«Because of a cardiac arrest he doesn’t speak anymore. I could leave»- Corriere.it

one of the best tennis players in the world: the ranking places her at number 4, but in October she was also number 3. At the Australian Open Jessica Pegula reached the semifinals in doubles, paired with her compatriot Gauff. Not just tennis. Hers Hers multibillion-dollar family. Dad Terry owns the Buffalo Bills in the NFL and the Buffalo Sabers in the NHL. The Bills bought them in 2014 for a figure close to a billion and a half dollars, even surpassing the competition from Jon Bon Jovi and Donald Trump. The total assets estimated at almost 6 billion dollars. She, Jessica, has earned over 7.5 million dollars in her career of prize money alone, but she has also opened a restaurant and thrown herself into the cosmetics business, founding the Ready 24 line distributed in shopping malls across America. Yet for eight months Jessica has been experiencing a drama: her mother Kim’s illness. Suffering from a heart attack, from that moment she has to live with expressive aphasia and memory problems.

A story told by Pegula herself: In June 2022 I had just returned to Florida from the French Open — her heartfelt letter to The Players Tribune —. I reached the quarterfinals in singles and the final in doubles. It’s been an incredible two weeks, full of positives, including entering the Top 10 in the world. A few days after I returned home, I received a call around midnight (my mother’s birthday) from my sister Kelly, who was staying at my parents’ house. Mom had a problem and they were taking her to the hospital by ambulance, with an urgency. She was sleeping when my father woke up to find that she had gone into cardiac arrest and was unconscious – he said -. My sister gave her CPR until the ambulance arrived. You saved her life. Mother Kim, a Korean from Seoul, abandoned by her family at the age of 5 and adopted by American parents (as also happened to Jessica, who was also adopted), was the head of Pegula Sports and Entertainment, a company in which the family united all own sports, entertainment, real estate activities. Now everything has changed: Today my mother is still in the recovery phase and she is getting better day by day – Pegula tells her -. He has to deal with significant expressive aphasia and significant memory problems. He can read, write and understand quite well, but has trouble finding the words to respond.

A situation that has forced Pegula to recalibrate her priorities in life, including a career as a tennis player: My mother always wanted me to work hard, to learn and in the end to do what she did. She always told me to wait until I finished my tennis career. I always asked her to give me more responsibility, to get me more involved, because I wanted to help. So now here I am, with my family, caught up in discussions of her treatments, legal guardians, doctors, therapy and what seemed to be the least important, my tennis career – writes the American – . Suddenly, your world turns upside down and you have no idea what’s going on. Suddenly, I went from “Let’s celebrate top 10 ranking” to “I have to start thinking about my career after tennis much sooner than I thought”.