Bagel Bites: Put me in coach

Internet ephemera from the tennis world and beyond. Have something you want to include? Join the Discord  – we have a really nice and active community growing there – or hmu on Bluesky.

• Previously on The Bagel: I yelled into the ether.

• Coco Gauff played a gritty one to hold off Belinda Bencic and advance to the Miami Open semifinals. This was a back-alley brawl of a match, with Coco locking in to play some of the best defense she's played since her US Open final.

Coco Gauff admits advice from random social media user motivated her latest win

For once, it appears that paying attention to social media mentions paid off for a professional athlete.

Awful AnnouncingSean Keeley

• If you'll recall, Coco's team advised her to skip Miami to let her body heal after retiring with an arm injury at Indian Wells. Instead, Gauff has battled through four straight three-set matches to make her first Miami semifinal – so weird it hasn't happened before! – and now she'll take on Karolina Muchova, against whom she's 5-0. Muchova knocked off Victoria Mboko in a rematch of the Doha final to make her second WTA 1000 semifinal of the year. (The Guardian)

• Y'all. WHAT IF Karolina Muchova finally winning her first WTA title since 2019 – let alone a WTA 1000 – opens up the floodgates and we get a six-title Mookie year?
• WHAT IF.

• The men's quarterfinals are set and whooosh this draw has cratered pretty hard after a week of upsets that ended with Jiri Lehecka knocking out Taylor Fritz. That left just two Top 15 players in the field and they're both in the same half of the draw.
• So here's where we were at when Wednesday began:

[Q] Martin Landaluce vs. [21] Jiri Lehecka – Lehecka won to make the semis
[22] Tommy Paul vs. [28] Arthur Fils
----
[18] Francisco Cerundolo vs. [3] Alexander Zverev
[19] Frances Tiafoe vs. [2] Jannik Sinner

• Joining Coco and Karolina in the Miami semifinals is Elena Rybakina, who got the better of Jessica Pegula once again. Every top play has their bugaboo, the one player who, but for their existence, they would have an obscenely better season or career. Well that is now Elena for Jess. Jess has lost five straight matches to her, three of them coming this year. The last four were all huge consequential matches: WTA Finals semifinal, Australian Open semifinals, Indian Wells quarterfinals, and now Miami quarterfinals. (The Guardian)

• Elena's win sets up a potential Indian Wells and Australian Open and WTA Finals rematch with Aryna Sabalenka in the semifinals. Aryna will play Hailey Baptiste later today.

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• From Discord KC152: Ben Rothenberg on Taylor Fritz. (Bounces)
• What you want to see when players start pulling away from the pack is the pack leveling up. We saw that Iga Swiatek and Aryna Sabalenka and we're seeing that now on the men's side with Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner. (Defector)
• I've been catching on The Body Serve pods and I'm not gonna lie, I've giggled a lot!

• You know it's a damn good point when Candi Gauff is in the aisle:

• Rafael Nadal said, and I am paraphrasing, "PFFFFFFFFFT" when asked if people should worry about Carlos Alcaraz. Dr. Nadal is correct! (Tennis.com)
• I really have no patience for this kind of panic-punditry. Like, be serious. I do wish these top players, from Carlos to Iga to Coco to Jannik would channel just a bit of Eileen Gu when they get these sky-is-falling questions:

• The Bernabeu will be transformed into practice courts during the Mutua Madrid Open. (Marca)

• Naomi Osaka is sounding a lot like Tomas Wiktorowski when she says she's not here for a good time, she's here to win. I hope she can remember that it was just seven months ago that she made a Grand Slam semifinal. And she needs to remember that particularly because she's going to need that perspective as she heads to four months of natural-surface tennis. The results might get rougher, but hard courts are the light at the end of the tunnel. (The Guardian)

“I feel like this also is a dilemma for me,” Osaka told reporters.

“Obviously, I would love to play, but like I said last year … for me, my daughter is very important, and I want to be a mom. I want to be the best mom I can, but sometimes I feel like I know what I have to do to become a really good player, and it’s very difficult. I’m not going to play Charleston. I hope I can play Madrid, Rome and then obviously the French Open.”

• I think that tweet is very true. Of course there are exceptions – not everyone has Mina Kimes or Pablo Torre's talent – but for the most part, it really would be better for everyone if journalists could just get back to writing. Leave the podcasts for the entertainers. But of course, journalists can't do that because writing is no longer lucrative. Way easier to just flood the market with quarter-baked takes and chaw.
• But I also acknowledge that it might come down to how you're hardwired. For me, writing IS the thinking. It IS the research. It IS the whittling and editing and stress-testing of ideas to get to something that is publicly presentable. I know this because last year, when I wasn't writing for pretty much six months, I just completely lost touch with what was going on in the sport and also, perhaps equally of import, I lost touch of what I thought about what was going on in the sport. After writing about tennis almost daily for 15 years, that's a really weird and uncomfortable feeling! There were days when I liked it and days when I didn't. I'm probably still working through those feelings.
• Since launching this little sandbox, I'm obviously way more locked in. And besides that, I've been to play with a lot of ideas. There's A LOT that has ultimately been CTRL-X'd because it was probably a thought I had or feeling that I felt that I was convinced was correct, and then as I was writing out and fact-checking, I realized oh no, I am completely wrong here or oh, I actually do not feel as strongly about this as I thought, or oh, nope, that's gonna have to go back in the oven for a bit longer. That's good! And honestly, I don't really have that same thought process when I talk. In most cases – I'd say maybe my extended hit on The Body Serve last year aside, where I really do feel like I was thinking things through honestly as we were talking – I kind of come with all my thoughts and opinions fully formed. Or at least I pretend they are, which is maybe worse?
• I'm sure there are other people who are not like this, who thoroughly research and stress-test their ideas before hitting the record button, or who genuinely engage in open and honest discussion of various ongoing topics or debates. That's all very valuable.
• But it's hard not to shake the idea that 90% of sports podcasts should just be emails.

• Hachette pulled a whole-ass book due to AI concerns. Doesn't sound like it was a very good book anyway! (Vulture)

It’s the first time a major publisher has publicly scrapped a book because it may have been written or edited using a large language model. The novel, which was published in the U.K. last year and was set to be released in the U.S. on May 19, faced a flood of critiques from readers online. In a nearly three-hour January 19 video titled “i’m pretty sure this book is ai slop,” the popular book YouTuber Frankie’s Shelf pointed out that it uses the word sharp or sharply 159 times (the video now has 1.2 million views). “I wear a pink dress, the kind that promises softness and delivers none,” its first lines read. “Its tulle is brittle and sharp, brushing against my fur like a thousand tiny teeth, a cruel lover that bites with every move.”

• It takes a long time, but lawsuits do change things. Here's to more of these tech companies getting absolutely hammered where it actually hurts: pockets. Meta just got tagged for $375 million. (Verge)
• And another one: Meta and YouTube found negligent in a social media addiction case, and that will very quickly lead to lots more lawsuits and some swift changes. Precedent matters. LFG. (NY Times)

The bellwether case, which was brought by a now 20-year-old woman identified as K.G.M., had accused social media companies of creating products as addictive as cigarettes or digital casinos. Citing features like infinite scroll and algorithmic recommendations, K.G.M. sued Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, and Google’s YouTube, claiming they led to anxiety and depression.

The verdict in K.G.M.’s case — one of thousands of lawsuits filed by teenagers, school districts and state attorneys general against Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snap, which owns Snapchat — was a major win for the plaintiffs. The finding validates a novel legal theory that social media sites or apps can cause personal injury. It is likely to factor into similar cases expected to go to trial this year, which could expose the internet giants to further financial damages and force changes to their products.

• For the "humans are the only species on earth who willfully and gleefully act against their own best interests" files: Suburban Homeowner Starts, Loses Fight With Enormous Jack Reacher Star Alan Ritchson. Like...why the fuck would you do that. Have you seen this man. (Defector; Men's Health)

• "Boy kibble"? Men are so embarrassing. Stop trying to min-max food, you dorks. Just eat, you babies. (The Guardian)
• This is an absolutely unhinged rank of movie candy and I respect that. You cannot seriously be saying you think it's peak to have to unwrap individual pieces of chewy candy, dude! (Screecrush)

• Kaori Sakamoto is skating her final competition this week at the World Championships in Prague:

• Looking forward to this new Hulu documentary on the legend Pat Summitt:

• If anyone wants something fun to do this weekend in the Bay Area, there's the SF Stationary Fest at the Westin SFO in Millbrae. I'll be down there all weekend, so if you wanna say hi, just holler at me!

• Bop of the Day: Robert Wuhl's deliveries in this scene.

• No wait, Actual Bop of the Day: Joe Posnanski's famous 2011 essay, "Baseball Night in America", which I've always thought tennis could learn a lot from.

Baseball, like life, revolves around anticlimax. That’s what you get most of the time. You stand in driver’s license lines, and watch Alfredo Aceves shake off signals, and sit through your children’s swim meets, and see bases loaded rallies die, and fill up your car’s tires with air and endure an inning with three pitching changes, a sacrifice bunt and an intentional walk.

But then, every now and again, something happens. Something memorable. Something magnificent. Something staggering. Your child wins the race. Your team wins in the ninth. You get pulled over for speeding. And in that moment — awesome or lousy — you are living something you will never forget, something that jumps out of the toneless roar of day-to-day life.

The Braves failed to score. Papelbon blew the lead. Longoria homered in the 12th. Elation. Sadness. Mayhem. Champagne. Sleepless fury. Never been a night like it. Funny, if I was trying to explain baseball to someone who had never heard of it, I wouldn’t tell them about Wednesday night. No, it seems to me that it isn’t Wednesday night that makes baseball great. It’s all the years you spend waiting for Wednesday night that makes baseball great.

• In a sport that is literally played daily, it's ok if nothing happens. It's ok if there are stretches of shrugging boredom. It's ok if the thing you see on any given day isn't the greatest thing you've ever seen. It's ok if a day at the courts is just a nice time hanging out with your friends and family under the sun, eating some overpriced stadium food and drinking some warm beer. If anything, it's absolutely imperative that this is true. Because if not, how in the world are we to have the bandwidth, energy, and eyes to see and celebrate actual memorable things when they actually do happen? How can you love without heartbreak? And how can you experience excitement without boredom?
• ANYWAY. Yay baseball. I hope the Giants lose 32-1 tonight. Enjoy your sushi, cake eaters. I hope you all get sick. LONG LIVE SPORTS!