Jessica Pegula had some of her best two weeks at the 2022 French Open. Everything was fine and dandy as the 30-year-old flew back home after cracking the Top 10 in the world, a quarterfinal and final appearances in singles and doubles respectively at the Stade Roland Garros. Just a few days later, she received a call from her sister Kelly who was staying at their parents’ house at the time. It was around midnight.

All she got to know by the end of the call was that “Something was wrong with our mom, and she was headed to the hospital in an ambulance.” Apparently, her mother Kim was asleep and her father woke up to her getting cardiac arrest. Jessica recalled, “She was unresponsive for quite a while.”

If it was not for her sister Kelly who made a timely intervention and performed CPR until the ambulance reached their residence, things might not have been the same. She narrated in The Player’s Tribune, “She saved her life. Even though she doesn’t like to take credit for this terrible situation, she absolutely saved her life, followed by the critical job performed by the paramedics who arrived and were able to restore a heartbeat.” But here’s the catch!

Just three months prior to the incident, Kelly reached out to her sister, saying she had decided to get a CPR certification to be eligible for a job. And considering how Jessica has been wanting to do the same, something or the other has always distracted her away from it. Jessica responded, “No way.” As nervous as Kelly was whether she had it in her to pass the class, she cleared her tests. Guess what her mother actually said?  “Nice Kells! Now if we have a heart attack you can revive us.”

Once the doctors were able to identify the issue, they fixed it. But the focus now shifted from the shock surrounding the sudden heart attack to playing that long game to wait, not knowing what to expect when she finally woke up. For two long weeks, the family members took rounds to provide the daily essentials and food with her father refusing to go back home without his wife. By the end of the first week, Kim was moved out of the ICU owing into an in-patient care facility. Towards the end of the second week, Jessica went back to practice bit by bit. She needed to focus on something else because reality was simply unkind and unforgiving. After all, well into another year of recovery, Kim was still struggling with significant expressive aphasia and significant memory issues.

“She can read, write, and understand pretty well, but she has trouble finding the words to respond. It is hard to deal with and it takes a lot of patience to communicate with her, but I thank God every day that we can still communicate with her at all.

Being the president of Pegula Sports and Entertainment, the holding company that managed the NFL’s Buffalo Bills and the NHL’s Buffalo Sabres, Kim was a workaholic. She invested time in people and brought energy to the culture. However, the realization hit hard when Jessica said, “Now we come to the realization that all of that is most likely gone. That she won’t be able to be that person anymore.”

However, seeing her mother’s recovery gave courage to her to keep moving on and eventually play the Wimbledon in November of the same year.

Jessica Pegula draws inspiration from her mother’s quick recovery

Back in 2022, Pegula was still reeling from her mother’s near-death situation ahead of the Wimbledon Championships. Nonetheless, she decided to play in the grass-court Grand Slam tournament, albeit without any practice. She reached the third round there, losing against Petra Martic. However, a year later, she reached the quarterfinals at Wimbledon, which was her best performance in that tournament.

Later, she highlighted how she was inspired by her mother’s recovery from cardiac arrest, saying, “A year ago when I came here, I didn’t have any warm-up. My mom basically almost died. I think a year coming around to make quarters, to see that she’s able to watch my match, was a huge success for myself and for my family.”

Years after that near-tragedy, Pegula is one step away from her best showing at a Grand Slam tournament, as she has made it to the final eight of the ongoing US Open. She will be up against Iga Swiatek in the quarterfinal and will be looking to pull off an upset to advance further in the tournament, even though Swiatek is the favorite to win that match. Do you think Pegula can beat Swiatek?