While the Wimbledon quarterfinals are underway next week, billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman will be competing in a different grass tennis tournament in Newport, Rhode Island.
The 59-year-old founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management will play in the Hall of Fame Open, an ATP Challenger event at the International Tennis Hall of Fame, where he’ll battle alongside doubles partner Jack Sock.
If the duo win their first match, Ackman is “pretty sure” he’ll be the oldest person in tennis history to win ATP points. (ATP did not respond to a request for comment.) Victory would earn them 25 points each and prize money of $2,030, which Ackman says will go to Sock.
“I’ve never met Jack Sock,” Ackman said in an interview with Front Office Sports on Thursday. That’ll change on Friday, when the partners start training in Bridgehampton before traveling to Newport on Sunday ahead of the tournament. Doubles matches begin Tuesday.
The duo will be sponsored by Nike. The two have not discussed which side of the court they’ll take, but Ackman is prepared to be a team player: “I assume I’m playing on the deuce side because Jack prefers the ad side, so to accommodate Jack, I’ll switch.”
Ackman says he tries to hit for 90 minutes four to five times in a regular week and every day during the summer. He plays with a Tecnifibre racquet after switching from one made by Babolat within the past year on the recommendation of his coaches Olivier Morel and Georgy Chukhleb.
“When my serve is on, it’s good,” says Ackman, a right-hander who has a one-handed backhand. He declined to identify the strongest part of his game. “I’m peaking next week,” he adds with a laugh.
Ackman says he doesn’t play on grass often, which puts him in the same camp as most ATP players, who spend the majority of the year competing on clay and hard courts. But he is at least familiar with the grass courts at the Hall of Fame, which last weekend hosted the “Finance Cup,” where Ackman and his partner Richey Reneberg reached the semifinals.
The Hall of Fame Open overlaps with the second week of Wimbledon, and often lures competitors who have made an early exit from the year’s third Grand Slam. Ackman has no plans to fly to London to watch; he says he’s hyper-focused on Newport, where he’s hoping for cooler temperatures and mild humidity.
“I’m going to try to have a lot of fun, we’ll do everything we can to win and put on a good show,” says Ackman. “It’s a once in a lifetime experience—unless we win.”
Nebraska-born Sock is an accomplished 32-year-old former pro who earned four ATP Tour singles titles and 17 doubles titles during his career. He retired in 2023 and now plays pickleball and hosts the Nothing Major podcast with former tennis players John Isner, Sam Querrey, and Steve Johnson. Sock is reemerging from retirement to play with Ackman.
So how did Ackman and Sock gain their wildcard entry to next week’s tournament?
“As a former champion here in Newport, Olympic gold medalist, and three-time major champion in doubles, the Hall of Fame was happy to support Jack Sock’s wildcard request,” a spokesperson for the International Tennis Hall of Fame tells Front Office Sports.
“Jack asked Bill Ackman to be his doubles partner, and the ATP approved the selection,” she added, highlighting that Sock is a fan favorite in Newport and that Ackman is a long-standing supporter of the Hall of Fame’s nonprofit mission. Sock lifted the men’s doubles title in Newport in 2021 alongside William Blumberg.
“I am playing the best tennis of my life and Jack is one of the greatest doubles players ever,” Ackman wrote in a post on X on Wednesday that, as many Ackman tweets do, got a lot of media attention. He said it was initially Nick Kyrgios who proposed they play in a tournament together, but Kyrgios’s injury delayed that plan.
Ackman, a longtime tennis aficionado who helped finance Frances Tiafoe’s junior career, has been across the net from some of the greatest ever to hold a racquet, including 20-time major champion Roger Federer. “I was so intimidated, I played poorly,” lamented Ackman.
The hedge fund titan did, however, get the better of Andre Agassi in a doubles match, and has practiced with professionals including Greek star Stefanos Tsitsipas and Canada’s Vasek Pospisil, a co-founder of the Professional Tennis Players Association which counts Ackman as a backer.
He’s also earned a doubles victory over former pro Noah Rubin, who reached a career-high singles ranking of 125.
“He’s definitely accustomed to pressure,” Rubin tells FOS. “The first time we played, I was shocked by his serve—for a guy that didn’t really play his whole life, he can really pop a serve,” adds Rubin, founder of the media platform Behind the Racquet, who has known Ackman for roughly five years.
“If he’s accelerating and going for his shots, he can definitely surprise people,” Rubin says, noting that opposing players will face another type of pressure: not wanting to lose to Ackman. “I’m curious to see how he acclimates to the pressure of a tennis arena.”
Rubin will be on site in Newport as the coach of Eugenie Bouchard, a former Wimbledon singles finalist who is making a return to women’s tennis.
On Wednesday, Ackman encouraged his 1.8 million X followers to buy tickets to the event, but his presence has not yet shown signs of boosting the tournament’s bottom line—though it should certainly boost Tennis Channel viewership.
“Ticket sales have been strong the past several weeks,” the Hall of Fame spokesperson says, “and yesterday was no different heading into the holiday weekend.”
