BRISBANE, Australia — When Ben Mitchell won his semifinal match at the Australian Open wild-card playoffs in December, his girlfriend’s reaction was underwhelming, and he knew why.
Mitchell’s girlfriend, Lois Ovett, was in Brisbane, 850 miles to the northeast of the tournament in Melbourne, and her contractions were coming closer together.
“Talk about Murphy’s law,” Mitchell said. “The amount of times someone asked me, ‘Mate, if you’re in the final and she goes into labor, what are you going to do?’ I can’t tell you the amount of times I got asked that. Obviously, it happened.”
In the midst of a week when he had won three best-of-five-sets matches to reach the final, Mitchell, a 23-year-old ranked 231st, began booking flights to leave town.