“Can’t believe this is my life” was how Emma Navarro captioned a selfie she took during the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics. In the photo she’s standing at the bow of the Team USA riverboat, wedged in between Jessica Pegula and LeBron James. Fans on social media, though, had a much different takeaway. They couldn’t believe James, who will earn $48m in salary alone this season, was the poorest person in the picture.
Navarro and Pegula, both New York state natives, are members of an exclusive tennis sorority – the Billionaire Girls Club. The 23-year-old Navarro is the daughter of Ben Navarro, whose net worth is $1.5bn and has an interest in the Cincinnati and Charleston Opens; the 30-year-old Pegula, is the daughter of another billionaire, Terry Pegula, a sports patron whose holdings include the NHL’s Buffalo Sabres and the NFL’s Buffalo Bills. Combined, the family net worth of these two women rings in just shy of $10bn – more than enough money to watch Thursday night’s US Open action from a suite seat, or buy the entire stadium for that matter. Instead, they were on court, laying it all on the line in the semi-finals.
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Navarro lost in straight sets to second-seed Aryna Sabalenka, while Pegula dug out a three-set victory against Karolina Muchova to book a place in her first career grand slam singles final. “It’s amazing,” Pegula said afterward. “It’s a childhood dream. It’s a lot of work, a lot of hard work put in. You couldn’t even imagine how much goes into it.” That either woman could say they had the same struggles as players from less resourced backgrounds, frankly, is a bit rich.
Despite tennis’ country club origins, many players who tend to excel come from grit. Andre Agassi is the son of a Vegas casino worker who fled Iran during the revolution. The Williams sisters were nearly swallowed by poverty and violence in Compton. Novak Djokovic, in war-torn Belgrade, saw his father fall into debt with loan sharks while funding his early development. Frances Tiafoe, on his own quest to reach this year’s US Open men’s final, spent 11 years living at the tennis center where his father worked as a custodian.
Even the greats who came of age in relative comfort – players such as Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal – grew up a long way down from Navarro and Pegula’s wealth strata. Ernests Gulbis, a former Latvian top-10 player born to an investment banker and an actor, is the exceptional pro who harks to a pre-Open era when gentry class types like Bill Tilden and Suzanne Lenglen ruled the game.
As daughters of privilege go, Navarro and Pegula are closer to nope babies than nepo. Neither is at pains to lead conversations about their flush fathers. “The most annoying thing is that people think I have a butler,” Pegula said of fans’ perceptions of her lifestyle. “That I get chauffeured around. That I have a private limo. That I fly on a private jet everywhere. I am definitely not like that.” She makes a point of playing down her wealth, commuting to the US Open on the subway. Navarro is just as low key, shrinking from the spotlight while modestly asking the US Open crowd for support because “I’m from New York.” The harder they try to keep a low profile, it seems, the more their fathers get in the way.
The owner of a bank that ranks among the US’s largest buyers of consumer debt, Ben Navarro made much of his pile thanks to borrowers with low credit scores. Terry Pegula, a fracking baron, was singled out in a lawsuit brought last year by veteran NFL reporter Jim Trotter. He alleges the Bills owner said that Black NFL players who participate in social justice demonstrations should “go back to Africa and see how bad it is”. (Terry denied the allegation, and the lawsuit is ongoing.) Terry Pegula also convinced the state of New York into assuming more than half the cost of a new $1.54bn home for the Bills – the largest ever public subsidy for a new NFL stadium.
Like Citizen Kane parking his wife at the opera even though she couldn’t carry a tune, Ben and Terry bankrolled their daughters’ tennis dreams despite little portending them as touring pros. Emma and Jessica could have very easily wound up in the same upper class as scions like the equestrian Georgina Bloomberg or F1 pay driver Lance Stroll: spoiled brats who can play to their hearts’ content because the money will never run out. But to their immense credit, the Billionaire Girls matched their fathers’ investments with sweat equity.
At 5ft 7in, Navarro is relatively small in the era of “Big Babe Tennis”. But she has put in the hours to raise her game, patterning it after the crafty Martina Hingis, testing it over and over until she emerged as the US’s best college recruit. At the University of Virginia, she lost a total of three games in two years while earning a wildcard entry into the 2021 US Open. After leaving college in 2022, Navarro has worked hard to establish herself as a perennial contender on the women’s tour.
Thursday’s US Open defeat marked the 197th match Navarro has played in the past two years in an effort to raise her world ranking from 127th to 12th. Fans can joke all they want about her reaching tournaments with ease on a private jet; she makes no apologies for her family. “My family is incredibly supportive and they’re always in my corner no matter what,” she said after the match. “To them, I’m a daughter and a sister before I am a tennis player.”
Pegula is just as implacable, the 15-year tour veteran who has been overshadowed by peer compatriots, not least her doubles partner, Coco Gauff. It took until 2021 for Pegula to break through at a slam, although she soon gained a reputation for bogging down in the quarter-finals. It appeared as if that might be the case again on Wednesday night when she played Iga Świątek. But this time she held her nerve and stuck with the steady, tactical approach that has become her trademark to knock off the top seed. On Saturday, Pegula will play for the US Open title – joining Martina Navratilova and Serena Williams as the only American women to manage that feat after turning 30. And yet: calling Pegula and Navarro’s climbs heroic still feels like a reach.
Billionaires, after all, are society’s villains. No one’s trying to hear about what they have overcome. But through their stubborn perseverance, Navarro and Pegula set themselves apart from the stereotype and their professional peers. Clearly, other players are in it for the money; they have to be. Navarro and Pegula? They play for respect. You have to tip your cap.
Following Navarro’s semi-finals defeat on Thursday, her father found his way down to the players’ warm-up area inside Ashe to console her. After Pegula booked her spot in the final, the stadium big screen cut to her father in a luxury box, proudly looking down. Altogether, it was a big night for the Billionaire Girls Club. Sure, money gave them advantages as they started out – but it didn’t buy their work ethic. It put them in the best position to let their talent shine through.
