I went to Arthur Ashe Stadium to see Alex Eala debut her new Nike kit. Nobody knew the surprise of the night would be her father, out there playing – the tennis was almost beside the point.
I parked on 114th St., walked over, and settled into my seat with two games still left in the match ahead of Alex Eala’s. The section near me was full of Filipinos: flags worn as capes, stitched onto shirts, wrapped around headgear, phones out for selfies before there was anything on court worth photographing.
Then the house lights dropped, fog shot skyward in bursts, colored beams swept the crowd, and the chant started on its own – ‘Alex! Alex! Alex!’ – before she’d even walked out. When she did, in a new royal blue Nike dress New York had only seen in renders until that night, the noise doubled. But the outfit wasn’t the story I walked away with. Her dad was.
Eala’s opponent for the ‘Stars of the Open’ exhibition was Iva Jovic, the 18-year-old American ranked in the mid-teens and, by every account on court, Eala’s closest friend on tour. Their one-set match had the shape of something neither of them wanted to take too seriously, and neither could quite help taking seriously anyway. Jovic broke early and went up 2-0. Eala leveled it at 3-all – a flash of the form that’s carried her to a career-high World No. 18 this season, even if nothing in this exhibition was going to count toward it.
Jovic closed it out clean, without cruelty, winning the last three games for a 6-3 finish in well under an hour. Mid-match, with a courtside microphone live to the stadium, the two traded lines in each other’s first languages: Jovic in Filipino, ‘Alex, ang galing mo,’ you’re amazing; Eala back in Croatian, ‘Ti si najbolja,’ you’re the best.
It was the kind of bit that only works between people who’ve known each other since the junior circuit, and it got the loudest laugh of the match. It also wasn’t the loudest laugh of the night.
That came after the eighth game, when both players waved their fathers onto the court. Michael ‘Mike’ Eala and Bojan Jovic walked out to a full ovation, and for a few minutes the exhibition turned into a doubles match played at half-speed; the daughters pulled their own shots so their dads could look good. It didn’t entirely work.
Bojan served a fault. Mike, reaching for a return, missed the ball entirely – swung right through it, racket catching nothing but net on the follow-through. He wasn’t wearing his glasses, which, from where I sat, looked like the real reason, and the whiff only made the stadium louder. Eala grabbed the microphone that had just carried her joke in Croatian and delivered a line she clearly knew she’d get to say: ‘I think our dads are at the top of the style game on the circuit. Will you guys agree?’ The stadium, still lit in the colors it had opened with, agreed loudly, and Mike took the ribbing the way a dad who knows he’s about to become a photo does, grinning, hands up, in on it.
He had reason to grin. The shirt he was wearing said ‘Alex Eala’ across the back in the same flower script as his daughter’s own kit drop, her name and Nike’s swoosh stitched over his shoulders while he stood on the biggest court in tennis, missing returns for her. It’s a small thing, a $42 piece of merchandise, but it’s the detail that made the night about them instead of about either the score or the sponsor. When the match ended, Eala went to the net and hugged him, laughing into his shoulder, racket still in her hand. I had my lens on him for it. He wasn’t looking at the camera. He was just standing there in his daughter’s name, in a stadium full of people wearing his country’s flag, watching her do what she does.
That was the real center of the night, more than the dress or the scoreline. This was only an exhibition, with no ranking points attached-one match on a Fan Week card benefiting the USTA Foundation. But Eala used it to remind a stadium full of her own flag-waving countrymen that the run that made her a story last year, when she became the first Filipina to win a match at the US Open, still has her family standing at the edge of the court, waiting to be waved on. She’ll open the tournament itself as its No. 17 seed, her highest Grand Slam seeding yet, in the same colors she wore that night.
The real test starts Sunday. But from where I sat two games early, in a section that felt like half the Philippines had shown up, the best moment of the exhibition wasn’t a shot Eala hit. It was her father missing one, in her name, in front of everyone who came to see her shine. ‘Stars of the Open’ was the name on the ticket. From where I sat, it turned out to be Stars’ Dads of the Open.