The photo is older than most of her career. A small Alex Eala stands next to Maria Sharapova, the Russian five-time Grand Slam champion who ruled women’s tennis when Eala was a child, and someone has written a sign for the picture. Eala reposted it last week, ahead of her guest spot on Sharapova’s podcast, Pretty Tough, and read the sign aloud: “My goal is to be her.”

That clip traveled further than anything Eala has done on court lately. Since the US Open, the 21-year-old Filipina has lost to the world No. 180 in Singapore, missed out on Asian Games gold for the second time running, and sat out one of the season’s biggest tournaments. Away from the court, she made her Paris Fashion Week debut, finally sat down with her idol, and learned that the WTA (Women’s Tennis Association, the body that runs the women’s pro tour) won’t penalize her for choosing her country over Beijing. In the same stretch, the tour put Manila on its 2027 calendar twice.

On Monday she goes back to work at the Wuhan Open, a WTA 1000 event, the level directly below the four Grand Slams. She has played Wuhan twice. She has never won a main-draw match there.

What She Told Sharapova

The episode came out on Wednesday. Eala told Sharapova that watching her as a kid gave her a picture of what competing hard looks like, and most of that picture was Sharapova’s face between points, which Eala remembered as “so serious and almost angry.” She reads her own expressions the same way now, as a gauge of how a match is going. The worst stretches, she said, are the ones where she can tell she’s slipping and can’t pull herself back.

She went back to the start, too: picking up a racket at three, coached by her grandfather, Lolo Bob, who she said gave up a good part of ordinary grandfathering to train her. She also brought up her brother, Miko Eala, and insisted he’s the better player of the two.

Not all of it was warm. Eala described a falling-out with her coaches after a first-round loss in Strasbourg in May, a week before Roland Garros. She thought she had played reasonably well. They didn’t. “We weren’t aligned,” she said. She came around to their view, and in August she beat the same opponent, Oleksandra Oliynykova, at the US Open.

The day before the episode aired, she was in the audience at Chanel’s Spring/Summer 2027 show in Paris with her mother, Rizza. It was her first Paris Fashion Week, a month after her debut in New York.

The Fine That Never Came

The news that mattered more came out of a Senate hearing room in Manila on Thursday.

In September, Eala withdrew from the China Open in Beijing to play the Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya, Japan. The China Open is one of the WTA’s mandatory 1000s, which top-ranked players are required to enter. Skipping one without an exemption normally costs a fine of up to $10,000 and a zero counted against her ranking. When we last wrote about it, the WTA hadn’t decided whether she would pay.

At Thursday’s hearing of the Senate Committee on Sports, Senator Bong Go asked Philippine Tennis Association (PHILTA) executive director Tonette Mendoza whether Eala had been sanctioned. Mendoza said she hadn’t. By her account, the WTA asked PHILTA two questions: whether Eala made the call herself, without pressure from the government or the federation, and whether the Asian Games counted as an Olympic qualifier for the Philippines. PHILTA said yes to both. The WTA didn’t follow up, and no penalty came. PHILTA’s reading is that the mandatory-event rules were written to stop players from skipping big tournaments for paid exhibitions, not to punish players who skip them to represent their countries.

Indonesia’s Janice Tjen asked for the same exemption, was refused, and pulled out of the Asian Games to play Beijing. She is also the player Eala faces on December 8 in the headline match at the Philippine Arena, where organizers are going after a tennis attendance record and the most expensive seat costs ₱63,000.

Skipping Beijing still cost Eala something. Without it, she dropped out of the race for the WTA Finals, the season-ending event for the tour’s top eight. She brought home bronze from Nagoya after losing her semifinal to China’s Wang Xiyu, and with Beijing off her schedule, Wuhan is her last WTA 1000 of the year.

Manila Gets a Bigger Seat

The WTA released its 2027 calendar on October 1, and the Philippines is on it twice. The Philippine Women’s Open, the WTA 125 that made its debut at Rizal Memorial Tennis Center this January, returns next January. The new entry is the Manila Open, a WTA 250, set for November 1 to 7, 2027, as the final stop of the tour’s Asian swing. A 250 sits one tier above a 125, with more ranking points and prize money, which tends to pull in higher-ranked players. Tennis journalist Ben Rothenberg reported that Manila takes over the 250 slot that Chennai, India currently holds. PHILTA secretary general John Rey Tiangco has credited Eala’s popularity for the country landing a second event.

Her entry isn’t confirmed, and no venue has been announced. The dates are worth noticing, though. The Manila Open ends a week before the 2027 WTA Finals in Charlotte, North Carolina, the same event she’s out of this year because she missed Beijing. If she’s in that race next season, her home tournament lands right in the last week that counts.

Two Tries, No Wins

Wuhan has not been kind to her. In 2024 she got in on a wildcard, an invitation for a player not ranked high enough to enter directly, and lost her opener to Czech veteran Kateřina Siniaková, 6-3, 6-1. In 2025 she didn’t reach the main draw at all, losing in the first round of qualifying to Japan’s Moyuka Uchijima.

This year she’s the 13th seed, five places above her ranking of No. 18, after withdrawals by several higher-ranked players. Wuhan runs a smaller 56-player draw, so only the top eight seeds get first-round byes. Eala opens on Monday at 8:40 PM, Manila time, against China’s Han Shi, who came through qualifying and will have the home crowd behind her.

After that, the names get familiar. A second-round match would be against either Canada’s Leylah Fernandez, whom Eala beat in Washington in August on the way to her first WTA title, or Russia’s Ekaterina Alexandrova. The round of 16 could bring the second seed, American Jessica Pegula, the player Eala came back against in that Washington final. They are 1-1 head-to-head.

A friendly draw guarantees nothing. Three weeks ago, Tatiana Prozorova was supposed to be a routine early round too.

Since the US Open, nearly all the good news about Alex Eala has happened away from a tennis court. Wuhan is where that has to change.