Eala’s rise draws a new Filipino audience to tennis

By Xavier Latimer

Filipinos who had never followed tennis are now buying tickets, streaming matches and signing their children up for lessons, a shift in the Philippines and across its diaspora that has followed almost entirely from the rise of 21-year-old Alexandra “Alex” Eala.

Before the Mubadala DC Open in August, nearly all of the tournament’s ticket requests were about Eala, its chairman, Mark Ein, said at the trophy ceremony, according to CNN. A one-set exhibition she played before the U.S. Open passed one million views on the tournament’s YouTube channel in less than a day, Tennis365 reported. In the Philippines, Decathlon told AFP that its sales of beginner racquets had risen 66 percent over the past year.

Eala was ranked 49th when she played the Australian Open in January and is now No. 18, the highest ranking ever held by a Filipino or Southeast Asian player. In July she beat defending champion Iga Swiatek on the way to the fourth round of Wimbledon, and in August she beat Jessica Pegula in the DC Open final to become the first Filipino to win a singles title on the WTA Tour. She reached the third round of the U.S. Open and won a bronze medal at the Asian Games in Japan on Oct. 1, an event she chose over the WTA’s China Open, a mandatory tournament, at the risk of a $10,000 fine.

At Home

Tennis has long been treated as a sport for the wealthy in the Philippines, where basketball and boxing draw most of the attention. The Philippine Tennis Association estimates there are fewer than 1,000 tennis courts in a country of about 116 million people, and AFP reported in August that parents were crowding their preschoolers onto the few that exist. The association’s executive director, Tonette Mendoza, told Front Office Sports that Eala’s results have made it easier to ask the government for money to build and refurbish tennis facilities.

Counting how many Filipinos watch at home is harder. WTA matches air in the Philippines on pay channels such as Premier Sports 2 through Cignal, and Spin.ph reported in March that informal Facebook livestreams, in which fans film a TV with a phone and collect small donations through the mobile wallet GCash, had multiplied around Eala’s matches to fill the gap. Much of her home audience never appears in official ratings. A clearer count may come Dec. 8, when she plays an exhibition at the 55,000-seat Philippine Arena. A full house would break the attendance record for a tennis match.

Abroad

More than 11 million Filipinos live overseas, and about 4.6 million people in the United States identify as Filipino, according to Pew Research Center’s analysis of Census Bureau data.

At the U.S. Open in September, thousands of Filipino fans filled Louis Armstrong Stadium for Eala’s first two matches, and the Associated Press reported that every seat at her practice court was taken hours before her opener, many by fans who did not have tickets to the evening session.

Jackie Chan, 46, who owns a hair salon in Queens, went to Eala’s second- and third-round matches with her parents, who moved to New York from Davao City around 1965 and had never followed tennis.

“It was amazing seeing how many Filipinos showed up,” Chan said. “You could feel the support throughout the stadium, and it made the match feel like more than just a tennis match.”

Eala lost in the third round to American Iva Jovic. “Seeing a Filipino player make it that far meant a lot to us,” Chan said. “My family will definitely keep following her.”

For some younger Filipino Americans, following Eala has become a way into the community as much as the sport. Nicolas Wright, 20, a sprinter at the University of Connecticut, started watching her at watch parties hosted by the Filipino student club on campus.

“I’m only half Filipino, but being involved with the Filipino club at UConn has helped me connect with that side of myself,” Wright said. His family now watches her together during big tournaments. “It’s something that gives us another reason to connect with our Filipino side.”

In Stockton, California, Eala’s following reaches back to one of the oldest Filipino American communities in the country. From the 1920s through the 1960s, the city’s Little Manila neighborhood held the largest Filipino population outside the Philippines, until most of it was torn down to build the Crosstown Freeway. Rhonda Ureta-Villalos, a fourth-generation Filipina American who has chaired the board of the preservation nonprofit Little Manila Rising since 2015, said her father, who was born in the Philippines, hears from relatives there that they have been watching more tennis because of Eala.

“Historically, I wouldn’t say tennis has occupied the same place in our community that basketball and some other sports have,” Ureta-Villalos said, pointing to the cost of equipment, courts and lessons.

“Our community has always had talent, ambition, and determination,” she said. “Seeing someone like Alex succeed helps make that visible to a much wider audience.”

What Comes Next?

Whether these new fans are following tennis or following Eala is still an open question, and her results have slipped since New York. She lost in Singapore to Tatiana Prozorova, ranked 180th, and in the Asian Games semifinals to China’s Wang Xiyu, ranked 85th, a loss that also cost her the automatic spot at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics that came with a gold medal. This week she lost her opening match at the Wuhan Open.

The tennis association is betting that the children now filling courts will keep playing either way. Mendoza said it is working with World Tennis to certify more coaches and is trying to bring tennis into the country’s public schools.