Alexandra Eala is currently one of the biggest names in Philippine sports. And she plays tennis. She’s not with the Gilas basketball team. She’s not even a volleyball player. Some people compare her to Manny Pacquiao. But she’s not a boxer.
A homegrown talent in tennis is rare. And what makes it rarer is that Eala wears the Philippine flag proudly. There are tennis players with Filipino blood like Leylah Fernandez, whose mother is a Filipina transplanted to Canada. She is now a Canadian citizen. So Fernandez now wears the flag of Canada wherever she competes. But she is brown-skinned like Alex.
Eala is physically bigger at 5’9” than Leylah, who I think is only 5’6” but even she (Eala) is smaller compared to many World Tennis Association or WTA players who are six foot and over in height. Fernandez, who is older than Eala, was previously ranked higher in the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA). But I think Alex has outranked her now.
Eala was recently defeated by her friend Iva Jovic, a teenager, of the United States in the US Open thus ending her dream of winning a grand slam tournament. There are currently four grand slams every year in world tennis: the US Open in New York, Wimbledon in London, French Open (Roland Garros) in Paris and the Australian Open in Melbourne. Eala has won a lesser WTA tournament in Washington DC and a still lesser tournament in Guadalajara in Mexico.
But there should be no pressure for her because what she is doing now in the world is largely unprecedented for a tennis player from the Philippines, man or woman. In the past, we talked only about the men’s game with Filipino players like Felicisimo Ampon, Felix Barrientos, Cecil Mamiit and Treat Huey. Tennis only became popular when we fielded a team in the Davis Cup, the regional games like in southeast Asia and Asia and, to a lesser extent, the Olympics.
As a sports fanatic, I followed world tennis and have gotten familiar with such names like Chris Evert, Martina Hingis, Maria Sharapova, the Williams sisters Venus and Serena, Martina Navratilova, etc. World tennis players, I thought then, only came from Europe, Russia and the United States. Having a Filipina like Eala in the WTA is therefore a pleasant surprise.
There should be no pressure on the 21-year-old, however, because what she has achieved and will achieve will always be historic for the Philippines. Reaching the top 20 in the WTA rankings has never been done in the past and no tennis player from the Philippines has won a tournament abroad. Eala’s rise has been fast and her popularity is worldwide and coincides with the spread of the Filipino diaspora throughout the decades.
Filipinos everywhere now know her name and they are now mostly part of what has aptly been called as “Eala’s army.” They are not only domestic workers but include professionals working in hospitals, in oil refineries and oil rigs, etc. They converge wherever Eala plays and buy Eala merchandise. The world has been introduced not only to Eala but also to the other Filipinos who are working abroad.