Alex Eala is the biggest new thing in tennis — and she’s bringing an entire country with her

· Yahoo Sports

At the height of Manny Pacquiao’s boxing career, there was a famous saying in the Philippines: The only time you could drive around Manila without experiencing relentless bumper-to-bumper traffic was during one of his fights.

Alexandra Eala, a 21-year-old who has risen to a career-high ranking of No. 18 heading into next week’s U.S. Open, is not quite in that category yet.

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“But she’s getting close,” said Bo Navarro, a California-based sports agent who played college tennis at UMass in the late 1990s.

Navarro keeps close ties to the Philippines through his family and his business, FilAm Sports, which guides athletes with Filipino heritage through the process of becoming eligible for their national team.

Lately, Navarro has observed some amusing interactions thanks to Eala's rise: Cousins in the Philippines who know nothing about tennis texting him about whether they should bet on her matches, his mother staying up in the middle of the night to watch an Eala match on Facebook via someone in Dubai holding up a cell phone to a TV, a tennis coach he knows in Bataan suddenly being so booked that he’s giving lessons until 10 p.m.

And like everyone else who has observed the Eala phenomenon in North America this summer during the hard court swing, Navarro expects that the U.S. Open will turn into a road game for anyone with the misfortune of drawing her — including Americans.

“It’s just gotten bigger and bigger everywhere she goes,” former top-five player and current ESPN commentator Mary Joe Fernandez said. “The fans that come to watch her — not just play but practice — is off the charts. Every point is loud. Every point she wins, it feels like she’s won more than a point.”

Fans show their support to Alexandra Eala of Philippines during the WTA 1000 National Bank Open.Anadolu via Getty Images

Though Eala is certainly one of the most interesting young prospects on the women’s tour at the moment — more on that later — in some ways it doesn’t even matter whether she wins a Grand Slam event. With a nation of 114 million people newly engaged in tennis, she’s already jolting the WTA’s business more than almost any individual player could.

At tournament after tournament, Eala’s press conferences and match highlights draw massive streaming numbers, dwarfing those of players who are more famous worldwide. When Eala knocked defending champion Iga Swiatek out of Wimbledon last month, the full match replay was viewed 998,000 times on YouTube. For comparisons’ sake, the replay of Serena Williams’ comeback match against Maya Joint had 122,000 views.

But the more obvious impact has come in person, where the Filipino diaspora around the world has started flocking to tennis tournaments. In the recent rain-delayed Washington final, where Eala defeated No. 3 Jessica Pegula for her biggest career title, the Monday afternoon crowd was so heavily tilted that by the third set it appeared the Buffalo-born Pegula would have rather been just about anywhere else. The following week, the Canadian Open leaned into the Eala Show by opening a concession stand to serve chicken adobo and lumpia.

“It was just unprecedented,” tournament director Karl Hale said. “We’ve never seen anything like that in Toronto before. Every match she played, it sold out.”

There are three primary reasons why Filipino fans have been rocket fuel for Eala’s profile on the international stage, making her far more famous (and potentially wealthy) than her results would typically dictate.

The first is obvious: The Philippines is a large country with a track record of delivering big audiences for sports. It has routinely been one of the NBA’s best international markets, for instance, regularly drawing more than 4 million viewers for big events like the Finals or All-Star Games. Tennis is new, but it’s catching on quickly.

“It’s always been basketball, then boxing and in the last decade volleyball has become No. 3,” said Anton Roxas, a sports broadcaster and podcaster in the Philippines. “In the past year, this is the most tennis news I’ve ever done. People who didn’t used to play tennis are now trying it out, and it’s all because of Alex Eala.

“I think any time a Filipino succeeds on the world stage, it just galvanizes the country.”

The second is that the population is highly online, with some estimates indicating that more than 90 percent of Filipinos use Facebook Messenger as their primary way to communicate — even more than regular texting. It ensures that nearly anything she does quickly goes viral and helps generate incredible numbers of video views.

And the third, Navarro said, is that she’s not a product of the diaspora but rather a fully Filipino woman who grew up in Manila and speaks Tagalog.

“There has never been, besides Manny, an athlete of this caliber who speaks the dialect that people can understand,” Navarro said. “The culture wants to attach itself and pull for somebody that’s homegrown.”

That distinction has helped Eala earn some significant endorsements, including from BPI (Bank of the Philippine Islands), Philippines-based Globe Telecom and Marriott Convoy’s Asia-Pacific division. It has also forced her to adjust to life under an intense microscope. Simply put, few players on the women’s tour are being watched as consistently or by as many people around the world. That’s a unique challenge for someone who would otherwise be working their way up the rankings — and through the difficulties of the tour — without a lot of fanfare that is following her from city to city.

“It's not an extra burden,” Eala said recently in Canada. “It's definitely an honor for me to represent my country, and I'm super grateful for all of the love and recognition that I'm getting. In those specific moments when I’m living in it, they do become quite overwhelming, especially when I’m experiencing things for the first time. But all in a positive light.”

Though it would be impossible for Eala not to be aware of the mania taking over her home country, in a way she has been shielded from much of it since age 13 when she arrived at the Rafa Nadal Academy in Spain to pursue full-time tennis training.

But back home, there is a Pacquiao-like effect taking place whenever she plays. Eala’s matches may not stop traffic in Manila, but she’s increasingly at the center of a specific type of community building that can only happen in a sports-crazy country that hasn’t had many signature athletes break through internationally.

“There are watch parties in various cities and we’ve never had that for tennis as far as I can recall,” Roxas said. “They set up a big screen and everybody is there — government officials, the mayor, the vice mayor, watching with the local folk and just supporting Alex all throughout.”

Alexandra Eala of the Philippines reacts after winning the women's singles championship match against Jessica Pegula of the United States on the final day of the Mubadala DC Open 2026.Scott Taetsch via Getty Images

All these new tennis fans are being treated to a player whose game stands out for a couple reasons. The first being that Eala is left-handed, which makes her a tricky matchup for much of the women’s tour simply because the spin and angle of the ball coming off a lefty’s racket isn’t something opponents see very often.

The second is her serve, which is unorthodox technically and unusually slow in terms of miles per hour. Though Eala overcomes it with heavy spin and the ability to command a point with her next shot, it is a vulnerability that may prevent her from reaching the very highest levels of the sport.

The net effect is when she plays, Eala has the look of someone who has to scrap and fight and chase down balls all over the court to win points. Even though Eala comes from a privileged background, her style makes her seem like a working class champion.

“I’m getting flashbacks of when Manny was doing this, when he was the underdog in every fight,” Roxas said. “Now Alex is the underdog in every match and when she wins, she always acknowledges the Filipino community and she’s very humble despite her comfortable upbringing. I think that’s what Filipinos love about her.”

Despite the question marks around her game and the natural barriers to entry for a young player coming out of the Philippines, Eala was identified very early as a talent worth uprooting and sending to a top academy. In 2022, she won the U.S. Open junior title and then began a steady climb from the minor leagues to this season where she’s beaten Coco Gauff, Elena Rybakina, Elina Svitolina, Naomi Osaka and Swiatek.

It would not be a massive surprise, particularly given the wide-open nature of the WTA these days, if Eala managed to string seven wins together at a Grand Slam in the near future.

And the longer she sticks around in these big tournaments, the more tennis crowds will start seeing the Filipino flags and interacting with fans who are not familiar with simple things like when to clap and when to be quiet.

“There have been a lot of complaints, a lot of people saying, ‘These guys are loud, they’re rude, they don’t know the rules,’” Navarro said. “Well, yeah, they don’t know the rules because the No. 1 sport in the Philippines is basketball and it’s loud and people scream and shout. That’s not tennis. But if you thought Canada was loud, wait until you see the Filipino New Yorkers.”

As the epicenter of so much immigration from around the world, a little slice of Queens often turns into a satellite of Rio de Janeiro when a Brazilian star plays or a mini-Buenos Aires when there’s an Argentinian on the court. But with more than a quarter million Filipinos and Filipino-Americans living in the New York metro area, a deep Eala run could bring a completely new and festive atmosphere to the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center.

“The USTA better make sure they put her on some big courts,” ESPN analyst Patrick McEnroe said. “The crowd is going to be wild for her, and it’s going to be a great story.”

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