​At the height of Manny Pacquiao’s boxing career, there was a famous saying in the Philippines: The only time you could drive around Manila without experiencing relentless bumper-to-bumper traffic was during one of his fights.Alexandra Eala, a 21-year-old who has risen to a career-high ranking of No. 18 heading into next week’s U.S. Open, is not quite in that category yet.“But she’s getting close,” said Bo Navarro, a California-based sports agent who played college tennis at UMass in the late 1990s.Navarro keeps close ties to the Philippines through his family and his business, FilAm Sports, which guides athletes with Filipino heritage through the process of becoming eligible for their national team.Lately, Navarro has observed some amusing interactions thanks to Eala’s rise: Cousins in the Philippines who know nothing about tennis texting him about whether they should bet on her matches, his mother staying up in the middle of the night to watch an Eala match on Facebook via someone in Dubai holding up a cell phone to a TV, a tennis coach he knows in Bataan suddenly being so booked that he’s giving lessons until 10 p.m.And like everyone else who has observed the Eala phenomenon in North America this summer during the hard court swing, Navarro expects that the U.S. Open will turn into a road game for anyone with the misfortune of drawing her — including Americans.“It’s just gotten bigger and bigger everywhere she goes,” former top-five player and current ESPN commentator Mary Joe Fernandez said. “The fans that come to watch her — not just play but practice — is off the charts. Every point is loud. Every point she wins, it feels like she’s won more than a point.”Fans show their support to Alexandra Eala of Philippines during the WTA 1000 National Bank Open.Anadolu via Getty ImagesThe Eala phenomenonThough Eala is certainly one of the most interesting young prospects on the women’s tour at the moment — more on that later — in some ways it doesn’t even matter whether she wins a Grand Slam event. With a nation of 114 million people newly engaged in tennis, she’s already jolting the WTA’s business more than almost any individual player could.At tournament after tournament, Eala’s press conferences and match highlights draw massive streaming numbers, dwarfing those of players who are more famous worldwide. When Eala knocked defending champion Iga Swiatek out of Wimbledon last month, the full match replay was viewed 998,000 times on YouTube. For comparisons’ sake, the replay of Serena Williams’ comeback match against Maya Joint had 122,000 views.But the more obvious impact has come in person, where the Filipino diaspora around the world has started flocking to tennis tournaments. In the recent rain-delayed Washington final, where Eala defeated No. 3 Jessica Pegula for her biggest career title, the Monday afternoon crowd was so heavily tilted that by the third set it appeared the Buffalo-born Pegula would hav