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You haven’t lived as a tennis fan, apparently, until a silver-haired-man pushing 60 with a head-scratching wild card into the doubles, accompanied by security, helicopters into your tournament.

Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who turned 59 in May, will take the court Wednesday at the Hall of Fame Open at the iconic club in Newport with former Newport champion and current pickleball player Jack Sock in a first-round doubles match.

It will, needless to say, be his professional tournament debut.

As fate would have it, they’re playing Aussies Omar Jasika and … Bernard Tomic. You can’t make that up.

Ackman is obviously pumped about this. Years of dropping dollars into tennis (and pickleball) and buying tennis moments with big-time players have paid off.

A tennis update. I met @NickKyrgios on @X and he proposed we play an ATP tournament together. Unfortunately, Nick got injured so our doubles hopes have been delayed, but fortunately fate intervened. @JackSock managed to get a wildcard into the @TennisHalloFame Hall of Fame Open… https://t.co/YR0IDQsi17

— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) July 2, 2025

Most casual fans would have no clue who Bill Ackman is. Unless they’re into the adventures of hedge-fund billionaires, or are fervent Donald Trump supporters.

But Ackman, who weighs in with the might of his mighty fortune on Twitter about various subjects – politics, mostly – has some 1.8 million followers.

So this “unpaid” advertisement for the event will get some reach.

(His description of the Newport courts is … well, aspirational).

“Any” publicity is good publicity, right?

The story of Ackman’s “professional tennis debut” got plenty of press.

It was in Fortune. And the Sun tabloid. And the Express tabloid. And a somewhat blistering column in USA Today. Not to mention the usual garbage clickbait sites.

As long as they spell the tournament’s name correctly, right?

It’s manna from heaven for an event that is a joint men’s and women’s Challenger-level tournament, with a not-insignificant sum of $400,000 US in total prize money.

But it’s a long way from what it was – a post-Wimbledon grass-court ATP Tour event with, as its centerpiece, the annual International Tennis Hall of Fame inductions. The tournament’s ATP sanction was retired after last year’s event.

It considered various options to keep the tennis going, finally opting for this joint event.

Wealthy tennis fan bucketlists

This has been brewing for awhile, ever since … this.

A fun story:

I reposted an incredible @NickKyrgios @DjokerNole doubles point, and Nick replied with an offer of a tennis lesson. I DM’d him taking him up on the offer and sent him some practice and doubles match videos. He then proposed that we are going to play a futures… https://t.co/sY8hMnXFwP

— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) March 26, 2025

From what we can see, the 59-year-old (who has access to the best coaches in the world) is a decent club player.

On his resumé for a tennis event he co-founded called the “Finance Cup”, he’s listed as a “Two-time NY State High School Doubles Quarterfinalist” who “Competed in Junior Tournaments in US and Europe”. But he only more recently returned to it.

He has shown no apparent interest in playing USTA tournaments in his age category – or any category. He appears to mostly play with his fellow finance bros.

I mean, why grind when you can buy your way to the top, really.

So it’s a rich man’s indulgence – nothing new on the planet.

But on the optics and ethics side, it’s as borderline as it gets.

The selling of wild cards

The ATP Tour regulations about wild cards are pretty well spelled out.

This falls under the “major tournament offence” category.

And there are priors in this area.

Back in 2019, former pro player and coach Miguel Tobon was suspended for 12 months and fined $20,000 US after “being found to have traded wild cards in return for payment at a number of tennis tournaments staged in 2017.” Tobon also failed to cooperate with the investigation, refusing to hand over his cell phone. He also had to pay an additional $6,000 – “representative of the monies he received from the sale of wild cards.”

Specifically: “Tobon was found to have “entered into an agreement with an individual which involved him promoting tennis events in Colombia, for which he received wild cards at those tournaments”.

That’s a pretty small return for taking such a big risk.

Bouchard Newport singles return brief – Montreal finale next?

Atlanta Open under scrutiny in 2023

Nearly two years ago, the now-defunct Atlanta Open came under scrutiny because of its wild card selections.

NCAA champion Ethan Quinn of the University of Georgia (whose career has been on the rise since then) and popular local hero Chris Eubanks, who had just won his first ATP Tour title in Mallorca, were originally bypassed for wild cards.

There was a system in place at that event installed by a previous tournament director to alternate wild cards between local college rivals Georgia and Georgia Tech. It was Georgia’s turn that year. Instead, college player Andres Martin of Georgia Tech (with far less NCAA gravitas than Quinn) got the valuable wild card.

The twist in this story was that Georgia Tech received the wild card for a second straight year “as part of an agreement to use the school’s facilities as practice courts during the event.”

That’s not allowed.

A few days later, the tournament issued a statement saying Quinn and Eubanks would get qualifying wild cards.

There doesn’t appear to have been any subsequent fallout about this issue.

Jumping over that ethical line

It’s hard to understate how poor the optics are with this one.

And from our boots on the ground in Newport, it seems the tournament staff and others are pretty livid about how it looks, too.

We’ve seen a few gift wild cards before; occasionally a tournament doctor (who donates their services) or someone else involved in a low-level ITF event will get a spot in the qualifying, if there are spaces available.

But this is next level. It’s not the ATP or WTA Tour. But it’s as big as you can get without jumping to that level.

The first concern is the fact that Ackman was one of the original investors in the Professional Tennis Players Association, whose beleaguered mission is to bring transparency and equity to the sport and create more income for the lower-ranked players. The 2022 IRS forms for the non-profit indicate a non-cash investment of $10,147,000 through Ackman’s Pershing Square Foundation, although the complex series of transactions make it a maze to wade through.

The PTPA, which still has no official membership roster or dues revenue, has been bankrolled by a for-profit arm called “Winners Alliance”. While we’re told Ackman’s original investment in the PTPA was repaid, he remains involved on the Winners Alliance side.

So having such a prominent PTPA investor line up on the opposite side of one of the issues the PTPA is battling for – the integrity and fairness of wild cards – in an ongoing court case against several tennis governing bodies, is awkward.

Ackman, who has donated generously to various tennis causes over many years including the New York Junior Tennis League, also has a non arms-length relationship with the charity foundation of the Tennis Hall of Fame, as a member of the Founders’ Circle.

Again, how bad does that look: contribute to the museum, snag a wild card into the doubles.

Even if there was no direct financial transaction, the examples listed above show that it doesn’t have to be a wad of cash directly into the tournament director’s hands to run afoul of the rules.

The tournament might have gotten around the logistics of this by awarding the actual wild card to Sock, the 32-year-old former top-10 player who won the Wimbledon men’s doubles title with Vasek Pospisil in 2014 (among others).

Sock ended his career, for all intents and purposes, with a doubles finale at the US Open in 2023 in company of John Isner. He’s now playing pickleball. Sock is not officially retired, so you presume he’s eligible to play and has continued to follow the required anti-doping protocols.

According to Ackman, it was Sock who asked him to team up – although Ackman admits he’s never met the American, who is a good friend of Nick Kyrgios.

We contacted Newport tournament director Brewer Rowe for comment on this rather borderline tournament decision. But he hasn’t responded.

However you spin all this, it’s not a good look.

We just hope Ackman doesn’t get hurt by an errant Tomic kick serve.

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