Bill Ackman's Tennis Delusions

These are not serious people

Bill Ackman played a professional tennis match this week. It did not go well. Nor was it ever going to.

Ackman, 59, has made billions from his perch running the Pershing Square Capital Management hedge fund. In recent years, he’s become an avid tennis player and a major backer of the sport. Of note, he’s funded a group called PTPA, or Professional Tennis Players Association, that has sought – not successfully – to create something resembling a pro tennis players union. (Tennis pros are independent contractors, and the major tennis bodies have used their individualism against them to screw players out of prize money and to abuse them with a ridiculous playing schedule that goes for 11.5 months of the year. I’m vaguely pro the PTPA’s goals.)

Apparently, Ackman’s largesse – both tennis and otherwise – was enough to wedge his way into the Hall of Fame Open. He teamed up with Jack Sock, one of the best doubles players of the last twenty years, to play doubles against Omar Jasika and Australian tennis bad boy Bernard Tomic.

This was not an exhibition match, mind you. It was a real tennis match on the Challenger tour, which is a lower rung of the pro tour. Tomic, for example, is currently ranked 214 in the world and has been using the Challengers to try and revive his once promising career and move up in the rankings.