Turkey’s Zeynep Sonmez said it was more important to be a “good human being than a good tennis player” after helping carry a fainting ball girl off court during her Australian Open first-round match.<\/p>\n
As Sonmez’s opponent Ekaterina Alexandrova served for the second set, the ball girl – stood beside the umpire’s chair – fell flat on her back before quickly getting back up.<\/p>\n
Sonmez sprinted over and helped walk her over to the side of the court, where the youngster received medical attention in the shade.<\/p>\n
The ball girl managed to get back to her feet and was helped off court by medical staff, with play resuming after a six-minute delay.<\/p>\n
“She was really struggling. She said she was fine but it was really obvious she was not fine,” Sonmez told BBC Sport.<\/p>\n
“So I went to grab her and said ‘sit down and drink something, you’re not fine’. <\/p>\n
“As we were walking she fainted so luckily I grabbed her. She was really shaking.”<\/p>\n
Tennis Australia confirmed that the girl had received medical attention on site before going home.<\/p>\n
“I always say it is more important to be a good human being than a good tennis player,” added world number 112 Sonmez.<\/p>\n
“It was just my instinct to help her and I think everyone would do the same. I’m happy I got to help.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Turkey’s Zeynep Sonmez said it was more important to be a “good human being than a good tennis…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":414766,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":{"0":"post-414765","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=414765"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414765\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/414766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=414765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=414765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=414765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}