Financier Bill Ackman has been widely shamed for his appearance in a professional tennis tournament last week. Since shame is no longer operative in American culture, he's continued to explain every painstaking detail of the experience in his tweets, which read like a transcript of a front-facing video filmed in a car. In the course of defending his embarrassing appearance at the Hall of Fame Open, Ackman is approaching something like performance art.
Ackman denied the charge that his doubles match at the tournament was a pay-for-play situation. "Many also claimed that I bribed the [International Tennis Hall of Fame] for the wildcard, which is entirely untrue," he wrote on Sunday. "The HOF asked me for nothing and I made no commitments to the HOF. I had in the past donated to the HOF, but had done nothing in recent years." When denying a bribe, it's always important to complete the terms of the bribe: Ackman announced a few paragraphs later that he would be granting the Hall of Fame a "$10 million endowment that I will manage for free."
Andy Roddick called Ackman's wildcard entry the "biggest joke I've ever watched in professional tennis." Journalist Jon Wertheim pointed out that Ackman is helping fund the Professional Tennis Player's Association, a quasi-union that purports to look out for players' interests and expand their earning potential. Shockingly, Ackman's ideological commitments didn't stop him from taking up a vanity slot at a tournament where a player might have otherwise earned money.
Ackman has also offered a laborious, multi-part explanation for why he played badly, despite the fact that his opponents abandoned all pretense of competition and began tapping the ball toward him as one would to a promising child. The hedge fund manager argued that it was precisely because they played down to his level that he played the way he did: "And yes, the competition were clearly holding back. That made it even more difficult as I had too much time to think." I propose a new challenge: Jannik Sinner, please aim a couple of 100-mph forehands at Bill Ackman's solar plexus and see how he fares when he has less time to think.
Ackman claimed that he has spoken his last words about his tennis farce. He'll get back to other hobbies where his incompetence might yield more interesting results, such as trying to install Eric Adams as the mayor of New York City.
