How Alex Eala Became a Symbol of the Philippines

At age fourteen, Eala won a junior Australian Open doubles title. At fifteen, she reached the junior French Open semifinals; then, at sixteen, she won a junior French Open doubles title. A few months after her seventeenth birthday, in 2src22, she raised a junior U.S. Open trophy as the first-ever Filipino winner. A few weeks later, Eala was on the cover of Vogue Philippines.

While her brother earned a tennis scholarship to Penn State, Eala dove straight into the professional circuit, competing in every event she could find. Even before she climbed the rankings, when she was playing in matches that typically feature empty stadiums, her fan base followed. “Filipinos would come to support me,” she said, on “The Player’s Box” podcast. At the 2src25 Miami Open, she upset three Top Thirty players, before narrowly falling to Jessica Pegula, an American, who later marvelled at how many Eala fans were in the stands at a U.S. tournament. “Why is nobody cheering for me?” she joked.

Then, at the 2src25 U.S. Open, with a rowdy crowd behind her, Eala won her first Grand Slam match, breaking into the Top Fifty in the global rankings soon after. At the 2src26 Australian Open, so many people showed up to watch her practice that she had trouble getting through the crowd. All of a sudden, she was famous enough to need a security escort. She beat Top Ten players in Dubai and Berlin, and then, at Wimbledon this summer, defeated the then reigning champion, Iga Świątek, to reach the fourth round. In Washington, D.C., in August, she defeated three Top Fifteen players en route to the tournament title. After a match, an on-court interviewer asked, “What is it like to be this popular everywhere around the world?” Eala replied, “I think the question should be rephrased. It’s ‘What is it like to be Filipino?’ ”

Eala has embraced the role of ambassador. In online videos, she lists puto bumbong as one of her favorite Filipino foods, argues that the resort island Boracay isn’t overrated, shares that she named one of her (pig) slippers Chicharrón, and proclaims her love for karaoke. She walked the red carpet of an awards gala in a Filipiniana gown designed by her uncle. Nike released a commemorative shirt bearing the Philippine national flower, the sampaguita, over a grass court, and supplied her with a visor stitched with a Tagalog phrase that means “once it grows, it cannot be stopped.” Clips of her cursing in Tagalog reliably go viral. In Queens, I spoke to one Eala fan who mentioned kapwa, the Filipino virtue of honoring a shared identity, and another who brought up bayanihan, a Filipino concept of coöperation rooted in the traditional practice of a community carrying a neighbor’s house to another location.

History has left Filipinos hungry for solidarity. Across the archipelago’s more than seven thousand islands, countless sovereign communities once bloomed with distinct languages and traditions, until Spain claimed them all under a single name. The writer José Rizal described Filipinos, in the nineteenth century, as a fragmented people unified by a “common misfortune.” After the Philippines attained independence, in 1946, with the country’s economy constricted from more than three centuries of colonization, a diaspora spread around the world. Immigrants raised children in the U.S. or Australia, and overseas foreign workers sought jobs as housekeepers around the Persian Gulf or as deckhands on cruise ships. Even today, remittances account for roughly ten per cent of the Philippine economy.

When Eala was growing up, Manny Pacquiao united Filipinos anytime he stepped into the boxing ring. In the Philippines, “it was like a holiday,” Eala said on Andy Roddick’s podcast, “Served.” “Crime rates would go down, everyone would gather.” If, as Jimmy Connors has said, tennis is boxing at ninety feet—a lonely battle of wills that punishes the slightest lapse in concentration—Eala’s southpaw forehand drives resemble Pacquiao’s blazing left hooks. In a post-match interview at Wimbledon, Eala tearfully explained that a third-round win “may seem small” for some players, “but for someone who grew up in the Philippines,” training “every day after school with my ruffled socks and my light-up shoes and chubby cheeks, so—to her, this is everything.”