Daily Bagel: Remembering Elena Baltacha

http://youtu.be/UkdKTKXCoMw The Daily Bagel is your dose of the interesting reporting, writing and quipping from around the Internet. • Video: Remembering Elena

http://youtu.be/UkdKTKXCoMw

The Daily Bagel is your dose of the interesting reporting, writing and quipping from around the Internet.

• Video: Remembering Elena Baltacha, who died of liver cancer on Sunday.

• The BBC has two very nice tributes to Elena Baltacha here and here.

• Baltacha's career in pictures.

• From Vulture: The Big Bang Theory's Jim Parsons is a big tennis fan. He's pen pals with Eugenie Bouchard, and his dream is that Roger and Mirka Federer fall asleep to his show.

About a year ago, he became pen pals with Genie Bouchard, a professional tennis player, when he found out that she’s a fan of his show; he emails her after every match. At some point during lunch, Parsons mentions that he’s going to the Met Ball and speculates on whether Roger Federer, friend of Anna Wintour, will be there. “All I have to say to him is that I’m such a fan. And the only thing I ever hope is that there’s a slim chance that, for some reason, he and his wife fall asleep watching Big Bang Theory reruns. What heaven would that be.”

Martin Klizan celebrates his victory at the BMW Open with the winner's car. (Mark Wieland/Getty Images)

• Photo: If this picture of Martin Klizan guzzling champagne in front of his new BMW convertible doesn't inspire kids to become professional tennis players, I give up.

• Rafael Nadal met his doppelganger... I guess?

Rafael Nadal meets his doppelganger, a bus driver from Madrid. pic.twitter.com/GdIpwtGq9x

— Bryan Armen Graham (@BryanAGraham) May 5, 2014

• Christopher Clarey for The New York Times on Rafael Nadal's clay struggles.

Emilio Sánchez Vicario, the former leading player and Spanish Davis Cup captain, said in an interview Sunday that after Nadal surprised the opposition with his quick-strike, higher-risk approach in 2013, he is struggling this time to switch from hardcourts to clay. Sanchez said he also believed that Nadal’s backhand had become less reliable because of a change in footwork presumably designed to protect his fragile left knee.

“He needs to keep playing the same way because we don’t know how much he still has difficulties with the legs and where to put the weight,” Sánchez said. “But what was his best before, the defense, he has to improve it today to be less erratic. Last year he was doing it with the drive and the passion and will to become No. 1 again. Now he is No. 1 and has to find those things again to not give the opportunity to the opponent.”

• Colette Lewis has the definitive write-up of Taylor Townsend's big Sunday.

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