Great Britain’s Great Hope at Wimbledon Cameron Norrie may have grown up South Africanwere it not for a life-threatening incident involving a gun nearly 25 years ago.
In the mid-1990s, Norrie’s Scottish father David and Welsh mother Helen had found work in a life science lab in Johannesburg, where Cameron was born.
In a parallel universe, they stayed in that sports-crazed country, and Norrie would have become a very different athlete – perhaps a fly-half in the rugby union Currie Cup?
But Johannesburg at the time had a deserved reputation for being one of the most crime-ridden cities in the world. And as David Norrie told reporters this week, he and his wife decided to leave South Africa after a hair-raising evening, bringing the sense of danger all too close to home.
“We lived in a kind of complex with barbed wire electric fence,” explains David Norrie. “And so it was relatively safe, but there was an automatic gate when you drove up.
“One night our neighbor was the victim of a carjacking. He had a gun to his head and there was a baby in the back of the car. We decided at that moment that this was not the place to raise children and started making plans to emigrate. We had many friends who had been broken into.
“I think we moved somewhere to New Zealand, we looked at the lifestyle change, a very active lifestyle. It was one of the best decisions we made in terms of space and where to raise a family. If we had stayed in South Africa, I think things might have turned out differently.”