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In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!
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Michael Chang [USA]Born: 22 February 1972
Career: 1988-2003
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 2 (1996)
Peak Elo rating: 2,186 (2nd place, 1994, 1996-7)
Major singles titles: 1
Total singles titles: 34
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When John McEnroe made his first trip to Roland Garros in 1977, his wise-cracking idol, Vitas Gerulaitis, told him what to expect. “You’re going to play some guy from Europe that you’ve never heard of, and you’re going to get your ass kicked.” Vitas was wrong–McEnroe never did lose to an anonymous European at the French–but such was the general fate of Americans on the French clay.
When McEnroe made his debut, no player from the United States had won the French title since Tony Trabert in 1955. Americans went nearly twenty years without even putting a man in the final. Gerulaitis was runner-up in 1980, and Johnny Mac came one set short four years later. In 1988, McEnroe reached the fourth round before losing (again) to three-time champion Ivan Lendl. En route, he routined a 16-year-old American wild card named Michael Chang, 6-0, 6-3, 6-1.
By the end of the 1988 Roland Garros fortnight, there were hints that things would start to change for the Americans. In just his second appearance at the tournament, Andre Agassi reached the semi-finals, where he pushed eventual champion Mats Wilander to five sets. Insiders knew that another young American, Agassi’s former roommate Jim Courier, was right behind him. Courier would upset Agassi and make his own mark at the event a year later.
Agassi and Courier would both go on to win French Open titles. But the man who ended the drought was Chang. When he returned to Roland Garros in 1989, he was 17 years old, stood only five-feet-eight-inches tall, and weighed 135 pounds. He had played only five clay-court events on tour, four of them on the ersatz Har-Tru surface used in the States. 20 months younger than Agassi, 18 months younger than Courier, and six months the junior of Pete Sampras, he jumped the queue to become the first slam winner of the quartet and kick off a memorable decade for American men.
Chang would go on to win 32 more titles and rise to number two in the rankings seven years later. But the 1989 French Open would be Chang’s only major championship. It was so unexpected, such a unique achievement, that it tends to overshadow the rest of an excellent career. That’s okay–it really was one of the transcendent moments of modern tennis.
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Chang and Sampras grew up together, facing each other a dozen times in Southern California junior tournaments. Chang usually won, and when Franz Lidz profiled him for Sports Illustrated in 1988, Pete was referred to as “Michael’s sometime doubles partner.” The pair spent some time before the 1989 French Open training with Jose Higueras, a Spaniard who won all but one of his 16 tour-level titles on clay.
Avoiding Vitas’s curse, the 15th-seeded Chang cruised through the first three rounds on his second attempt at Roland Garros. He beat the Belgian Eduardo Masso and Francisco Roig, from Spain, with a straight-set drubbing of Sampras in between. His reward for living up to his top-16 seeding was a fourth-round test against Ivan Lendl, the number one player in the world. To Chang at the time, Lendl was “the most feared opponent on the tour.”
In the half-year before the French, the two men had met twice. The first time, at an exhibition in Des Moines, Lendl dismantled the youngster. He then spent the limo ride back to hotel explaining to Chang why he lost: “You know, with your game the way it is now, you have nothing that can really hurt me.”
The second time was also an exhibition, this time on green clay in Atlanta. Chang had taken Lendl’s words to heart. Just a few months of added strength and aggressiveness, and Michael took the match, 7-5 in the third. It didn’t count, but it planted a seed in the teenager’s mind. Lendl came into the French as the reigning Australian Open, with five titles in his last seven events. But Chang knew he had a chance.
Chang at Wimbledon in 1990
The top seed won the first two sets, 6-4, 6-4. But it was hardly one-way traffic. When Lendl served for the first set, Chang broke him after a 20-stroke rally–a length that barely registered after 40- and 51-stroke points earlier in the set. Chang broke again early in the second before Lendl charged back to take the two-set advantage.
It’s hard to imagine the mindset that allowed the 17-year-old to approach the third set with the belief that he could still win the match. Mark Kratzmann, an Australian player who lost a five-setter to Chang at Wimbledon in 1990, said, “If you have him in a losing position, he’s going to change. A lot of players are scared to change; he’s not. Then he almost forces you to decide whether to stay with your tactics or adjust to his. He makes you think, and a lot of guys can’t handle that.”
Another brainy tennis player concurred. Arthur Ashe told the Los Angeles Times, “He is easily the smartest young player I have ever seen. He has an intuitive sense that I can only compare to a chess prodigy at age 9. You see him do things on the court that you would expect to see from someone who’s been on the tour for years.”
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With nothing to lose, Chang ramped up the aggression. He still didn’t have many weapons that would hurt Lendl, but he had learned how to use the few that he wielded. He broke serve at 3-all in the third with two inside-out forehands. He took Lendl’s serve again in the final game of the set, planting a few doubts in the mind of the top seed.
After Chang broke for 4-2 in the fourth, the cracks started to show. Lendl complained about the conditions, he whined about line calls, and after he accused chair umpire Richard Ings of cheating him “every time,” he lost the seventh game of the set on a point penalty. Chang earned set point with a bruising, 39-shot rally, then evened the score on another Lendl unforced error.
It was already the match of the tournament. The fifth set would make it one of the matches of the decade. Chang began cramping, and he nearly retired after three games. Barely able to move, he stuck it out, moonballing to buy time, attempting high-risk shots whenever the slightest opportunity presented itself. For all his experience, the veteran couldn’t adjust. “Lendl choked,” said 1955 champion Tony Trabert, at the match as a commentator for Australian television. “Michael, to his credit, worked him around pretty good.”
Chang broke in the seventh game to take a 4-3 lead, and at 15-30, he sensed a turning point where he could win or lose the match. The idea struck him to try an underhand serve: “I never thought twice about it. I just did it. … I had never planned to serve underhand. I had never hit an underhand serve in my life before that moment.” It worked; Lendl reluctantly followed his return to the net, and Chang passed him. The crisis passed.
The American had one more trick up his sleeve. With Lendl serving at 3-5, 15-30, Chang hit down-the-line backhand winner on the point’s 26th shot to reach match point. When Lendl missed his first serve, Chang crept up to a foot behind the service line, a tactic he’d occasionally used to rattle opponents in junior tournaments. Lendl responded just like a jittery teen. He missed his second serve, handing the match to Chang.
Years later, a journalist would ask Chang to name his favorite character from the Bible. He chose David, the Israelite who took down the giant Goliath in single combat. No explanation was necessary.
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At five-foot-eight, Chang naturally identified with underdogs, and underdogs idolized him in turn. His upset of Lendl inspired another 17-year-old, Arantxa Sánchez Vicario, to her own unlikely feats. Reaching the final as the 7th seed, the Spaniard upset Steffi Graf in a marathon final, handing Graf her first loss at a major since 1987.
Chang followed Arantxa’s progress, but his main focus was on another David-versus-Goliath struggle much further afield. For weeks, Chinese pro-democracy protesters had amassed at Tiananmen Square. Chang and his parents–his father was born in China, and his mother was the child of Chinese diplomats–spent the tournament glued to CNN as the tensions rose. The day before the Lendl match, the government sent in the army. The result was a massacre of at least several hundred, and probably several thousand people.
Some studies suggest that athletes perform at a higher level when they compete for something greater than themselves. Chang certainly had that motivation. He later said, “What it was really about, was an opportunity to bring a smile upon Chinese people’s faces around the world when there wasn’t a whole lot to smile about.”
The giant-slayer gave Chinese and American fans plenty more to smile about. He knocked out Ronald Agenor–“the Haitian sensation”–in the quarters, even after Agenor saved a critical point by using Chang’s service-line return position against him. Then he won another four-set grindfest against Andrei Chesnokov.
Waiting in the final was the third seed, Stefan Edberg. The Swede had years of experience to his advantage, not to mention three major titles. But Chang had his own reasons to be confident: The two had met just three months earlier, at Indian Wells. The American won that match easily, 6-3, 6-2.
This one wasn’t as easy, but the result was the same. It ran to five sets, and Chang fought off 19 of 25 break points. He held his own against Edberg’s world-class serve-and-volley game, limiting the Swede to only 58% of points when he came in behind his first serve. When they reached a fifth set, no one would’ve blamed Chang for running out of gas–the cumulative emotional toll on him was enormous, and the cramps had attacked him again after the semi-finals. But it was Edberg who faded, and the American won, 6-1, 3-6, 4-6, 6-4, 6-2.
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The French Open title was the pinnacle of Chang’s career. He’d never again win a major championship, despite reaching three more finals in the mid-1990s. Agassi, Courier, and Sampras would all overtake him, each one claiming multiple slams of their own and spending time at the top of the ranking list. Sponsors and agents would never again fight for Chang’s affections like they did in the wake of his Roland Garros triumph.
Chang felt something pop in his hip during a December 1989 practice session. He ended up spending a month on crutches, and he struggled to string wins together when he returned to the tour. His ranking, which had peaked at 5th in his breakthrough season, fell to 14th before the French, then it dropped to 24th after he lost to Agassi in the Roland Garros quarters. Despite the ups and downs, he was hardly a spent force: He beat Agassi and Sampras back-to-back to win the Canadian Open, then came back from two sets down to beat Horst Skoff in the September Davis Cup semi-finals.
Chang in 2003
It would take two more years before he could re-establish himself at the top. Before the 1991 season, he instituted a new coaching arrangement with his brother Carl. Together, they focused on developing bigger weapons so that Michael’s game wouldn’t rely entirely on his retrieving skills and tennis smarts. After a racket change in 1994, the serve that averaged 77 miles per hour during the 1989 French Open would sometimes reach 120.
Chang returned to the top ten in March of 1992, and he stayed there for six years. He barely mentions that span in his autobiography, except to say they were the best years of his career. He spent most of 1997 ranked number two in the world, and he came within one match of reaching the top spot. Patrick Rafter dashed those hopes in the US Open semi-finals, and Chang won only three of ten matches for the rest of the season. Injuries struck again in early 1998, and his time among the elites was effectively over.
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From his teenage triumph to his later years as a top-five stalwart, Chang always puzzled both journalists and his peers. John Feinstein called him “as serious-minded and as colorless as Agassi was goofy and colorful.” Reporters didn’t know how to process his outspoken Christianity, and his confidence that God was on his side alienated fellow players.
Agassi found Chang’s faith particularly irritating:
Every time he beats someone, he points to the sky. He thanks God–credits God–for the win, which offends me. That God should take sides in a tennis match, that God should side against me, that God should be in Chang’s box, feels ludicrous and insulting. I beat Chang and savor every blasphemous stroke.
French crowds also bristled at the openly religious star, whistling at the player who they otherwise would’ve enthusiastically embraced. Over time, Chang became a bit more circumspect about his faith, though he never hid it.
What his contemporaries found most baffling was the degree to which Chang was a thinker. Arthur Ashe compared him to a chess prodigy, but Chang’s search for tactical advantages was sometimes more prosaic. McEnroe told Feinstein about the first time he faced the young player:
We tossed the coin and he won, so it was his choice–serve or receive. He just stood there, thinking. I mean, the match was indoors. Finally, after thirty seconds I said, “Is there a time limit on this or what?”
Tennis, for Chang, was all about preparation. He responded to Ivan Lendl’s dissection of his game in a matter of months. His father and brother obsessively watched match video to give Michael an edge against upcoming opponents. He executed under pressure as well as anyone–he won 27 of 30 deciding third sets in one mid-1990s span–a reflection of the fact that he always had another game plan to turn to.
Off-court, he liked to unwind on a fishing boat. He wrote in his autobiography:
I found fishing, in some ways, to be similar to tennis. Preparation and technique were important, as well as planning how you were going to beat that fish. That meant you had to choose the right hook, position the boat just so, pick the right lure–plastic worms, spinnerbaits, crankbaits, or surface plugs–or choose the correct live bait, such as night crawlers, crayfish, mealworms, or water dogs.
Not many players would see that all that slow-paced planning had much of anything to do with tennis. It’s certainly tough to reconcile a love of bass fishing with the way Chang would step inside the baseline to smack an inside-out forehand. But no David ever won the battle by playing Goliath’s game.