Brian Vahaly is one of those tennis lifers: He’s been playing since the age of two, competing in tournaments since he was seven, was the first All-American tennis player at the University of Virginia, and spent six years on the pro tour, with some big victories over top-10 players. Now 46, he’s the chairman of the board and co-CEO of the United States Tennis Association, which oversees the sport in the US—and, most famously, runs the US Open.
In 2017, Vahaly also became the first-ever male professional tennis player to come out as gay—something he only felt comfortable doing a decade after his retirement from pro tennis. (Since then, only one other pro player has followed in his footsteps: Brazilian Joao Lucas Reis da Silva, currently ranked 229th, came out last December.)
To celebrate today’s Open Pride Day and Pride Night out at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, we spoke to Vahaly about his long journey to understanding himself, his decision to come out to better represent his truth for the twin sons he shares with his husband—and about dramatically leading and expanding those pride celebrations at the Open.
Vogue: You started playing at a very young age. Was tennis a family thing?
Brian Vahaly: When I was two years old, my parents took me down to the local park, and the options were to swim in the pool or to play tennis—and my parents had exposed me to the movie Jaws a little too early, so I was always afraid that the shark from Jaws would show up in the pool. So I just gravitated towards tennis. Soon I started taking lessons and hitting with my parents, hitting against the wall. I don’t really know life without tennis.
When did you know that you were good? Or good enough that maybe going pro would be an option?
Good and pro are two totally different things. The odds of being a professional athlete are so unbelievably small, but when I was seven, eight years old, I started playing in local tournaments around Atlanta, where I grew up, against 10-, 11-, and 12-year-olds. As a kid, I loved the attention you get from being great at a sport, and from there it started to escalate into state tournaments and sectional and national tournaments. Going pro was certainly always the dream—I remember watching Michael Chang and Andre Agassi and wondering what it must be like—but to really believe that it was possible for me to be a professional athlete didn’t happen until much later. For my family, who cared a lot about education, tennis was about getting a college scholarship.
