Daily Bagel: Andy Murray's R&R
The Daily Bagel is your dose of the interesting reporting, writing and quipping from around the Internet.
• Video: Serena Williams holds a news conference in Bastad ahead of the Swedish Open.
• Andy Murray and Kim Sears hit the beach in the Bahamas. Even on vacation he's playing tennis and doing sprints. Poor Kim.
• Sloane Stephens, Angelique Kerber and Laura Robson have been added to the WTA's Strong Is Beautiful campaign. You can see all the new photos here.
• A summary of Martina Hingis' Hall of Fame induction speech.
“I was born behind the Iron Curtain, and my mother wanted to tear the curtain apart for me. That is the reason I played tennis as a little girl. In 1980, my mother had not many choices for giving me a better life and a chance for freedom to see the world. She chose the game of tennis as a way out of the world and the prison we lived in, so thank you, mom.
“She also gave me the name Martina after Martina Navratilova who was a great legend and a symbol of freedom in our country back in Czechoslovakia.
“As the wall came down in '89, also, thanks to this great land of yours, I was already on the way to where life would take me, so thank you, mom, again, you gave me life, you gave me love, you gave me tennis. You gave me everything you could give me.
“Thank you, tennis. You gave me the world, and now I honestly am out of words, because there are no words to explain what I feel as you chose to give me a place here for eternity.”
• A nice interview with 20-year-old U.S. pro Shelby Rogers.
• Peter Bodo isn't sold on the Maria Sharapova-Jimmy Connors partnership.
Connors not only has very big shoes to fill, he’s got very different feet from the man he’s succeeding. Right off the bat, it will be interesting to see how the guy in the Members-Only jacket will get along in Sharapova’s glitzy sphere. He also brings a lot more personal baggage—and clout—to the job than did [Thomas] Hogstedt.
It starts with Connors’ own celebrity. His gig with [Andy] Roddick represented a return to the limelight, and Connors appears to have enjoyed it. Now he has a tell-all autobiography to sell, and the U.S. Open represents his biggest potential hit. If you were disinclined to believe that Connors is a low-class, self-aggrandizing guy willing to sell out anyone he knows, you no longer have to take his critics’ word for it. You can just read “The Outsider,” in which he makes the case all by himself.
Connors, an eight-time Grand Slam champion, comes at a very high price (don’t ask me how I know this, but I do). This is something neither players nor coaches like to talk about, but it matters—sometimes a lot. Sharapova may have more money than God, but there will be significant pressure to keep the W’s keep rolling in at the pace established by Hogstedt, who presumably was paid considerably less than Connors is getting.
You can see how this promises to be a very interesting liaison even before you get into the Xs and Os.
The New York Times
Saturday Night Live
