Daily Bagel: A cancer patient meets her tennis idol, more coaching news

Author:
Courtney Nguyen
Publish date:
Nov 25, 2014

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

• Serena Williams went to Twitter to react to the announcement that Officer Darren Wilson would not be indicted in the fatal shooting of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri:

[tweet=https://twitter.com/serenawilliams/status/537099784851824640]

• Rafael Nadal denies the stem-cell treatment he's been getting on his back qualifies as "doping":

Tennis star Rafael Nadal has spoken in a recent interview with a Spanish news outlet about a controversial accusation that the stem treatment that he recently had on his back falls in the category of doping in Italy.
In an interview with El Mundo, Nadal has brushed aside the doping accusation. "I do not think so," Nadal said. "I do not have all the information, but at the end of the day, we are governed by global standards, not Spanish or Italian," he added.

• Do you want your tennis quick and snappy? Roger Federer and Lleyton Hewitt will play an exhibition match in Sydney under "fast format tennis" rules. It will be a best-of-five set match with no-ad scoring, no lets, and sets are shortened to the first to four games. Weird.

• Report: Stan Wawrinka and the French Davis Cup team had a confrontation after the Davis Cup final in Lille. Leave it to Gael Monfils to be the peace-maker.

• Heartwarming stuff on the Today Show, profiling young cancer-patient Sunny Logan, who talks about her love of tennis. She got to meet her idol Maria Sharapova and knocked a few winners past the five-time champion.

• From Simon Briggs for The Telegraph: "Mirka-gate" only shows just how soft a sport tennis has become:

Sponsors and agents act as gatekeepers, protecting McEnroe’s successors from personal crises. You can see this in Novak Djokovic, a naturally stormy personality who has become house-trained and all too predictable in his public pronouncements.
We can find further ironies here. The first is that the truth of tennis is nothing like the genteel image. Any insider will tell you that this is a sport of bitter struggle and financial hardship on the outside courts, a sport where isolated convictions for doping and match-fixing are only the tip of a sinister iceberg, a sport of unprintable nocturnal adventures that could turn your hair white, especially if you are the parent of a promising junior.

• More on the French tennis official who was issued a lifetime ban by the ITF's Tennis Integrity Unit: According to Bloomberg, he was a part-time DJ, considered himself incredibly good friends with the players and didn't cooperate with the investigation.

• According to Italy's La Gazetta, Potito Starace has been accused of throwing the 2011 Casablanca final against Spain's Pablo Andujar. Starace lost that match 6-1, 6-2. He denies the allegation.

• Report: Laura Robson undecided over whether to play the Australian Open.

• Worth bookmarking: Robson just started her own blog.

• Who did it better: Grigor Dimitrov or Odell Beckham Jr.

• More details on the coaching split between Nick Saviano and Eugenie Bouchard.

• Other coaching news: Fabrice Santoro will coach Sergiy Stakhovsky and Nemanja Kontic, ex-coach to Ana Ivanovic, will team with Kristina Mladenovic.

• 2009 U.S. Open semifinalist Yanina Wickmayer has been suffering from Lyme disease but is getting better.