Alex Eala is making tennis history for the Philippines. For her, that’s the easy part.
MIAMI — Scour the records. Sift through the score sheets from matches the past few months all over the world, in Trnava, Slovakia, or Bengaluru, India, or Takasaki, Japan.
Other than five consecutive wins in January at a minor tournament in Canberra, Australia, there is little to suggest the immediacy of what has been a breakout week for Alexandra Eala. Yet here she is, beating Iga Świątek, the most mercilessly dominant women’s player of the last three years, 6-2, 7-5 in the quarterfinals of the Miami Open — a WTA 1,000 event, just below the level of a Grand Slam. It’s her third consecutive win over a Grand Slam champion.
Eala, 19, is in a place no player from the Philippines has ever been. No wonder her parents flew in for the match.
The trailblazing, though, might be the easiest thing for Eala to deal with. She’s been breaking ground for tennis players from her country — an archipelago of 7,641 islands and more than 110 million people — for a while now.
Eala was the first to win the Les Petits As, the premier international tournament for kids aged between 12 and 14. She was the first to win a junior Grand Slam, at the 2022 U.S. Open. She’s the first to get to the cusp of the top 100.
“It’s prepared me to take this in, step by step,” Eala said during an interview underneath Hard Rock Stadium on Monday evening.
Minutes before, Eala had heard the news that Paula Badosa had withdrawn from their round-of-16 match with a back injury. She had to figure out whether she was going to watch Świątek play Elina Svitolina later in the evening.
She was on the fence. It was the second match of the evening session, and would likely finish after midnight. Perhaps getting some rest might serve her better. She’d never done this sort of thing before.
“A lot of new experiences,” she said.
Eala began her stay in Miami with a solid win over the American Katie Volynets, a scrambler with a sneaky hard knockout punch when she needs it. Then she beat the mercurial 2017 French Open champion, Jelena Ostapenko, in two tight sets. That was her first win over a top-30 player. It was also the first win over a top-30 player for a Filipino player since WTA rankings were first published in 1975.
Then she backed it up by beating Madison Keys, the reigning Australian Open champion and world No. 5, 6-4, 6-2. Two top-30 wins and one top-5 win for Eala; the same for the Philippines.
Keys makes her home in Florida and hits something close to the biggest ball in women’s tennis. Her forehand was too big for top-10 men’s player Casper Ruud to handle at times during a mixed-doubles exhibition before the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, Calif.
Eala used her legs to get her feet behind Keys’ shots. She absorbed the power, took aim at the lines and sent Keys on the run in the style of Mirra Andreeva, another teenager who has toppled bigger and more powerful foes lately.
