On a winter’s day at the end of 2005, Gregory Howe, a 34-year-old English teacher at a school in Cheltenham in southwest England, turned to the website with the International Tennis Federation’s rankings and realized that time was running out on his childhood dream. An amateur tennis player, he had occasionally attempted to qualify for Futures tournaments, the bottom tier of professional tennis, during school holidays. But his ambition was simply to get the single point required to achieve a world ranking. “Well, I was a teacher, so probably a bit of a breakdown. But I realized I’d never given myself a really good chance to see how good I could be.

Source: New York Times August 25, 2018 09:00 UTC