Alex Eala Is Catching The WTA’s Best Off Guard

In tennis, it can be pleasant to play under the flag of an underrepresented country with a large diaspora. Essentially, you have a network of sleeper cells who can be activated all over the world. They are extremely willing to spend money to come watch you play, and extremely loud, because to them you are one of the most important sportspeople alive. A player in these circumstances doesn’t have to reach the absolute peak of the sport to have this effect on people. Brazilian fans go nuts for blue-chip prospect Joao Fonseca. Turkish fans turn up for recent top-50 debut Zeynep Sonmez. But nobody out there is doing it quite like the Filipinos and Alex Eala. The 21-year-old from Metro Manila inspired mass devotion during her breakout semifinal run at the Miami Open last year, and probably would have continued to do so if her career petered off immediately after that. Instead, as she’s surged into the top 20 this summer, Eala is solidifying a place on tour for both her own curious game and her colossal fan base.

Last week, Eala competed for the first time at the D.C. Open. Mark Ein, chairman of the tournament, said that his staff had been courting her since the spring. He also said that about 80 percent of the inquiries to the tournament’s ticketing department were about when Eala was playing. “Honestly, I think it’s more, and they just didn’t want to say it was more, but they’re, like, virtually all. It’s not an exaggeration,” he said.

The Philippines haven’t produced an athlete of this international prominence since Manny Pacquiao. Eala held onto the crowd in D.C. even when opposed by an international superstar like Naomi Osaka or a top-ranked American like Jessica Pegula. Flags flapped and Tagalog chants boomed. Eala rewarded all that fan interest on Monday by winning the title—her first at the tour level—after upsetting the tournament’s top three seeds in her final three rounds. Giant-killing was at the center of the Eala origin story, and it remains a distinctive feature of her career. This summer, her lefty repertoire has looked strong enough to suggest that she could herself become a giant.

There is still one aspect that is decidedly lilliputian: her serve. How does Eala survive on tour with a first serve that generally clocks in at 80-90 mph, and a second serve that she often slides in the mid-60s? It’s a shot that might lead you to believe that she’s shorter than she actually is: 5-foot-9, plenty tall enough to achieve tour-average speeds—on paper. While it might still be the most conspicuous hole in her game, her off-speed delivery can actually confound returners. Opponents have said as much.

“I know exactly how it’s going to come to me, but it’s such a different rhythm,” Iga Swiatek said, after Eala upset the defending champ in the third round of Wimbledon last month. “I felt like she was serving slower and slower, and it became tougher and tougher for me to return these serves, and that was hard for me to accept.”

Eala often slices her second serve to keep the ball low and difficult to attack, and places it well, but her success is mostly in spite of the serve; it’s a testament to everything else she can do once the point has started. She has a robust baseline repertoire, built on her ability to neutralize the opponent’s pace and apply pressure with her own court positioning. Often you can spot her parked right on top of the baseline, crouching low to take the ball on the rise, smoothly redirecting the rally at will. She can tolerate a longer rally because she moves well, but it is movement with the intent of creeping forward and suffocating the opponent, rather than simply hanging deep and prolonging the point. Within the realm of counterpunchers, hers is a more aggressive approach. As Eala told BAGEL Magazine recently, growing up in the hoops-obsessed Philippines, she trained on a tennis court that had basketball hoops behind her, and she literally couldn’t move back too far behind the baseline. Her spinny lefty forehand is a versatile shot that cracks open the court with angles, while her flatter two-handed backhand is becoming a better tool for ending points.

That philosophy of pressure via court positioning applies just as well to her return game. Eala often sets herself up to return serve well inside the baseline, and often takes aggressive cuts that can perturb the server from the very first ball. Among top-50 players, she drags out return games the longest, averaging 7.0 points per return game, per Tennis Abstract. There’s a cost to standing that far up (she gets aced 6.2 percent of return points, which is fourth-worst among the top 50), but there’s also the benefit of making the server sweat (she produces double faults 5.9 percent of return points, which is eighth-best). Surprisingly, despite drawing out these return games longer than anyone, she’s not yet breaking serve at an elite rate—36.8 percent, which puts her at 22nd on tour—but perhaps that will come in time as she gets better at calculating risk versus reward.

Eala arrived in D.C. on a heater. Though she is a product of the Rafa Nadal Academy, clay is thus far her weakest surface; she’s been brilliant on grass and has cited hard courts as her most instinctive surface. This summer she went 12-4 on grass, culminating in a fourth-round appearance at Wimbledon, her best major performance to date, and after that she didn’t play until D.C., where she beat, in order: Qinwen Zheng (former top-10 player rebounding from injury), Leylah Fernandez (her predecessor in thrilling the Filipino fan base with lefty craft, frequent upsets, and a Pure Aero racket), Elina Svitolina (world No. 10), Osaka (world No. 13), and Pegula (world No. 3).

A rain delay split the final into two days, and Eala showed up Monday afternoon a set down but flipped the match her way, running away with the decider, 4-6, 6-4, 6-0. Pegula praised Eala’s recent results and noted that she “baits you” with her serve. Despite practicing against slow serves to prepare for the match, Pegula couldn’t dial in on it. There’s the lefty aspect, and the fact that the ball stays so low on her slider. “There’s no space to actually do anything with it. Sometimes you feel like you’re just starting the point,” Pegula said.

By the end of that title run, Eala had won her last five matches against top-10 players; on the season, she is 7-2 against those opponents. This is her first full year playing at the WTA level. Will her style get easier to solve on second viewing, once its novelty has worn off? That’s the usual knock on this sort of newcomer with an unconventional bag, and it is always a possibility. But she’s also already beaten Svitolina and Swiatek twice apiece, and those are both intelligent veterans. She’s already the first Filipino player to make it into the top 30 in singles, beat a top-10 player, reach the fourth round of a Slam, or, as of this week, win a WTA title. I’m very curious to see how much farther Eala can go on tour, and certainly there are millions of people who feel the same way, expressing that feeling at much higher decibel levels.