

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This creates a brutal hierarchy, which is at the heart of The Racket. Niland paints a vivid picture of tennis’ haves and have-nots, documenting a training session with idol Pete Sampras among portraits of the myriad characters all the way down the sport’s rungs. Niland’s peers crave support and success, while the likes of Agassi and Sampras occupy another universe; he recalls Agassi surrounded at a tournament by so many hangers-on that he accepts a glass of water he doesn’t really want, just to give them something to do.

What Niland also captures is that players, even greats such as Sampras and Agassi, don’t breathe that rarefied air from the start; he uses current world No. 10 Grigor Dimitrov as an example of how the tennis hierarchy moves. He recalls getting on well with Dimitrov when the Bulgarian was a wide-eyed teenager who proudly declared that “(Maria) Sharapova likes me, man”, before explaining that Dimitrov became more distant as he rose up the food chain. “By the time he had cracked the top 20, he was ignoring me completely,” he writes.

There is scarcely more friendliness among players of the same level, though, especially on the Challenger and ITF Tours where people are fighting for their livelihoods as well as their ranking points. “Locker rooms on the lesser tours are full of strangers with bad tattoos,” Niland writes. “Everyone is just polite enough not to call one another out for being an a**hole, but selfishness is rewarded. Everyone is in competition with one another and on the lookout for a weakness in everybody else.”

Conor Niland’s only main-draw match at Wimbledon ended in heartbreak as he lost in five sets (Clive Mason / Getty Images)

These are power structures that people who have never gone near tennis can relate to, whether on the corporate ladder or in social groups. In tennis, as in all fields of life, “you’re constantly self-analyzing,” Niland says.

The tensions intrinsic to these hierarchies have boiled over in the past few months in the wake of high-profile doping cases involving men’s world No. 1 Jannik Sinner and women’s world No. 2 Iga Swiatek. Tennis players and fans largely accept that it is a tiered sport: the top players aren’t just paid more on and off the court, but receive preferential treatment in terms of court allocations and appearance fees.

Low-level players who do make it into bigger tournaments won’t get picked for show courts equipped with roofs for when it rains; they are less likely to make deep runs and so rarely know when their matches will be scheduled or how long they’ll be at a tournament for. An early defeat can mean a panic to change flights and an unexpected series of wins can mean scrambling for a new hotel room. The Challenger and ITF or ‘Futures’ circuits are played at small venues with modest facilities and few spectators.

The Racket sees Niland recount Federer summoning the British player Dan Evans to his base in Dubai for a few weeks of off-season workouts, insisting that every practice match be at 7 p.m. local time. Federer knew he would play the first match of his next tournament three weeks before the tournament even started.

Players accept these kinds of privileges. Things get heated when people perceive the accepted double standards in other realms.

Several of Sinner’s peers vented their frustration in August when he was not banned after twice testing positive for the banned substance clostebol, even though the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) followed due process throughout an investigation that led to a “no fault or negligence” verdict. Sinner received a provisional suspension for each positive test, but quickly and successfully appealed on both occasions, meaning he could keep playing without the bans being made public until the conclusion of the ITIA’s investigation.

‘One rule for them, another for us’ was the essential complaint. In November, Swiatek’s positive test for trimetazidine (TMZ) from contaminated melatonin (sleeping tablets) medication led to a month’s ban. Swiatek also quickly and successfully appealed her provisional suspension, which the ITIA issued in September.

On this occasion, lower-ranked players emphasized that only elite players like Sinner and Swiatek can afford the swift legal and medical advice and testing required to appeal their provisional suspensions. Players only have a 10-day window and ITIA chief executive Karen Moorhouse accepted that players with more resources are better positioned to deal with incidents like this.

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Niland feels the segregation of the Challenger and ITF Tours “downgrades” tennis outside of the rankings’ top 100s and “makes it seem like we’re not legitimate professionals,” describing the Swiatek case as a “perfect example” of why tennis is perceived to be a two-tier sport.

“The fact that they’re able to announce to the world on their terms on their own Instagram page … Tennis has a bad habit of thinking the very best players in the sport are the sport and that they’re bigger than the sport. It’s the way these things are managed and the feeling that it’s the haves and the have-nots,” he says.

Niland never directly witnessed doping but was once approached to fix a match by an anonymous caller. He hung up the phone.

Unable to afford the entourage and support teams of the best players, Niland describes the “crushing” loneliness and isolation of being a lower-ranked tennis player.

“I made virtually no lasting friendships on tour through my seven years, despite coming across hundreds of players my own age living the same life as my own,” he writes. Players who do strike up bonds, such as Dane Sweeny and Calum Puttergill, two Australians who document their seasons on YouTube, spend time figuring out if they can afford to lose a match or not.

Niland also recalls the unhealthy obsession with one’s ranking — the digits that measure a player’s sense of self-worth. He says he still gets a “flash of adrenaline” when he sees the number 129, say on a digital clock, remembering the constant fretting about losing points won the previous year.

“By September, you’re already thinking about the points you might lose in February,” he says.

“You’re dealing with losing constantly and constantly trying to get better and comparing yourself with the very best in the world,” he says, explaining that the intertwining of results with self-esteem was the worst part of the job.

And the best? “It was great to wake up with a dream every day — mine was to play at the Grand Slams. The fact I actually got to do it was great, even though it was bittersweet.”

Niland hopes The Racket humanizes the players below the sport’s top 100, explaining that one of the biggest misconceptions about tennis is the perceived gulf in talent between the elite and those just below them. It’s a much smaller gap than people think, he says, and very small margins can determine a player’s career trajectory.

Nowadays, Niland is the Irish Davis Cup captain, but his main job is with a commercial real estate company.

He lives in Dublin with his wife and kids (Emma, eight, and six-year-old Tom), all of whom play tennis, something he very rarely does anymore. Full-time coaching doesn’t appeal, but he would love to keep writing, with the work on this book helping him to process his gruelling first career: “I think some of the ‘failures’ in the book are what makes it more compelling and the fact that there isn’t necessarily a happy ending for me in the tennis context. I guess the happy ending is this book.

“Tennis can offer you something — you might get bits and pieces out of it, but it’s not necessarily going to save you.”

(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Dan Goldfarb)

Related Topics:Featured Sports Business Tennis

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Culture

The Most Anticipated Book Adaptations of 2025: Movies and TV Shows

Published

7 hours ago

January 21, 2025

Press Room

The Most Anticipated Book Adaptations of 2025: Movies and TV Shows

New Year, new reading goals. It’s that season again when anything feels possible: Maybe this is the year you’ll finally tackle that dust-laden copy of “Infinite Jest” sitting on your shelf, or earn your “I finished ‘The Power Broker’” mug. And for binge watchers, it’s also the perfect chance to study up by diving into the books that are being adapted into movies and TV shows in 2025. Here are some of the thrillers, romances, sci-fi page turners and detective novels coming soon to a screen near you.

This is a running list. Check back for more updates as the year goes on.

By Matthew Quirk

Peter Sutherland is an F.B.I. agent who works at the White House, monitoring an emergency phone line that seldom rings. One night, he receives a distressing call from a woman named Rose Larkin, who reports that two people have just been murdered. What follows is a whirlwind of action and suspense as the two become entangled in a conspiracy involving high-level corruption and espionage.

Season 2 of “The Night Agent” premieres on Netflix on Jan. 23.

By Arthur Conan Doyle

There have been no shortage of screen versions of Sherlock Holmes, Doyle’s beloved British detective: According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the persnickety genius is the second-most portrayed literary character in the history of film. In “Watson,” the latest adaptation, however, the focus is on Dr. John Watson, Holmes’s loyal confidant and the frequent narrator of his escapades. Though the series is not inspired by a specific book or story, “A Study in Scarlet” is a delectable primer on the two men’s longstanding friendship.

“Watson” premieres on CBS and Paramount+ on Jan. 26.

By Dav Pilkey

In this spinoff of Pilkey’s “Captain Underpants” universe, Dog Man — a part-dog, part-human police officer — and his eccentric friends battle villains and solve crimes. Blending humor, action and heart, the graphic novel series teaches young readers about friendship and bravery — all brought to life through colorful illustrations and quirky anthropomorphic characters. It has already been adapted into an Off Broadway musical. Now it heads to the big screen.

“Dog Man” premieres in theaters on Jan. 31.

By Helen Fielding

In this third installment of Fielding’s series about an endearingly hapless British diarist, Bridget Jones is adjusting to widowed life after the death of her husband, Mark Darcy. Raising her two young children as a single mother now in her 50s, she juggles her career and navigates romantic mishaps with characteristic wit and self-deprecating humor. The book, our critic wrote, “is not only sharp and humorous, despite its heroine’s aged circumstances, but also snappily written, observationally astute and at times genuinely moving.”

“Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy” premieres on Peacock on Feb. 13.

By Michael Bond

Paddington was still in Peru when he first appeared on the big screen in 2014. Now, over a decade later, he returns to his home country with his adopted Brown family in the third installment of this fan-favorite film series, inspired by Bond’s beloved books. Dozens of titles, including novels, picture books and short story collections, have been published since the clumsy brown bear made his print debut in 1958, but “A Bear Called Paddington” remains a perfect introduction to the marmalade enthusiast.

“Paddington in Peru” premieres in theaters on Feb. 14.

By Giuseppe di Lampedusa

In this 1958 novel, now being given the mini-series treatment, Prince Don Fabrizio Corbera grapples with the decline of his aristocratic family’s status in 1860s Sicily, as Giuseppe Garibaldi leads the Risorgimento campaign to overthrow the monarchy and unite Italy as one nation-state. Lampedusa was himself the last in a line of Sicilian princes, and he drew heavily on his own family’s story to craft this tale about the rise of a new bourgeois class and Prince Fabrizio’s struggles to find his place in a rapidly changing world.

“The Leopard” premieres on Netflix on March 5.

By Edward Ashton

Mickey, an “expendable” worker on a remote ice planet, knows he will most likely die on the job. But no matter: Cloning exists in this space colony and, after one version of Mickey dies, a new one will regenerate. After Mickey7 goes missing on a space mission, Mickey8 is immediately created. The only problem? Mickey7 is still alive. (And in case eight regenerations weren’t enough, the director Bong Joon Ho takes it 10 steps further in his film adaptation, “Mickey17,” starring Robert Pattinson as Mickey.)

“Mickey17” premieres in theaters on March 7.

By Dennis Tafoya

Ray and his best friend, Manny, met in a juvenile detention facility. Nearly two decades later, they’ve found a way to make a living by posing as D.E.A. agents and raiding drug houses in Philadelphia. It’s a simple and lucrative grift — until a poorly chosen mark puts them in the cross hairs of a dangerous kingpin. High-speed car chases, bloody violence and many flying bullets ensue.

“Dope Thief” premieres on Apple TV+ on March 14.

By Hilary Mantel

“The Mirror and Light” is the final book in Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” trilogy, which chronicles Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power in Henry VIII’s capricious court. It’s a sinewy, imaginative work of historical fiction that delights in the psyche of a man whose political maneuvering and ambitions lead him to the pinnacle of power — and to his own undoing. The actor Mark Rylance, who won a BAFTA for his portrayal of Cromwell in the 2015 mini series that covered the trilogy’s first two novels, returns for this final chapter.

“Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light” premieres on PBS on March 23.

Culture

Unrivaled’s an instant hit, but can the new women’s basketball 3×3 league sustain?

Published

15 hours ago

January 21, 2025

Press Room

Unrivaled’s an instant hit, but can the new women’s basketball 3×3 league sustain?

MEDLEY, Fla. — Outside a custom-built arena on the outskirts of Miami, a line of fans waited to sit on a throne composed largely of basketballs. They wrote personal answers on a sign asking, “What does Unrivaled mean to you?” Empowerment. Leadership. Community. Future. Not even some evening rain could extinguish the buzz that had been building since 2023, when fans learned about the creation of this new 3×3 women’s basketball league.

As fans filed into the 850-seat Wayfair Arena on Friday night for the opening night of Unrivaled, they sported a tapestry of WNBA gear. But many wanted new apparel, too, crowding into the gift shop an hour before tipoff. The least expensive single ticket cost north of $300, but fans flocked to support their favorite WNBA stars and witness a new chapter of women’s basketball history.

At tip-off before the first game of a doubleheader, co-founders Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart posed at center court for a photo to capture the moment before they competed against each other.

The nationally televised contests aired back to back on TNT, highlights replayed on SportsCenter, and a clip of Skylar Diggins-Smith sinking the league’s first game-ending shot amassed millions of views across various social media platforms.

In its opening weekend of games, Unrivaled has undoubtedly commanded attention. But to carve out a permanent space in women’s basketball, it needs to accomplish what many other start-up sports leagues have historically failed to do: sustain.

Unrivaled executives say the league’s long-term success has been set up by its stable foundation — signing renowned WNBA stars, attracting big-brand sponsors, capitalizing on lucrative investments and inking a multi-year television deal.

“I think we put ourselves in a great position to be successful right away, but it’s a marathon,” said league president Alex Bazzell, a basketball skills trainer and Collier’s husband. “We’re not running out there from Day 1 trying to get millions of viewers out of the gate. It would be tremendous, but we’re gonna be here for a little while.”

Phee with the steal and Sky got it done 😮‍💨🔥 pic.twitter.com/CtpkLUnznR
— Unrivaled Basketball (@Unrivaledwbb) January 18, 2025

Before Unrivaled filled its rosters with 22 WNBA All-Stars, it started with just two — Stewart and Collier. Like many of their WNBA peers, the star forwards share a history of spending months overseas during the offseason and competing professionally abroad to supplement their WNBA incomes and sharpen their games.

The routine sparked brainstorming between them. Bazzell first pitched Unrivaled to Stewart in late 2022. “(We were) trying to make women’s basketball continue to be relevant in the offseason from a professional standpoint,” she said.

From the beginning, both players were on constant phone and Zoom calls. They met with investors, relaying their experiences from their years in countries such as Turkey, France, China and Russia. They explained why they believe top women’s basketball players should be marketed in the U.S. during the WNBA offseason and how Unrivaled could offer comparable domestic competition and salaries on par with high-paying overseas clubs.

They wanted to convince stakeholders that Unrivaled wouldn’t be just a novelty but that the league would have staying power. “(Stewart and Collier were) instrumental because when brands come in they act like founders,” Bazzell said.

The two players, alongside other Unrivaled executives, sold their idea to major brands and to deep-pocketed investors, including Gary Vaynerchuk, U.S. soccer star Alex Morgan and NBA legend Carmelo Anthony.

Bazzell said the league already has “far exceeded” the first-year revenue expectations it pitched to initial investors. “We’re focused on building a great business, but for the time being we don’t have to worry about money,” he said.

That is partially because of its media rights deal — a six-year $100 million agreement with Warner Bros. Discovery, according to a source with knowledge of the agreement — and a robust sponsorship roster.

The day before tipoff last week, Stewart paused for a moment and pointed out a banner displaying some of Unrivaled’s partners: Ally, Under Armour, Samsung Galaxy, Sephora. “People are walking that walk and also talking that talk,” she said.

The question is: Will they continue?

Unrivaled’s launch comes at a time of unprecedented attention on women’s basketball. Record-breaking viewership, attendance and media deals became commonplace for women’s college basketball and the WNBA over the last two years.

“You couldn’t have landed this at a better time,” said David Levy, an Unrivaled investor who is the former head of Turner Sports and current co-CEO of Horizon Sports and Entertainment.

Bazzell said Unrivaled operates with a “startup mentality.” Executives might create rules one day and unload boxes the next. The league, of course, is still unproven. But unlike many other short-lived start-up leagues, key to Unrivaled’s early success is that its most important members are verifiable stars.

“A lot of times leagues go away because they don’t have the best of the best playing in them,” Levy said. “Unrivaled didn’t start with names nobody knew or people that didn’t make the WNBA. This is the best of the best.”

Early on, Unrivaled executives recognized attracting top talent would be critical to creating visibility on TV, with partners and on social media. With nearly two-dozen WNBA All-Stars — Stewart, Collier, Brittney Griner, Sabrina Ionescu, Angel Reese among them — and seven No. 1 WNBA Draft picks, name recognition isn’t an issue.

To keep so many stars in the U.S., they knew the importance of paying salaries competitive with top overseas clubs. Unrivaled said it is the highest-paying American women’s sports league in history, with salaries averaging north of $200,000.

Its 36 players are more than just talent in Unrivaled, too. A substantial portion of the league’s equity — around 15 percent — is allocated to players. “We’re proud to be here also as investors,” Diggins-Smith said. “All of us being investors, (we) really care about this product and (it) really doing well… You want it to sustain.”

GO DEEPER

How Unrivaled became a welcome alternative for WNBA players’ overseas offseasons

Three-time WNBA MVP A’ja Wilson and rookie sensation Caitlin Clark are among those not playing in Unrivaled. The league made overtures to rookie Clark, but she elected to sit out the inaugural season, as she recovers from a nonstop last 12 months. Clark’s WNBA salary — around $75,000 — is supplemented by her countless endorsement deals, and she told Time she felt training privately in her own space would be beneficial. Clark, though, didn’t rule out playing in the league in the future. If she does, Levy said, interest in the league will “catapult,” surely propelling its long-term outlook. But he stressed that Unrivaled isn’t built around one person.

Unrivaled already has a high-profile media rights partnership, which is critical to its financial foundation and will be important in its ability to grow.

Initially, Unrivaled executives wondered if the league would need to broker a revenue-sharing deal with a potential TV or streaming partner before getting a licensing deal once the season launched. But they quickly found that multiple parties were interested in a licensing agreement with at least four companies in the final bidding, Levy said.

Bazzell relied on Levy and John Skipper, the former president of ESPN and another early Unrivaled investor, to tap into their professional networks and help find a partner.

Things crystallized this summer when Bazzell met with TNT Sports CEO Luis Silberwasser while in France for the Olympics. Having reach outside of traditional broadcast windows was important to Unrivaled, Bazzell said, as founders recognized the importance — both financially and culturally — of having broad social media reach. Warner Bros. Discovery’s portfolio including Bleacher Report, House of Highlights and HighlightHer (recently renamed B/R W) made it especially appealing.

WBD was ideal, executives said, because of everything it had under one roof: widespread TV distribution (all games will air on TNT or TruTV, and stream on Max), ancillary production, and social media strongholds, a key component of Unrivaled’s business strategy. Warner Bros. also financially invested in Unrivaled, as a sign of its deep commitment to the league’s success.

Getting WBD and Unrivaled founding partner, Ally, on board were critical in the avalanche of partnership deals that followed. (Ally has pledged a 50/50 media spend to support men’s and women’s sports equally.)

Under Armour senior lead for global sports marketing, Tamzin Barroilhet, first met with Bazzell in the summer of 2023. A former college and overseas pro player, Barroilhet said she was “hooked” on the concept and Unrivaled’s deal with WBD helped convince the apparel brand to sign on as the official outfitter. Unrivaled is Under Armour’s highest-profile women’s basketball partnership, and a number of other brands also struck deals in women’s basketball for the first time. Sephora’s agreement with the league is the beauty company’s first partnership with any sports league.

Unrivaled’s scarcity was also intriguing to prospective investors. The league runs only 10 weeks. Its $8 million salary pool is one of its two largest categorical allocation of funds. As a single-site operation, it has a lower operational cost than many other start-up leagues, which Bazzell said minimizes its burn rate.

“(When you) keep the product at a premium level and ultra-competitive, you have some opportunities to pique interest,” he said.

The league announced in December it had raised an additional $28 million (on top of the $7 million in its seed round) from investors, including Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo, tennis star Coco Gauff, swimmer Michael Phelps, and South Carolina women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley. A number of its initial investors, including Anthony, Morgan and UConn women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma, committed additional capital.

“We have new people trying to rush in and now we’re getting to a point where you have to be selective,” Bazzell said.

Fans flocked to buy merchandise before Unrivaled’s inaugural games in Florida. (Carmen Mandato / Getty Images)

How Unrivaled engages and grows its audience is paramount to its future.

League officials stress TV ratings will be just one aspect of that answer. “It’s part of a puzzle,” Levy said. “How many people are following (on social media)? What are they doing? How many people are sharing? How much is the fan base interacting with it? How much is merchandise going up? There are going to be so many different metrics that I think are going to play into this.”

Part of their build involves recruiting the next generation. Aliyah Boston, the Indiana Fever center and 2023 No. 1 pick, said college players she’s talked to aim to play in the WNBA and Unrivaled. LSU star Flau’jae Johnson has an NIL deal with Unrivaled, and UConn’s Paige Bueckers, who is the presumed No. 1 pick in this April’s WNBA Draft, has an NIL deal and equity in the league. Bueckers plans to play in Unrivaled when she turns pro.

USC’s JuJu Watkins won’t enter the WNBA until 2027, but when she enters the pro ranks, Unrivaled will have a spot for her. She was among the December investors and is optimistic about the league’s future and sustainability.

When those players set foot in Unrivaled, the league will almost assuredly be different. This season, all 10 weeks of action take place at the Florida facility, but a tour model for competition is planned for next year.

GO DEEPER

Can Unrivaled’s 3×3 style benefit WNBA players?

The locations are yet to be determined but Unrivaled is targeting non-WNBA cities and college towns. Bazzell said it wouldn’t visit more than four cities and the league will still have a home base. The operational cost, Bazzell said, would be similar as it’s likely only four teams would travel to a given stop. Important to maintaining a premier player experience, the league would use charter airfare to transport its players.

“We want to go to different markets to help grow the game and bring a touch point to hopefully a lot of young girls around the country that are looking up to these players and haven’t been able to see them play in person,” Bazzell said.

Taking the league on the road will bring logistic challenges, but league executives believe it will help grow Unrivaled’s business and open it to even more fan opportunities. Barroilhet, the Under Armour executive, foresees potential youth clinics and camps in conjunction with Unrivaled’s tour. Brands could produce activations at different venues, furthering engagement and reach.

Ensuring the WNBA’s top players participate will be critical to Unrivaled’s sustainability, and perhaps some are less interested in any travel necessary for touring. WNBA salaries drastically increasing in the next CBA — the league is negotiating a new agreement with the WNBPA — could also diminish part of a player’s financial lure to the new league. Plus, while TV ratings aren’t fully indicative of overall fan interest, they still remain a datapoint that will impact the league’s viability, especially when media rights conversations begin for a second time.

Yet for now, the stars seem delighted to be in the new venture. Throughout Friday and Saturday’s action, Unrivaled athletes from other teams sat around the arena and watched their peers, enjoying the moment. Fans approached players like Jackie Young, Rhyne Howard and Natasha Cloud for selfies. Onlookers cheered not only for athletes playing, but for those wandering the aisles. “It’s a very intimate setting,” Jewell Loyd said.

Maintaining that connection will build fan loyalty. But for television audiences, the game — the appeal of watching the best players in the world perform — will have to remain at the forefront.

“At the end of the day, the product needs to be great for fans to continue to want to watch it,” Bazzell said. “You can capture people’s attention, but how do you keep people’s attention? It’s done through the most competitive product possible, which is really what we’re adamant on, day in and day out.”

(Top photo of Kahleah Copper: Carmen Mandato / Getty Images)

Culture

Book Review: ‘Mona Acts Out,’ by Mischa Berlinski

Published

23 hours ago

January 21, 2025

Press Room

MONA ACTS OUT, by Mischa Berlinski

If not for the opiates in her system, or the weed she vaped to boost the pills’ effect, Mona Zahid might have handled Thanksgiving Day better — not ducking into the bedroom of her Manhattan apartment to hide from her quarreling relatives while dinner cooks, or emerging only to grab her affable beagle, Barney, and head for the front door. But in Mischa Berlinski’s novel “Mona Acts Out,” she is, fundamentally, very, very stoned.

So when, on her way through the building’s lobby, she finds a postcard in her mailbox from Milton Katz, the famous Shakespearean stage director who for two decades shepherded her acting career, its piteous message grabs hold of her fuzzy mind.

“I am dying, Egypt, dying,” he scrawls, repurposing a line from “Antony and Cleopatra,” and even though she well knows the charismatic Milton’s habits of shameless self-dramatization and precision-calibrated emotional manipulation, she worries that he speaks the truth. Ever since a #MeToo article in The New York Times got him expelled from his own legendary East Village company, the Disorder’d Rabble — the name is borrowed from “King Lear” — he has lived in disgraced exile.

Mona, who was one of his leading ladies and remains at least a semi-loyalist, hasn’t seen him in nearly a year. Her imminent turn as Cleopatra for the Rabble, without him at the helm, is only stoking her anxiety. His postcard suggests he knows it.

She must go to him immediately, she decides, and she will walk. That means an hourslong odyssey from Morningside Heights to Brooklyn Heights, but again, she is quite high — and trying to avoid her Trump-voting father-in-law, who is on the wrong side of the Shakespeare authorship question, as well as her doctor husband, with whom she is in a holiday snit.

And so the plot is set in motion in Berlinski’s book, which takes inspiration from a 2017 article in The Times by Jessica Bennett, about nine women accusing the veteran playwright and artistic director Israel Horovitz of sexual misconduct.

It’s unlikely fodder for a comic novel, yet Berlinski (“Fieldwork,” “Peacekeeping”) pulls it off, laughing not at Milton’s trespasses but at the ridiculousness of being human — especially in the theater, and especially in New York. As Mona’s sidekick, the joy-seeking Barney is like a furry little clown.

Structured in five acts and an interlude, this psychologically acute, Shakespeare-steeped tale is about both the aftermath of Milton’s downfall and its plentiful causes over many years. By the time of his banishment, he is something of a Lear figure, and Mona something of a middle-aged Cordelia. But the novel’s curiosity is less about Milton than about her and other women once in his orbit, who figure in Mona’s Thanksgiving.

Like Susan Choi in “Trust Exercise,” Berlinski has an intricate understanding of the dynamics of predation, the psyches of performers and the culture of theater, particularly the grittier, convention-trampling downtown variety.

Ambitious and egregiously self-absorbed — Mona and Milton have those traits in common — Mona always tolerated his aggressive handsiness, his middle-of-the-night phone calls, his chronic inappropriateness. “He’s kissed me more than you have,” she tells her husband. To her, enduring that was the price of making great art, a condition about which Milton had been “totally clear with everyone.”

This puts her at odds with Rachel, her beloved college-student niece. A target for Milton’s unwanted kisses as an intern at the Rabble, she became an anonymous source for the reporter from The Times. There is also Mona’s erstwhile friend Vanessa, once Milton’s latest young discovery, who fell fervidly in love with him, not realizing the danger to her nascent acting career if their affair should end.

The journey of “Mona Acts Out” is insightfully, entertainingly multitudinous. Its destination is a letdown. Too neat, too complacent, too contrived, the ending feels like a cop-out not because it fails to wrap up the story in a particular way, or at all, but because it places characters with a profound and important conflict between them in the same small space and pretends it’s a cozy tableau.

Perhaps Berlinski means this outbreak of placid coexistence to be hopeful, even a metaphor for a less fractured United States: its angry old men and outraged women enjoying a moment of détente.

But it comes across as a willful skirting of confrontation — as if our storyteller had averted his gaze and stepped away, humming cheerfully. In that, though, he is merely following the master’s template. Shakespeare’s comedies often behave similarly, culminating in scenes of harmony that the playwright has essentially magicked up.

“Mona Acts Out” is a comedy, too, but its affinity for Shakespeare gravitates at least as much toward the tragedies, and there remains a swirl of stubborn trauma at the novel’s center. A smudge of complexifying darkness would not have gone amiss in its final moments, just before the Act V curtain falls.

MONA ACTS OUT | By Mischa Berlinski | Liveright | 304 pp. | $27.99