Other trips were frontloaded with problems. After spraining his ankle in a 2009 Davis Cup doubles match in Cyprus, McGee flew to Syria alone for a Futures tournament, at the lowest level of professional tennis. McGee made it to Damascus, but his racket bag did not. “I didn’t have any tennis rackets, didn’t have any tennis shoes, and I was hobbling around the airport with a bad ankle,” McGee said.

Image James McGee of Ireland, who has no coach, often travels to tournaments by himself. Credit... Robert Prezioso/Getty Images

He blearily took the court hours later, playing with borrowed equipment against a feisty local opponent. “So I’m like half asleep, getting onto the court, thinking to myself, ‘What on earth have I got myself into here?’ ” he said. “You really start asking these sort of deep questions: ‘What am I doing here?’ ‘Why am I putting myself through all this pain for one ATP point?’

“By the first point of the match, we had some guy with a drum on the side of the court: Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! It’s 35 degrees, 40 degrees — it’s absolutely roasting.” Those temperatures, in Celsius, are the equivalent of 95 to 104 Fahrenheit.

“There was a point in the match where I just stopped and I thought, ‘Is this really worth it?’ ” he said. “I can’t move, I’m using someone else’s rackets, someone else’s shoes, and I’m playing some guy who wants to kill me.”

McGee won the match and later reached the semifinals in what turned out to be one of his more successful weeks that year.

He has made it beyond Futures events and onto the higher tiers of Challenger events and ATP qualifying, but McGee, who has earned $94,673 in career prize money, remains an advocate for change to help lower-ranked players. In June, he wrote an impassioned 3,600-word blog post detailing the financial strain tennis players face at lower levels of the sport, as well as his own coping mechanisms, like doing laundry in hotel bathtubs. He received $3,600 for losing in the first round of Australian Open qualifying, as well as a $1,500 travel stipend from the tournament that is given to all players.

The Irish tennis federation does not give him the type of financial support offered by larger federations, like the United States Tennis Association or Britain’s Lawn Tennis Association.