Iva Jovic beat Alex Eala for the third time this year at the US Open on Saturday night, 7-5, 3-6, 7-5, closing out a third-round match at Arthur Ashe Stadium that was, for the first time in their rivalry, actually a fight. Eala had never taken a set off Jovic in two prior meetings this season. This time she took one, forced a decider, and led it 4-2 and 4-3 before Jovic leveled at 4-4 and served out the last two games to win it.
Eala crossed the court to embrace her friend anyway — a hug that, for a moment, looked less like a rivalry ending than two people who happened to be on opposite sides of it.
It was the first of their four meetings to reach a third set, and the first played on a hard court — the surface where Eala has had some of her best results this year. None of that changed the outcome. It did change what the loss means: Eala’s tournament ends in the third round, her deepest-ever run at the US Open as a pro — she already won the tournament once before, as a junior, taking the US Open girls’ singles title in 2022 — even if it falls short of the fourth round she reached at Wimbledon in July, still the best Grand Slam result of her professional career.
The City Painted Her First
A week before her tournament opener, a crew of street artists in Taguig City finished a mural of Eala’s face, forty feet wide, on a basketball court that has never once hosted a tennis match. Tenement Visual Artists — the informal collective behind the Fort Bonifacio Tenement’s long-running tradition of painting NBA stars like Kobe Bryant and LeBron James onto its walls — spent four to five days finishing the piece with backing from paint company Boysen and BPI (Bank of the Philippine Islands), racing to have it done before Eala’s tournament opener. Artist Adrian Piñon told ABS-CBN News the group had broken from tradition because Eala was “one of the first Filipinos we’ve seen making such a significant impact in tennis.” It’s the second mural of her career — the Rizal Memorial Tennis Center put her face up alongside boxer Manny Pacquiao, gymnast Carlos Yulo, and weightlifter Hidilyn Diaz back in January, ahead of the Philippine Women’s Open, a tribute Eala called “hard to grasp” at the time.
The paint isn’t even the strangest tribute. In August, collector Carol Enriquez and artist Erickson Abilgos opened Beyond the Court, a 13-piece 3D exhibition built entirely around Eala’s rise, at Life ‘n Arts Gallery inside Ayala Malls Solenad 3 in Nuvali, Santa Rosa. Abilgos spent six months working from match footage and photographs, distilling each piece down to a single expression rather than a specific score line — it wasn’t “just the victories that stayed with me,” he said, but what he saw underneath them.
“I Lost My Sanity Five Times”
Jovic didn’t undersell how close it got. In her on-court interview afterward, she said, “I lost my sanity for around five times in this match,” and then, without much room left for anything but honesty: “This match is everything to me.” She’d been down more than once in that third set — Eala led 4-2, then 4-3, before Jovic leveled at 4-4 and closed it out — playing in front of a crowd that, by her own account, wasn’t cheering primarily for her. She addressed them directly anyway: “You gave me so much energy to keep pushing.”
It’s a strange thing to say about the crowd that came for your opponent, and it’s the clearest sign yet of how real the friendship between them actually is. After beating Eala at the French Open in May, Jovic had posted on Instagram, “One of those days I wish there could be two winners” — a sentiment she’s echoed, one way or another, after each of their three meetings since.
The Scheduling Story She Didn’t Ask For
Eala’s run to the third round came with a controversy she didn’t create and couldn’t control. Ahead of her second-round match, the US Open placed her on Louis Armstrong Stadium — the tournament’s second-biggest court — while six-time Grand Slam champion Iga Swiatek was moved to the smaller Grandstand court for her own match, a decision that drew accusations online that organizers were favoring the Filipina’s ticket-selling fanbase over an actual Grand Slam champion. Asked about it directly in her press conference, Eala didn’t dodge it: “I’m grateful to be on Armstrong and to play on such an incredible court. But yeah, I don’t control the scheduling. My job is to be prepared for whatever court they put me in and whoever I’m against.” By the third round, the question had answered itself — Eala-Jovic got Arthur Ashe itself, the tournament’s biggest stage, for a Saturday night session opener.
The Wedding She Missed to Get Here
The scheduling wasn’t the only thing out of Eala’s hands this week. Her uncle, Noli Eala, revealed that the family had “a wedding this weekend in Seattle of one of our nieces,” with Alex set to be a bridesmaid alongside her cousin Lexie and her parents serving as principal sponsors. A second-round loss would have sent her straight to the airport. Beating Oleksandra Oliynykova bought her one more match in New York before the tournament — and the wedding — caught up with her anyway.
What Comes Next
The loss doesn’t erase what got her here: a Round 1 win over Mary Stoiana, a Round 2 win over Oliynykova that avenged an old defeat, and a US Open run that’s now one round deeper than her 2025 pro debut. It also leaves the rivalry with Jovic at 3-0 — closer than the record suggests, and by Jovic’s own admission, not an easy one anymore.