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UCF inquires about USC coach Lincoln Riley: Sources

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UCF inquires about USC coach Lincoln Riley: Sources

By Bruce Feldman, Antonio Morales and Ralph Russo

UCF has inquired about the availability of USC coach Lincoln Riley as it searches for a replacement for Gus Malzahn, three people who have been privy to those conversations told The Athletic on Wednesday.

There has been no indication Riley is interested in making the move, the people said. He is three seasons into a reported 10-year contract that pays him about $10 million per year.

The people spoke to The Athletic on condition of anonymity because all the discussions were private and UCF was not publicly revealing details of its coaching search.

Riley’s contract is not publicly available because USC is a private school, but extracting him from Southern California — if he wanted to leave — would likely cost tens of millions of dollars for either the Trojans or the school looking to hire him away.

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Representatives from UCF reached out to Riley’s representatives last weekend to inquire about his interest in making a move across the country, one source said. Any discussions about adjusting the terms of Riley’s contract would be between him and USC, sources said.

The first source added that UCF has not received any word from Riley’s camp that he is interested in leaving USC, and the school is still looking at multiple candidates to fill its head coaching vacancy.

Firing Riley, whose win total with the Trojans has decreased in each of his three seasons, would cost USC about $90 million, according to one of the sources. If Riley were to leave for another school, he would owe USC nothing. But UCF is not in position to replicate the deal Riley has at USC. Malzahn made $4 million in 2024 at UCF.

Two sources said even if Riley had an interest in making the move, it would require some payout of his current deal with USC to make up for what he would be giving up in the transition — like a professional sports trade where one team pays a chunk of a player’s remaining salary on a large contract and the receiving team picks up the rest.

Riley was hired at USC by former athletic director Mike Bohn, who resigned amid controversy in the spring of 2023. University president Carol Folt oversaw the hire as well and will retire this summer, which means two of the main parties involved in bringing Riley to USC will be gone.

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Jen Cohen, the former Washington athletic director, was hired in August 2023 to lead the athletic department. She inherited Riley and his contract.

She’s in the unenviable position of having an underperforming football program but a coach who is too expensive to move on from. In the spring, Cohen navigated a delicate situation with men’s basketball coach Andy Enfield, whose tenure had run its course but his track record was too good to justify a firing. He eventually took the SMU job, and Cohen hired Eric Musselman from Arkansas to replace him.

Even with a suitor for Riley, getting out from under his deal looks more difficult.

Malzahn left UCF after four seasons as head coach to become offensive coordinator at Florida State. The Knights have gone 10-15 overall and 5-13 in league play in their first two seasons in the Big 12 after making the move from the American Athletic Conference. UCF received only a partial share of Big 12 revenue last year, about $18 million, and is scheduled to receive about $19 million for the 2024-25 fiscal year.

The number jumps to a full share in 2025-26, which should be about double those figures.

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Riley is 25-14 at USC since being lured to Los Angeles from Oklahoma after the 2021 regular season. It was a seismic move for the Trojans, swiping away a coach who had a 55-10 record in Norman and two Heisman Trophy winners in Baker Mayfield and Kyler Murray.

The Trojans went 11-3 in Riley’s first season with another Heisman winner in Caleb Williams, the star quarterback who followed the coach from Oklahoma to USC. But the results have been trending in the wrong direction since.

USC went 8-5 in 2023, its final season in the Pac-12, and wrapped up its first regular season in the Big Ten with a 6-6 overall record (4-5 in league play).

After the 2023 season, Riley told The Athletic that he “didn’t come here (USC) for some short-term thing and as long as SC continues to give us the support and the things we need to continue to build this, this was not a two-year rebuild.”

Recruiting hasn’t lived up to the high expectations that came with Riley’s hire. USC continues to regress on the field each season, and the program doesn’t appear to have much direction moving forward, making the outlook for Riley look hazy at best.

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(Photo: Sean M. Haffey / Getty Images)

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How Netflix Took on the Magic of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’

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How Netflix Took on the Magic of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’

The town of Macondo never existed. It was never supposed to. And yet, here it is.

The idyllic town in Colombia was the imaginary setting for “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” the 1967 novel that helped Gabriel García Márquez win the Nobel Prize and that, over the years, led to many offers from Hollywood to create an adaptation.

The author always refused, insisting that his novel, in which the real and fantastical converge, could never be rendered onscreen. His Macondo, he said, could never be built.

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But now, in a rambling field outside the city of Ibagué, stands Macondo. Built by Netflix from the ground up for the first-ever screen adaptation of the novel, the town has real birds nesting in its trees and dogs wandering its narrow streets.

García Márquez did not want Hollywood to make a movie from his book, his son Rodrigo García said, because he could not picture English-speaking actors playing the Buendías, the family at the center of the novel. Nor could he see the epic story being squeezed into two hours — or three, or four, for that matter.

And then there was the issue of magical realism, which the author used to conjure his experience of Latin America’s capricious, stranger-than-fiction reality.

In the novel, which opens in the 19th century, the people of Macondo marvel at things already considered ordinary elsewhere: a daguerreotype machine, magnets, ice. But no one questions the presence of a ghost — or whether a baby can be born with the tail of a pig or flowers fall like rain from the sky.

Flowers raining down on Úrsula, the matriarch of the Buendía family.

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Pablo Arellano/Netflix

Onscreen, magical realism has proved notoriously hard to replicate: The visual effects used to create such images in the past tipped at times into fantasy or horror, or just looked silly. The 2007 film adaptation of “Love in the Time of Cholera,” the author’s other best-known book, was a box-office flop.

But in the decade since García Márquez died, much has changed and, in a turn he could not have imagined, Netflix has been able to overcome his old objections.

For one, the streaming giant could make a big-budget adaptation of the novel in Spanish, having proved the global appeal of Latin American content with hits like “Narcos” and “Roma.”

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Netflix could also make a series, not a film, giving the plot more room to stretch out. Finally, it could film it in the author’s native Colombia, with mostly Colombian actors, said Francisco Ramos, the company’s vice president of content for Latin America. Netflix could make “Cien Años de Soledad,” not “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

The author’s family said yes, and the first season, made up of eight hourlong episodes, airs on Dec. 11. The second is in progress.

García, the author’s son, said the family had agreed in part because they felt a series could produce “the sensation of having experienced 100 years of life,” which is a hallmark of the book, he said.

“That, to me, is what’s important,” he said. “It’s the total experience of immersing yourself.”

And so now, Macondo — and a studious replica of the Buendía home, sheltered beneath a hangar — have become reality.

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They are so real, so immersive, in fact, that sometimes the actors aren’t sure where the fiction begins or ends.

On a recent afternoon, as the actor who plays an older Úrsula, the Buendía matriarch, prepared to shoot a scene in the kitchen, she held out an egg before cracking it on a bowl and laughed.

“Is it real, or is it fake?” asked the actor, Marleyda Soto.

The actress playing Úrsula, Marleyda Soto, and Laura Mora, the co-director of the series.

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A total commitment to recreating reality, or the novel’s version of reality, would guide their work, the creators decided. With that, would they — finally — get magical realism right?

Inside Macondo

In Colombia, where García Márquez appears on the currency, many people can recite his book’s opening lines: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

In the series, the scene lets viewers see how what might appear ordinary elsewhere is often experienced as magical in Macondo, a town isolated by a dense jungle swamp near the Caribbean coast.

When ice comes to the town for the first time, it is not just a novelty, a sign of modernity, but an otherworldly spectacle. Mirroring the author’s elaborate description of the moment, and hewing closely to the text, the filmmakers create a theatrical scene in which light and shadow evoke an almost religious experience.

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Seeing Ice

When it was opened by the giant, the chest gave off a glacial exhalation. Inside there was only an enormous, transparent block with infinite internal needles in which the light of the sunset was broken up into colored stars. Disconcerted, knowing that the children were waiting for an immediate explanation, José Arcadio Buendía ventured a murmur:

“It’s the largest diamond in the world.”

“No,” the gypsy countered. “It’s ice.”

1970 translation by Gregory Rabassa

The ice also signals the arrival of the first outsiders to Macondo. They are a troupe of gypsies who bring the esoteric knowledge — and basic scientific instruments — that charm José Arcadio, the Quixote-like family patriarch.

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He eventually sets to work on alchemy, melting down his wife’s gold coins and leaving his family to fend for itself. While his head is buried in a book, one of his sons runs off with the gypsies. Later, his daughter nearly floats off in her bassinet. He casually pulls her down, more annoyed by the distraction than amazed.

Like other scenes where the impossible occurs, the moment is presented in the series without drama or fanfare, much as it is in the novel by the author.

The Floating Basket

One day Amaranta’s basket began to move by itself and made a complete turn about the room, to the consternation of Aureliano, who hurried to stop it. But his father did not get upset. He put the basket in its place and tied it to the leg of a table…

1970 translation by Gregory Rabassa

That approach was part of “visually capturing a special book,” said Alex García López, one of the first season’s two directors. “This is the culture of the Caribbean,” he said, where Catholic mysticism mingles with Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean beliefs about life and death, the body and the soul.

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Portraying reality as it is experienced by the characters became the guiding vision of the project, said García López. What is familiar, what is theirs, is taken for granted; the new enchants and ultimately destroys.

That is strong social commentary. It is also playful, said García López, who is from Argentina. “It’s typical of Latin America,” he said, “to think that everything that comes from abroad is better than what we have at home.”

The next figures to bring the outside world to Macondo are a magistrate from the capital and a priest, the personification of politics and organized religion.

Against the wishes of the Buendías, they transform the town, painting houses in the blue of their political party and erecting a church. Like the gypsies, they also claim one of the family’s sons, who will head to war.

Most of the first season is devoted to telling this story.

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“Ninety percent of the book, and the series, deals with Colombian history and the domestic passions and traumas of this family,” said José Rivera, the screenwriter and playwright who produced the first draft of the screenplay.

“When the magic does happen, it’s startling,” he said. “It’s gorgeous, because it falls in the middle of very everyday realism.”

A scene where Úrsula learns of the death of one of her sons is an example of magic taking place within ordinary daily life. A trickle of his blood travels through the town to reach her.

The Trickle of Blood

A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta’s chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.

1970 translation by Gregory Rabassa

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Úrsula is shocked not by the journey the blood has taken, but by the ominous message she sees in it. It is “her sixth sense” made visible, said García López, who directed the scene.

Flesh and Blood

To keep the production grounded in the characters’ reality, the filmmakers shot the scenes involving magical realism in front of the camera, avoiding visual effects whenever possible, said Laura Mora, who is co-directing the series.

“That had to do with a formal decision on our part,” Mora said. “‘Everything has to feel very homemade, very analog, very, very on-camera.’”

So, for example, the ghost that haunts the Buendías was not a translucent apparition made in postproduction, the directors said. He was a flesh-and-blood actor — with lots of blood.

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The ghost appears repeatedly trying to staunch a bleeding wound.

Mauro González/Netflix

Likewise, the scene in which the town’s priest levitates after drinking hot chocolate was not filmed in a studio against a screen. The actor was hauled up right on the set, using ropes and harnesses.

The harness and ropes lifting the priest were removed in postproduction.

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Netflix

And in the memorable scene when it rains flowers, thousands of real (and plastic) flowers truly did fall from above while the cameras were rolling.

Real flowers were supplemented with flowers made using visual effects.

Netflix

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Mora said the hope was that if the magical scenes looked just like the rest of the drama, they would be more convincing.

“For the actors, that was delightful, because everything was happening on the set,” Mora said. No one had to be told to imagine things that were not there, she said. “That was really beautiful.”

A Homage to Colombia

The town of Macondo embodies the commitment Netflix made to the author’s family when it got the rights to the book in 2018.

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No series on this scale had been made in Colombia before. In building the town, an effort that took hundreds of workers more than a year, Netflix gave reality to a bygone world, recreating the Colombia that García Márquez had created, down to the details.

On a recent, sweltering afternoon, Bárbara Enríquez walked through Macondo, a set she helped create as one of the two production designers on the series. She pointed to a towering rubber tree, which was all that had stood in the field before.

The location was chosen in part because of this tree.

Now it was the center of a town filled with buildings modeled on architectural styles from the 19th century, she said: vernacular, Colonial, Republican. There was the book’s bordello and bar, Catarino’s, its school, hotel and church. Dozens of species of plants were shipped in by the landscape designer to recreate the flora of the Caribbean coast.

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Enríquez, who designed the set for the 2018 film “Roma,” stepped into the town’s general store.

Her team scoured the country for the antique furniture on the set. She pointed to a woven basket: They commissioned Colombian craftspeople to weave them, along with hats, hammocks and the distinctive shoulder bags known as mochilas.

Hats used in the series, and the general store.

To recreate Macondo, Netflix also relied on museums, documents, researchers and historians. The costume designer used drawings made by a 19th-century traveler and a government commission to create a wardrobe of thousands of garments.

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“In the end,” said Enríquez, “‘One Hundred Years’ is a homage to Colombia.”

The creative crew had to sit down for Colombian history lessons, learning about the Thousand Days’ War, the brutal civil conflict that plays a pivotal role in the first season.

The actors had to learn to speak in the regional Costeño accent, and also to write longhand, in ink, to sew and embroider. They took to calling it “The School of One Hundred Years.”

Costumes were aged on the set.

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In the process, everyone on set learned that many scenes from the book that appear fantastical were part of García Márquez’s life.

In his writings, the author revealed it was his sister who, like a little girl adopted by the Buendías, ate dirt. And there really was a priest in the region who was said to levitate when he drank wine from the chalice. (García Márquez said he swapped the wine for hot chocolate because he found that more believable.)

“You realize, OK, what he’s doing here is he is narrating the stories of the world he was born into,” Mora, the director, said. “Magical realism is a name that the academics have applied.”

The cast, most of whom are Colombian like Mora, came to see the series that way, too — as a way of bringing to life not only a fiction born from one man’s imagination, but also their country’s rich, if painful, history, and its inimitable culture.

Mora, the director, used this notebook to plan shoots.

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Because of the care brought to that effort, the details accumulate to make Macondo seem real, said Enríquez, the production designer. “They may not all be seen, but they can be felt.”

The first season recreates the 19th century; the second will follow Macondo into the 20th. Enríquez said she hoped the deeply researched production would work like a time machine, making Colombians say, “That’s right, it was just like that.”

In the end, “you enter into the fiction,” she said. “Everyone enters the world of the fiction, and you embrace it.”

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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Lewis Hamilton ends Mercedes F1 career with fight, emotion: ‘I’ve got no more tears’

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Lewis Hamilton ends Mercedes F1 career with fight, emotion: ‘I’ve got no more tears’

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Stooped beside his silver and black Mercedes W15 car on the main straight of the Yas Marina Circuit on Sunday, Lewis Hamilton paused to soak up the moment.

It was the final time after 12 seasons, 246 grands prix, 84 race wins and six drivers’ world championships, making it the longest and most successful driver and team partnership in the history of F1, that he would be alone with his Mercedes car. In February, he’ll be racing in red for Ferrari.

Balancing on his toes and with his forearms resting on the sidepod, helmet still on, Hamilton bowed his head and took some time to think about the journey he and Mercedes had been on together. The good, the bad. The highs, the lows.

“I just wanted to embrace the moment because it’s the last time I’m going to step into a Mercedes and represent them,” Hamilton said in the media pen after the race, eyes glistening. “It’s been the greatest honor of my life.”

The overriding emotion in that moment beside the car was gratitude. “I was just giving thanks,” Hamilton said. “Firstly, thanking my own spirit for not giving up, for continuing to push, and thanking everyone that powers and builds that car. I’m proud of everyone.”

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Twenty-four hours earlier, it felt like Hamilton’s last blast in the silver car might be a difficult one. Mercedes made a mistake by mistiming his last qualifying run in Q1, leaving him a lowly 16th on the grid. Toto Wolff, the team principal, apologized to Hamilton for an “idiotic” mistake that would make his race much, much tougher.

In the post-qualifying debrief, even as the engineers and strategists rued the error, Hamilton reminded them of all the good moments they’d enjoyed together. He was still hopeful of finishing on a high, providing a swansong tribute to the team that has given him so much professionally and personally.

And Hamilton did exactly that, delivering a memorable fightback to sign off at Mercedes in Abu Dhabi.

From 16th, he made up a handful of positions on the opening lap thanks to incidents ahead before sitting on the fringes of the points. By running the alternate tire strategy, the plan was always to run deep on the hard tire before pitting, setting Hamilton up for a final charge to the line. After biding his time and letting the cars ahead pit, he started moving into position for a decent points haul. Hamilton’s engineer, Pete Bonnington, came onto the radio toward the end of the first stint to say there was a possible third-place finish on the cards, according to Mercedes’ data.

Hamilton emerged from the pits in seventh place with fresh medium tires, ready to bear down on the cars ahead on older, slower hards. For one final time, Bonnington delivered the catchphrase that it was time for Hamilton to push, one that has encouraged the Briton to claim wins and poles throughout their time together.

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“OK, Lewis, it’s hammer time!”


Lewis Hamilton started P16 at the Abu Dhabi GP and finished P5. (Photo by Luca Martini / SOPA Images/Sipa USA)

“When he told me, I was like, I can’t remember the last time he told me ‘hammer time,’” Hamilton said post-race. “I remember I told Bono to say hammer time back in the first year together. I was like, ‘Don’t tell me just, ‘go faster,’ just tell me, ‘It’s hammer time,’ and I’ll know what it is!’”

As always, Hamilton got the memo. He quickly picked off Nico Hulkenberg and Pierre Gasly before being told there was a 14-second gap to his teammate, George Russell, ahead in fourth place. The pair went into Abu Dhabi tied on points from their three seasons together. This last stint would settle the intra-team battle. Hamilton said it “took perfection” to catch Russell in the final stages.

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It went all the way to the last lap. On the radio, Wolff told Russell to bear in mind the situation, which was a gentle reminder to keep things clean. Russell was powerless to keep his teammate behind anyway when at Turn 9, the same corner where Hamilton saw Max Verstappen pull away to the championship three years ago and deny him a historic eighth title, Hamilton swept around Russell outside and moved ahead. A brave, brilliant overtake.

“I only caught him right at that last lap, and I was like, it’s now or never,” Hamilton said. Russell thought it was “quite a fitting way to finish with Lewis, just one second apart after these three years” and was pleased to see his teammate end in style. “He deserved it,” Russell said. “The team deserved to give him that send-off.”

As he turned through the final few corners, the sky already lit up with fireworks to honor Lando Norris’s win, Hamilton soaked in the last moments as a Mercedes grand prix driver before crossing the line. The radio messages with Bonnington and Wolff on the cool-down lap were filled with emotion, Bonnington seemingly in tears. The end had arrived.

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Hamilton was positive and reflective after his final Mercedes race. (Joe Portlock/Getty Images)

Post-race, the analytical side of Wolff pondered that, without the bollard getting stuck under Hamilton’s car in qualifying, he might’ve been able to fight for victory. Hamilton told Wolff to instead think about the 84 wins they’d already achieved together.

“These last few races, they don’t change how we feel about it,” Wolff said. “He drove like a world champion today from P16. We played the long game and finished fourth, driving away from the Red Bull. That was a statement of a world champion.”

Hamilton was also glad to finish a challenging year on a high. Despite wins at Silverstone and Spa, his first victories since 2021, seventh place still marks his lowest championship finish in F1, having struggled to gel with the tricky Mercedes car throughout the year. The subtext of his pending move to Ferrari, announced at the start of February, underpinning everything this year also presented its own challenge.

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“It’s been a really turbulent year, probably the longest year of my life, I would say,” Hamilton said. “We’ve known from the beginning that I’m leaving, and it’s like a relationship — when you’ve told whoever the counterpart is that you’re leaving, but you’re living together for a whole year. Lots of ups and downs, emotionally. But we finished off with a high today.”

The only emotions Hamilton felt post-race were positive. He’d completed his celebratory donuts on the start-finish line, permission given to him as part of the FIA’s post-race procedures, and then gone back to the Mercedes garage to celebrate with his team, so many of whom were eager to get one final picture together. A lasting memory for all their success. All the history they have written.


Hamilton performs a burnout after the Abu Dhabi Formula One Grand Prix. (GIUSEPPE CACACE/AFP via Getty Images)

The whole weekend had been about that. On Thursday, Hamilton took a number of his engineers and mechanics, including Bonnington, for a hot lap about the Yas Marina Circuit. Mercedes then held a team event on Thursday night that looked back on Hamilton’s time at Brackley and paid tribute to all their success. Hamilton had no idea it was happening and was genuinely touched by the surprise.

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“That was super emotional,” he said. “I ain’t got no more tears, really. Everything came out there.”

That didn’t stop Sunday from being soaked in emotion. Despite the challenges of this year and the long, awkward goodbye before he moves to Ferrari, a fierce rival Hamilton and Mercedes have worked tirelessly to defeat, there has always been an underlying respect and affection for all they’ve accomplished together. The message from Wolff and the Mercedes board members in Abu Dhabi to Hamilton was that he would always be a part of their story and, more importantly, their family.

When Hamilton made the decision to quit McLaren for Mercedes back in 2012, many thought it was the wrong move. Few could have predicted their success. Even fewer that the relationship would’ve lasted so long and run so deep.

As Hamilton put it on the cool-down lap, “What started out as a leap of faith turned into a journey into the history books.” What a journey it has been.

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Top photo: Sipa USA

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