'Clickbait Trash': Pegula Opens Up On Misconceptions About Family's Net Worth

| by Nurein Ahmed

Jessica Pegula comes from a billionaire family, and media outlets and tennis fans have always famed her for being the "world's richest tennis player."

The 29-year-old was one of the new additions to Netflix's tennis documentary Break Point, which premiered its second season this week. In the fifth episode of the series, titled "Now Or Never," Pegula fires back at naysayers who taunt her failures.

Moreover, Pegula responds to reports from critics and the media about her family's wealth. According to Forbes, Pegula's father, Terry, has an estimated net worth of $6.8 billion. The World No. 5 explains in the series that her family's net worth had no impact on her tennis career.

The Pegula family owns the NFL's Buffalo Bills and the NHL's Buffalo Sabres. But before he turned his fortune into a sports empire, Terry Pegula (Jessica's father) earned a living from oil and gas when, in 1983, he helped incept East Resources from an investment of $7,500 that he borrowed from friends.

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Tennis fans have always had this depiction that because Pegula comes from a wealthy family, her upbringing was "easy" but far from it. As she states in the episode, she was not given the comfort of life until she was in her late teens.

But not that she is complaining, and she lauded her parents for inculcating a culture of discipline in her. This probably explains why Pegula never backed down from turning her tennis career around after struggling with injuries in her early phase before emerging as one of the world's top-ranked players.

"Some people get this image that it’s really easy for me because my dad is very wealthy but that didn’t happen until I was 17 or 18. My dad was probably more hard on me than my mum, the more old-school one pushing me. They gave me a great childhood and instilled a lot of work ethic in me. This definitely got me to this point."

Pegula has been ranked as high as No. 3 in singles and was co-ranked as the doubles No. 1 team on the women's tour along with Coco Gauff this past year. She has been to six Grand Slam quarterfinals but has not progressed beyond that stage at a major.

Because of that record, she's become the "nearly woman" at Grand Slams, and some vile trolls on the internet tend to flock to her social media page with abhorrent comments.

Foreign journalists who have only recently learned about her family's net worth have not spared her either. Pegula opined that she doesn't "owe" them anything but acknowledged that it hurts that she's been unable to crack that quarterfinal barrier.

"The journalists that write about me have no freaking clue. I can’t buy my way into a semi-final. I was just like, what kind of clickbait trash is this? I would definitely give up everything to win tournaments."

"I hate when people write horrible stuff on social media or online. I don’t think I owe anything to prove those people wrong. I don’t care. But at the same time there’s definitely really dark moments where I’m like, what am I doing? Why am I doing this? I’m just putting myself through the same thing over and over again. And it sucks."

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