Cheeky Chang's success story

Twenty-five years later, Michael Chang still has not talked about the 1989 French Open with Ivan Lendl. Nor has he hit another underhand serve in competition.

Back in Paris at age 42, Chang still has a bowl cut, still is an openly devout Christian and still is traveling with family, only this time he is here not with his parents, Betty and Joe, but with his wife, Amber, and their two daughters, ages 3 and 1.

But this French Open, which begins today, is not merely about nostalgia for Chang. It is also about fresh dreams.

Yes, this is the anniversary of his victory at 17 against sound logic and great odds; a victory that coincided with violence far away in Tiananmen Square; a victory he attributes to a potent brew of talent, toil, youthful insouciance and divine intervention.

“There were matches I just shouldn’t have won,” Chang said.

“There were balls that should have gone out that didn’t. There was rain that had no business coming down. I mean, you can’t fathom how those things had happened. There was a purpose there, and there was a purpose for me being 17 and a purpose for me being Chinese and for the events that unfolded during that period of time. There was a reason it happened the way it did.”

This year, Chang is at Roland Garros on a new mission, as coach of Kei Nishikori, the Japanese star who is ranked in the top 10 for the first time.

The lessons from 1989 were manifold: Keep your tactics flexible; refuse to be intimidated by those of greater experience and achievement; keep fighting, hustling, lunging and hobbling no matter how much your legs cramp and your optimism wavers.

“Bjorn Borg won the French Open when he was a teenager,” said José Higueras, Chang’s coach in 1989.

“So did Mats Wilander and Rafa. But to me, the special thing about Michael’s win was not so much that he won the French but how he won it: having the audacity to play the best players in the sport in a huge arena and having the guts to actually serve underhand and having the nerve to believe he actually could win.”

Higueras and others tend, understandably, to focus on the fourth-round match against Lendl, which was on Court Central and was perhaps the closest tennis has come to David and Goliath.
“If they play that match 20 times, Michael wins it once,” Higueras said.

It was astonishing. Lendl was a seven-time Grand Slam singles winner and three-time French Open winner long established as the No 1 player in the world.

Chang, who had played rarely on clay as a standout junior or young professional, had not been past the fourth round in a major.

He was, however, seeded 15th at Roland Garros because of some injuries and withdrawals.

The match with Lendl was played on June 5, one day after the Chinese government crackdown on student protests in Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

Chang, the American-born son of Taiwanese immigrants, followed the news closely with his family.

“Once the crackdown actually happened,” he said, “and you saw so many people dying and you see the guy standing in front of the tank and stuff like that, it does put things into proper perspective.”


After dropping the first two sets against Lendl, Chang won the next two despite cramping in both legs near the end of the fourth. He recalled walking toward the chair umpire, Richard Ings, to retire after the third game of the fifth set, then stopping at the service line because he had “an unbelievable conviction of heart.”

“Something I’ve never had happen to me at any other time in my career,” he added. “I honestly just felt like God was just saying to me, 'Michael, what are you doing?'”

The underhand serve, the first and last of Chang’s career, came at 4-3, 15-30 in the fifth set. Chang sensed that Lendl was on his way to breaking him again and felt he needed to do something different.

Lendl, understandably surprised, managed to keep the ball in play but lost the point after a Chang passing shot.

On match point, Lendl missed his first serve, and Chang hobbled forward, much farther forward than was customary, to return.

With Chang a few feet from the service box, the crowd tittered. Lendl, irritated, asked Ings for another first serve. Ings denied the request, and Lendl, shaking his head, hit a second serve that struck the tape and landed long for a double fault. Chang soon landed, too, on his back on the clay, in tears after 4 hours 37 minutes and a 4-6, 4-6, 6-3, 6-3, 6-3 victory.

“I umpired over 2,000 tour matches,” Ings said in an email. “Nothing came close to the drama and passion of that match.”

Chang said that despite spending time together on the senior tour and golf course, he and Lendl had never discussed the match. “I don’t plan to,” Chang said, laughing.

In the final, Chang faced Stefan Edberg, the net-rushing future No 1 player from Sweden who was the reigning Wimbledon champion. Chang rallied again, this time from a two-sets-to-one deficit, fending off nine break points in two pivotal games in the fourth set.

Attacking the net plenty of times himself, he ultimately wore down Edberg, 6-1, 3-6, 4-6, 6-4, 6-2.

Chang was the first American man since Tony Trabert in 1955 to win the French Open, and he remains the youngest man to win a Grand Slam singles title.

He acknowledges the odds are slim that another 17-year-old could do it in this era of physical tennis. In the United States, his peer group — Andre Agassi, Sampras and Jim Courier — used his victory for fuel, winning 26 Grand Slam tournaments among them in the years ahead.