Investment banker enjoys day at the office despite loss
Matija Pecotic’s long journey toward getting the chance to play his first match on the red clay at River Oaks Country Club, a place he has long wanted to visit racket in hand, was the consummate feel-good story, although the match itself devolved into a feelbad story for the 33-yearold investment banker from Croatia via Malta, Princeton and Harvard Business School.
Right, Princeton and Harvard Business School. Pecotic is no ordinary tennis player. For starters, he has a day job that he hasn’t quit. After failing to qualify for the main draw of the U.S. Men’s Clay Court Championships, he’ll be back in the office in West Palm Beach on Monday afternoon. At least he won’t be wearing a tie.
“It’s Florida, not New York,” Pecotic said, flashing a smile despite a disappointing 7-6 (4), 6-4 loss to the top-seeded player in qualifying, Japan’s Yosuke Watanuki.
Why disappointing? Because he reached set point on his serve in the first set, and he was up a break in the second, too. It wasn’t disheartening, however, because “(the score) wasn’t one and one,” he said. Watanuki, at No. 123 in the ATP rankings, is 447 spots above Pecotic — and 241 higher even than Pecotic’s career-best 206 in 2015, shortly after which a bizarre and potentially fatal infection nearly ended his professional tennis career before it became one.
“Five-three, 40-30, set point … I served wide, had an easy forehand up the line and missed it by 3 inches,” he said of Saturday’s near miss. “Against guys ranked that high, you’ve got to take those chances. (If) I make the shot, it’s 6-3 and then he has to win two sets. Sure, I lost the match, but you have (to keep your) perspective. It didn’t shake my confidence any. I mostly did what I had to do, but I had two or three shots that I didn’t execute on and that was the difference. You only get so many chances at this level.”
To be sure, Pecotic possesses a surfeit of perspective. As a teenager, he fled the war-torn Balkans with his family for Malta, where the tennis culture wasn’t of the sort that would prepare him for big-time college tennis, never mind the ATP Tour. But he had the academic smarts to get into Princeton, where he rose to No. 2 in the NCAA rankings and earned Ivy League player of the year honors three seasons running.
Then in his first season as a pro, he posted a smattering of promising results. But he needed hernia surgery before the 2016 Australian Open. It went badly, to say the least.
“That year was very, very tough,” he said. “Oh my god, I lost 20 pounds. For the first three months, I didn’t get out of bed. My mom was spoon-feeding me. My skin had completely peeled off my body. I felt like I had been dipped in acid. But, looking back at that period, every setback led to the next great achievement. Had I not been forced to stop playing tennis, I probably wouldn’t have applied to Harvard. I would not have gone that route.
And he “would not have met the next group of people” who helped lead him to where he is now, serving as the director of capital markets for Wexford Real Estate Investors, an affiliate of the $4 billion investment firm Wexford Capital.
By 2019, he’d pulled his game back together enough to win an ITF Futures tournament, only to have the pandemic turn the world upside down. When the 2023 season began, his only shot at getting into a main ATP draw was relying on the kindness of strangers, namely tournament directors willing to give him wild-card spots for qualifying.
That happened in the Delray Beach Open in February. And he qualified. Then, after losing the first four games, he rallied to defeat Jack Sock, once a world top-10 player and the 2015 Houston champion.
“If I hadn’t beaten Jack,” Pecotic said, “I wouldn’t be here today.”
True, Clay Courts tournament director Bronwyn Greer admitted. But, because he did beat Sock, awarding him the wild card was a no-brainer. She received a nice email from him, and that’s all it took.
Pecotic always assumed he would land solidly on his feet in the world of high finance at some point, saying, “I understand the economic realities of tennis — only a very few guys really make big money.” For the next 12 to 18 months, though, he’s determined to live in two worlds.
“I asked my firm (to let me play) 25 tournaments,” he said. “Given the nature of our work, I can do a lot remotely. I’m 33, but I only have 2½ years of Tour experience, of Tour mileage. My body feels the same as it did when I was 23. I told the firm I have more tennis to give.”
But back to the office he’ll go Monday … after spending his morning hitting tennis balls.