There are certain crowd environments where you take something of a calculated risk, like sitting in the lower deck at a baseball game or close to the track at NASCAR. In those cases, being close to the game could potentially put you in harm’s way. You wouldn’t expect that to be the case at tennis — the sport of kings, where contact on the court is forbidden, where you have to apologize to your opponent if the ball accidentally hits the top of the net and goes over.
Well, that’s what happened recently at the semifinals of the China Open when Daniil Medvedev, about to lose the match to Novak Djokovic and angry about losing a point, swatted a ball with his racquet that ended up going into the stands and hit some fan in the front row in the face. It apparently was hard enough that the fan needed to leave, which worked out because the referee disqualified Medvedev, as this violated tour rules of hitting a ball recklessly out of the court enclosure with disregard for the consequences. Since Djokovic was serving for the match, this was likely how it was going to end up anyway. But instead of just losing this match, Medvedev also forfeited the more than $200,000 he would have earned from the entire tournament and the 200 ranking points for reaching the semis. That second part could be valuable, as Medvedev is currently in the eighth and final spot to qualify for the year-end ATP Finals, arguably the most important tournament outside the majors.
That aside, Medvedev has said all the right things — he’s very sorry, it was in no way intentional, and he wants to apologize in person. I am certain that’s all true, and he probably feels worse than the person who got hit, who I hope and assume will get some pretty nice apology swag out of this ordeal. While this kind of thing is pretty rare, there are a few similar examples. That includes Djokovic himself, who was once disqualified for accidentally hitting a line judge with a ball. There are a few other examples, typically involving officials. There were a couple of times when a ball hit a fan that didn’t end up in disqualification, usually because the ump decided the fan wasn’t hurt. It’s actually a little surprising with all the tantrums and racquet-throwing that we haven’t seen more of this. Whether that’s dumb luck or a nod to discipline, I don’t know. But it does make this incident more notable.
It could be easy to attribute this all to Medvedev himself, or his particular character on the court. He’s mercurial and gotten attention for a couple of on-court tantrums, including a late-night argument with an umpire at the US Open that was more entertaining than the match itself. But even with that, he’s nowhere near the Mount Rushmore of bad boy tennis, like John McEnroe or Nick Kyrgios, who was once kicked out of a match for throwing a folding chair on the court. As much as Medvedev was clearly to blame here, I don’t think this is a story about his failed moral character.
What I do find interesting is the way tennis, a full non-contact sport, deals with this odd and rare fan interaction. If a player swats the ball in anger, they might get a warning. If that same player swats the same ball in anger and it accidentally hits a ball boy, they get kicked out. But if the ball boy is OK and it doesn’t hurt too much, they stay. I suppose that’s not all that different from how the law works. But it feels odd for a sport like tennis, one of the most intense pressure cookers in all of athletics, where hitting a ball or breaking a racquet is pretty mild compared to what a player would like to do. It feels like automatically kicking someone out is somewhat draconian — and that’s not an endorsement of the act. It’s also an odd name for the infraction — ball abuse — a nod to the reverence given to the sport’s artifacts and tradition, something hard to maintain when fans are downing a dozen Honey Deuces in the stands. But maybe that’s just it. In a world where decorum is a fading fantasy, some nod to rules and tradition are more important than ever, which means a passing swat of a tennis ball could be the end of a match, and why sitting front row at center court comes with small but calculated risk.
Keith Strudler is the dean of the College of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler.
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