Daily Bagel: No wedding plans for Caroline Wozniacki yet
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_I07PjckxY
The Daily Bagel is your dose of the interesting reporting, writing and quipping from around the Internet.
• Video: Here's a highlight reel for everyone. For Roger Federer, they're highlights of his opening-round win in Dubai. For Tunisia's Malek Jaziri, they're highlights of that one time he took a set off the great Roger Federer.
• Caroline Wozniacki tells reporters in Kuala Lumpur that she and boyfriend Rory McIlroy aren't planning a wedding just yet.
"I enjoy everything that's happening right now and how things are. Marriage? We're still young and we have many years in front of us."
...
When asked if she would accept now if McIlroy proposed, she burst into laughter, saying: "This is getting personal."
• The Daily Mail report that the Grand Slam tournaments will double their financial support of anti-doping measures in an effort to keep the sport clean. Money is great, but more important is ensuring it's used effectively.
• Janko Tipsarevic, who lost to Nikolay Davydenko 6-0, 7-5 in the first round of Dubai, will miss Serbia's Davis Cup quarterfinal against the United States next month in Idaho. Tipsarevic says he's battling injuries and doesn't think he could compete in a best-of-five match.
• It seems every player has his own interpretation about how the ATP's 25-second rule between points should be enforced. As Tennis.com reports, Gael Monfils says taking time to dry his hands doesn't count.
• Pat Cash was promoting a Caribbean luxury resort chain that is being investigated for fraud.
• Multichannel.com reports that the court hearing Comcast vs. FCC, a case in which Comcast is challenging the FCC's administrative ruling that it has to afford Tennis Channel the same opportunities as its own channels, grilled the FCC for its decision. That's not a good sign for Tennis Channel. (You can read another account here.)
Between the serious First Amendment issues with the FCC's carriage remedy expressed by Judge Brett Kavanaugh and the contract issues on which Judge Harry Edwards focused, the FCC appeared to have an uphill fight to keep its decision from being remanded back. Following the hearing, sources on both sides of the case expressed that sentiment following lengthy questioning that saw FCC and Tennis Channel lawyers.
...
Comcast's argument was essentially three-pronged: The complaint was moot because it came after the statute of limitations; the FCC failed to look at the competitive markets, which justified Tennis' Channel placement; and the remedy violated Comcast's First Amendment freedom to choose its own programming.
Comcast argues that it is free to discriminate for the right reasons, just not the wrong ones. Estrada said that Comcast has a constitutional right to favor its own speech over others, so long as it does not do so for anticompetitive reasons. Ignoring the marketplace evidence that others treated Tennis no better, and some worse, in terms of carriage, Estrada suggested, the FCC had arrogated for itself the role of a government censorship board and that the FCC's decision was the most outrageous content call since the Sedition Acts. He suggested, as Comcast has in its brief, that the FCC's decision is comparable to telling a newspaper it has to put a freelancer on the front page.
• Interesting thought at WTA Backspin: Would a top four of Serena Williams, Victoria Azarenka, Maria Sharapova and Petra Kvitova be a contender for the "best ever"?
Just for a second, think of it... it's early July, and the Ladies semifinal weekend at the All-England Club is the talk of the sport, as two-time slam champ Vika Azarenka stares down four-time winner Maria Sharapova in one match-up, while the other sees world #1 and fifteen-time major winner Serena Williams facing off with '11 Wimbledon champ Kvitova in quite possibly the best, most talented final four any major has seen in years, and maybe even a full tennis generation, or two. The Big 4: a contender for the "best ever" moniker, quite possibly the biggest "star" the game has ever seen, maybe the most "disliked" women's champ ever, and a soft-spoken yet pulverizing hitter who stolen the heart of many of the sport's positively smitten all-time greats just two summers earlier. Something for everyone, and something everyone would want to see... even those persistent loudmouths who still try to describe the women's game as less worthy of attention -- and prize money -- than the men's, where a similar Big 4 have dominated the slams for a decade.
• Video: Novak Djokovic and his team play shirtless beach tennis.
