Farewell to the Don Quixote of British tennis
With prizes being cut at Futures level, amateurs such as Gregory Howe have had their day, writes
Y‘When playing Stakhovsky, I had to drag my game up to a level I didn’t know I had’
ou would not know it from watching next week’s Cincinnati Masters, but the sport of men’s professional tennis is about to be cut off at the knees.
Imagine a giant ladder, stretching from the humblest $15,000 event in Ecuador to Wimbledon’s Centre Court. At the moment, up to 14,000 hopefuls fight over tiny crumbs at the bottom end, while a handful of multimillionaires enjoy the view from the top.
Yet this will change next year, as the International Tennis Federation slashes the money and points at Futures events, cutting out the hobbyists and leaving only 700-odd ranked players who can call themselves professionals.
One man who feels particularly miserable about the changes is Gregory Howe, a 46-year-old Futures veteran who could very well be described as the Don Quixote of British tennis. In May, Howe published a delightful
book – Chasing Points
(Pitch Publishing, £12.99) – which catalogued his journey around some of least likely tennis locations: Carthage, Mombasa, Lahore.
Chasing Points follows a well-trodden formula, first popularised by the 1960s American sportswriter George Plimpton in a series of books about boxing, baseball and Gridiron. The set-up finds a wide-eyed novice mixing it with the big boys, in the hope of a) discovering unsuspected inner strength, and b) understanding what it takes to be a top athlete.
It might seem surprising that no one had tried this with a racket before. Yet while tennis is sometimes seen as a “sissy” sport, it is also hugely intimidating. A would-be footballer can hide from the ball. A novice boxer can resort to dumb courage. But if your forehands keep landing in Row Z, you just look like a prat.
If nothing else, Howe has cojones. Chasing
Points makes a dramatic gearshift two-thirds of the way through, when Howe uses the rankings points he collected in Africa to enter an ATP event in Dubai. From slumming it around flyblown backwaters, he suddenly finds himself surrounded by free towels, courtesy cars and – yes – Roger Federer.
“I was 34,” Howe told this column, “so I knew my window was closing. I promised myself that, once I had my points, I would go for the big time. But when I talked about it with other players around my level, they found the idea too nerveracking.
“You do feel like an impostor, and I guess I was. But it was also one of the best moments of my life. When I played Sergiy Stakhovsky [who knocked Federer out of Wimbledon in 2013], he was going for the kill, trying to get off the court as quickly as possible. To win three service games, I had to drag my game to a level I didn’t know I had.” The events covered in
Chasing Points mainly date back 10 years: the length of time it has taken Howe to write and publish his book. But he has kept his hand in, taking time off from his day job as an English teacher to pop up at Futures events in Riyadh one year, Sharm El Sheikh the next.
This weekend, he will be dreaming the impossible dream one last time in Santa Cristina val Gardena, a tiny and picturesque village in Italy’s Dolomite mountains. “It could well be my final tournament,” Howe said, “unless I race through qualies and collect some ATP points, which doesn’t seem very likely.
“The changes to the tour have probably done me a favour; otherwise I would just have kept trying until I dropped.
“I’m the lucky one, though, because in the future no one will be able to do what I did. I think it’s a shame.”