NEW YORK — Jessica Pegula was both surprised and a little amused when she recently saw the score of the U.S. Open final she lost last year to Aryna Sabalenka.
The record book says it was a razor-thin margin — 7-5, 7-5, a few points here or there. She had her chances. She even served for the second set, letting the opportunity to take it the distance barely slip away.
But in retrospect, it didn’t necessarily feel that way.
“I didn’t remember it being that close,” she said Tuesday. “I wasn’t like, ‘Oh, what a great match, I’m happy to be in the finals.’ I walked off the court and told my coach that I didn’t serve well. That’s the mentality I have.”
Pegula, 31, is going to get another chance at Sabalenka on Thursday night in the U.S. Open semifinals. It’s also an opportunity to stamp 2025 as the year American women took out the world No. 1 in all four majors.
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After Madison Keys beat Sabalenka to win her long-awaited first major in Australia, Coco Gauff came back from a set down to beat her in Paris before Amanda Anisimova pulled the upset to reach the Wimbledon final. Now, is it Pegula’s turn to knock out Sabalenka in New York?
“It would be cool to get revenge, obviously,” she said.
Pegula vows to bring a different mentality to the court this time versus Sabalenka, against whom she’s won just two of nine career meetings. Last year, Pegula was wrapped up in trying to finally break through to a major semifinal, which she hadn’t done in six previous trips to the quarters. This year the feeling is different, not just because she’s had an admittedly favorable draw to get to this point but because her results this season have been uneven.
It has made her appreciate even more what she did last summer, going 15-2 during the North American hard court swing with a title in Canada and making the finals of Cincinnati and the U.S. Open. It also put her on a different level of stardom, saddled with outside expectations really for the first time in her career.
“Seeing the feedback from all the fans and how much support I’ve gotten, now I (know) last year was incredible,” she said. “I went on a crazy run and just played some girl that was having a five percent crazier run and, wow, I was right there. This year I’ve come back with a different perspective.”
In the big picture, of course, the perspective on Pegula’s career should be easy to see regardless of whether she wins a major: It’s been far more successful than anyone could have imagined.
In Pegula’s first several years as a professional tennis player, she was mainly known for one thing: Being the daughter of Terry and Kim Pegula, who made a fortune in fracking and then bought both the Buffalo Bills and Buffalo Sabres.
Being the daughter of billionaires, of course, comes with advantages. Tennis can be an expensive sport, and the top echelon is filled with stories of players whose families needed financial help to pay for coaching and travel in pursuit of a child’s dream. Many end up abandoning the sport when they struggle to break into the top 100 because it’s too impossible to make a living.
Pegula didn’t have those concerns. But at the same time, tennis is as much of a meritocracy as any sport on Earth. The only way to build a career is to win, and it’s impossible to buy what it takes to become one of the five best players in the world.
For Pegula, that was a long journey. She was pretty much stuck on the ITF circuit — two rungs below the top-level WTA events — until she was 24 years old. She finally broke into the top 100 in 2019, allowing her to compete more regularly in big tournaments before her career changed entirely that summer with a surprise title in Washington, D.C.
By 2021, she was seeded at the Grand Slams and starting to pop up in the second week. But even last year, when her U.S. Open run exposed her to a whole new set of fans, it was hard to separate the idea of a player who had to work extremely hard just to get to this level from the connotation of being a billionaire’s daughter.
After a Wimbledon quarterfinal loss in 2023, the British tabloids were particularly unkind. The next day, the Times of London ran a headline that read: “Six quarterfinals, six defeats: Jessica Pegula needs dynamic that family billions can’t buy.”
Pegula addressed some of those misconceptions at last year’s U.S. Open.
“People think I have a butler, that I get chauffeured around, that I have a private limo, that I fly private everywhere,” she said. “Yeah, I’m definitely not like that. I mean, people can think what they want. I just think it’s kind of funny. A butler? I read these comments and I’m like, no, not at all. Maybe I should, I don’t know at this point. Is that what you want me to do? It’s a little annoying, but I think it’s kind of funny because I don’t know anyone that lives like that. It’s outrageous.”
If you can mentally separate the player from the level of privilege she comes from, it’s difficult to root against Pegula because she is probably getting as much out of her talent as any player in the top 10. And she grinds over the details — maybe too hard, at times.
Pegula admitted Tuesday to doing a lot of tinkering this summer after she lost to 116th-ranked Elisabetta Cocciaretto in the first round a Wimbledon. It was a result that came out of nowhere given that Pegula had won a warm-up tournament on grass in Germany the week before. In the final of that event, she beat Iga Świątek, who went on to win the Wimbledon title a couple weeks later.
That sequence of events left Pegula frustrated and searching for answers, to the point of even experimenting with new strings as she prepared for hard court season and her most important tournament of the year.
But still, Pegula hadn’t really been able to recapture her rhythm until a series of practices before the U.S. Open intended to simplify things and get her back to playing the kind of straightforward, flat-hitting power tennis that got her to the brink of a Grand Slam title a year ago.
“I feel like I can always come back to the fact that I’ll figure it out in the end and that hits me in the toughest moments of the year,” she said. “It doesn’t mean it’s easy, but I think now especially as I’ve gotten older I can tap into a lot of the experience I’ve had and this week I’ve tried to get back to enjoying competing.”
Rather than focusing on the result, Pegula plans to take in the moment and appreciate the journey Thursday night against Sabalenka. Maybe this time she’ll leave Arthur Ashe Stadium with a score worth remembering.
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