He missed a seemingly simple shot, the ball crashed into the net and Cameron Norrie (19 years old) could not contain his frustration. Immediately, in a gesture of instinctive rage, he stretched out his left arm and forcefully dropped the racket. It shot through the air backwards and flew to the front row at the back where the British tennis player was playing. The shovel was going straight to the head of a spectator, but the woman, attentive and with good reflexes, stopped the blow with both hands.
It happened in the first round of the Auckland Open (New Zealand), during the match that Norrie, world number 48, ended up losing (6-2 and 6-3) against the Argentine Facundo Díaz Acosta.
“It was not my intention to do that, and I had never done anything like that,” declared Norrie, who immediately turned to the viewer and asked for forgiveness.
“The woman was laughing and I said ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to do that.’ She answered me: ‘Yes, I’m completely fine’. In the end it wasn’t a big deal, but as we saw with other players, it’s easy to get sent off if you’re in the wrong place, not looking or something like that,” added the Brit.
The chair umpire gave him a warning for unsportsmanlike conduct, and what Norrie probably had in mind after that light punishment was what happened to Novak Djokovic during the match 2020 US Open before the Spanish Pablo Carreno.
The Serbian tennis player was immediately disqualified in the fourth round after throw a ball that hit a line judge in the throat. Like Norrie’s, Djokovic’s action was fortuitous and that is why it has been remembered by tennis experts and fans, each day more surprised and outraged by the different yardstick that is applied in similar situations, whether relative to the sports discipline or doping.
«It was not my intention and it is not like me to do something like that. I apologized very quickly and I want to apologize in general. “I’m not happy with my behavior,” Cameron Norrie added.
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