The US Open wrapped up and unless you stayed for the Sabalenkas, Alcarazes, and Sinners (and not too many others of interest, discounting those behaving badly, like the Medvedevs and Ostapenkos), you might have stopped watching by the second round.
That was when Alex Eala received a trouncing from Spain’s Cristina Bucsa. Yes, the pugnacious verbs of sports journalism can apply to our own. Trounced she was, much as it pained us to admit, after her sterling, historic first-round win over 14th seed Clara Tauson.
With the fresh-faced scholar of the Rafa Nadal Academy, however, we are so healthily obsessed that we’ve been accused of being her hype train. Much social media commentary, tinged with faint sneers of classism, drew attention to crowd behavior during Eala’s first-round match and her Filipino fans’ alleged lack of tennis education. Cheering on double faults and Tauson’s errors apparently dragged the largely Filipino spectators down to the level of drunken European football hooligans.
Funnily enough, the same crowd behavior persisted into the next rounds, when the Filipino contingent from the Little Manila of Queens had been duly replaced in the stands by Hollywood and political royalty after Eala’s exit.
It seems the sport’s unwritten rules of conduct would more readily tut at ill-timed applause for unforced errors than at a U.S. President arriving late and holding up a line of paying spectators an hour into the eventual Sincaraz final.
GRAND SLAM
Eala’s professional winning act goes as far back as her Miami Open streak in March, when, with flat strokes, she unsettled the games of seeded mainstays and grand slam winners such as Iga Swiatek, Jessica Pegula, and Madison Keys. The semifinal berth in Miami booked her tickets to the main draws of Roland Garros and Wimbledon.
These genteel courts are barely in the Filipino universe of sports spectatorship—hence our basketball-grade cheering.
With grand slam stands serving as paparazzi sessions for the truly famous, it’s even a wonder our well-traveled nepobabies have never done their flaunting content there. A ticket on a good day could exceed Brice Hernandez’s PhP 70k monthly salary as a DPWH assistant district engineer—or about a third of the price of a designer bag.
Chump change, really, if those with deeper pockets put their minds to it. Eala’s global breakthrough announces another sport for height-disadvantaged Asians.
This hopefully elevates us from the scrappy, makeshift basketball rims of our streets, which never made worldwide stars of the most sweat-soaked, noon-playing fanatics.
That our national chosen sport, basketball, remains an anthropological anomaly has come to the fore with the successes of Hidilyn Diaz, Carlos Yulo, and Manny Pacquiao in their respective fields. The unfortunate takeaway, as always, is the lack of facilities and public support for less popular sports, not of talent.
Eala’s success is again due to her own kinesthetic gifts and the touchy truth of her relative privilege.
It’s no joke to be a tennis hobbyist in the Philippines, much less a dedicated rising tennis star. The country club sport has not shaken allegations of exclusivity, even amid the rise of a Filipina in the global tennis ranks.
Even the increasing disuse of members-only sports clubs—where courts are usually reserved for huffing, puffing old men playing triples at the expense of young ball boys with untutored but blasting groundstrokes—won’t make tennis an everyman sport anytime soon. There is nowhere else to play in the city unless you live in a posh condominium complex with its own painted cement court.
Public tennis courts in the Philippines are few and far between—fewer than you can count on your fingers in the metro. Rizal Sports Complex in the Kapitolyo-Shaw area, now the Ynares Center dedicated to (cough) basketball, used to host a trio of shell courts and summer clinics for middle-class children. When the program wrapped up, it was anyone’s guess where its students might be free to shoot their shots without being fed balls by a coach paid at least PhP 1,000 per hour.
It takes a whole summer’s training just to make contact with the ball and get it across the net—and another lifetime to cobble a professional game out of the basics. One would certainly need a trusty hitting partner, all the wide angles of a full court, and the physics and data analytics bundled into ambition. Yet all the latter scientific enhancements to the game could be compressed into the cheapest workaround: a head start.
Most grand slam champions hold racquets even before their milk teeth fall out, which fuels the worry that even Eala—like Filipino attendance in the biggest tennis stadia, and Trump at the US Open Sincaraz final—might have been late to the game.
Eala started training professionally at the Rafael Nadal Academy in Mallorca, Spain at the age of 12. There’s a valid suspicion that her formative tennis years in the Philippines, with its thin tennis infrastructure and speck of tennis culture, might have set her back vis-à-vis the more precocious upstarts of the WTA. The other late starter I can think of is Jannik Sinner, now ATP world number 2 (and former world no. 1), but he was already a ski champion in his tender years before fully dedicating himself to tennis at 13—a background that still counted as early physical conditioning.
