“Can’t believe this is my life,” 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 Team USA’s riverboat, sandwiched between Jessica Pegula and LeBron James. Fans on social media, however, had a very different conclusion. They couldn’t believe that James, who is earning $48 million in salary this season alone, was the poorest person in the photo.
Navarro and Pegula, both from upstate New York, are members of an exclusive tennis fraternity called the Billionaire Girls Club. Navarro, 23, is the daughter of Ben Navarro, whose net worth is $1.5 billion and who has a stake in the Cincinnati and Charleston Opens; Pegula, 30, is the daughter of another billionaire, Terry Pegula, a sports sponsor whose assets include the NHL’s Buffalo Sabres and the NFL’s Buffalo Bills. Together, the family fortunes of these two women total just under $10 billion — more than enough money to watch Thursday night’s U.S. Open action from a suite of seats, or to buy the entire stadium. Instead, they were on the court, risking it all in the semifinals.
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Navarro lost in straight sets to second-seeded Aryna Sabalenka, while Pegula claimed a three-set victory over Karolina Muchova to secure a place in her first Grand Slam final. “It’s amazing,” Pegula said afterwards. “It’s a childhood dream. It’s a lot of work, a lot of hard work. You can’t imagine how much goes into it.” That either woman can say they’ve faced the same struggles as players from less affluent backgrounds is, frankly, a bit of an exaggeration.
Despite tennis’ country-club origins, many players excel through perseverance. Andre Agassi is the son of a Vegas casino worker who fled Iran during the revolution. The Williams sisters were nearly swallowed up by poverty and violence in Compton. Novak Djokovic, in war-torn Belgrade, watched his father spiral into debt to loan sharks as he financed his early education. Frances Tiafoe, on his own quest to reach the final of this year’s U.S. Open men’s tournament, spent 11 years at the tennis center where his father worked as a janitor.
Even the greats who grew up in relative comfort – players like Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal – grew up well below the wealth class of Navarro and Pegula. Ernests Gulbis, a former Latvian top-10 player born to an investment banker and an actor, is the exceptional pro who harks back to a pre-Open era when royalty like Bill Tilden and Suzanne Lenglen ruled the roost.
When it comes to privileged daughters, Navarro and Pegula are closer No babies than nepo. Neither of them makes an effort to lead conversations about their wealthy fathers. “The most annoying thing is that people think I have a butler,” Pegula said of fans’ perceptions of her lifestyle. “That I’m chauffeured everywhere. That I have a private limo. That I fly everywhere on a private jet. I’m absolutely not like that.” She makes a point of downplaying her wealth, riding the subway to the U.S. Open. Navarro is similarly understated, shunning the spotlight and modestly asking the U.S. Open crowd for support because “I’m from New York.” The harder they try to keep a low profile, the more their fathers get in the way.
The owner of a bank that is among the biggest buyers of consumer debt in the United States, Ben Navarro, made much of his money from borrowers with poor credit scores. Terry Pegula, a fracking baron, was hit with a lawsuit filed last year by veteran NFL reporter Jim Trotter, alleging that the Bills owner told black NFL players who participate in social justice protests “to go back to Africa and see how bad it is.” (Terry has denied the accusation, and the lawsuit is still pending.) Terry Pegula also convinced the state of New York to pick up more than half the cost of a $1.54 billion new home for the Bills — the largest public subsidy ever for a new NFL stadium.
Just as Citizen Kane parked his wife at the opera house even though she couldn’t sing a note, Ben and Terry bankrolled their daughters’ tennis dreams despite little sign of their futures as touring pros. Emma and Jessica could easily have found themselves in the same upper echelon as offspring like equestrian Georgina Bloomberg or Formula One driver Lance Stroll: spoiled brats who can play to their heart’s content because the money never runs out. But to their credit, the Billionaire Girls matched their fathers’ investments with sweat equity.
At 5’10”, Navarro is relatively small in the era of “Big Babe Tennis”. But she’s put in the hours to hone her game, modeling it on the wily Martina Hingis, testing it again and again until she’s emerged as America’s top college recruit. At the University of Virginia, she’s lost a total of three matches in two years while earning a wildcard entry into the 2021 US Open. Since leaving college in 2022, Navarro has worked hard to establish herself as a regular contender on the women’s tour.
Thursday’s US Open defeat marked the 197th match Navarro has played in the past two years as she attempts to raise her world ranking from 127th to 12th. Fans may joke about how effortlessly she travels to tournaments in a private jet; she makes no apologies to her family. “My family is very supportive and they always stand by me no matter what,” she said after the match. “For them, I am a daughter and a sister before I am a tennis player.”
Pegula is similarly relentless, the 15-year-old tour veteran overshadowed by her peers, not least her doubles partner, Coco Gauff. It took Pegula until 2021 to break through at a slam, though she quickly developed a reputation for stalling in the quarterfinals. It looked like that would be the case again on Wednesday night when she played Iga Świątek. But this time she held her nerve and stuck to the steady, tactical approach that has become her trademark to knock out the top favorite. On Saturday, Pegula will play for the US Open title — she joins Martina Navratilova and Serena Williams as the only American women to do so after the age of 30. And yet, it still feels like a step too far to call Pegula and Navarro’s ascents heroic.
Billionaires are, after all, the villains of society. No one tries to hear what she have overcome. But through their stubborn perseverance, Navarro and Pegula stand out from the stereotype And their professional colleagues. It is clear that other players are in it for the money; they have to be. Navarro and Pegula? They play for respect. You have to tip your hat.
After Navarro’s semifinal defeat on Thursday, her father found his way to the players’ warm-up area in Ashe to console her. After Pegula booked her spot in the final, the stadium’s big screen was switched to her father in a luxury box, looking down proudly. All in all, it was a big night for the Billionaire Girls Club. Sure, money gave them advantages when they were starting out, but it didn’t buy their work ethic. It put them in the best position to let their talent shine.
