10. BOY WONDER: Chang was the youngest player ever to reach an ATP semi, the youngest to win a U.S. Open match and the youngest male to win a Grand Slam, at 17 years, three months. He turned pro at 15, but that didn’t stop him from saying, “I would never want teens to skip school in order to watch me play. I don’t want to get into trouble with their teachers.”
9. WILLIE MAYS IN A METS UNIFORM: Recently, players have been leaving the game long before they played out the string. Chang was the opposite. Hanging on, he became a forlorn player traipsing from one Challenger to another. In his last year, after losing his 11th first-round match of the season, he told reporters, “You guys must think I’m really stubborn.”
8. THE SPRINTER WHO RAN A MARATHON: Chang’s classic ‘92 U.S. Open “Battle of the Gentlemen,” which he lost to Stefan Edberg 6-7(3), 7-5, 7-6(3), 5-7, 6-4, was a stunning five-hour, 26-minute marathon that is widely considered one the best matches in tennis history.
7. THE MICHAEL JORDAN OF CHINESE TENNIS: Tennis was once an almost entirely Anglo/Western sport. No more. These days the game booms in China. Thank you, Michael Chang. The first and really only player of Chinese origin to have a major impact on the tour, Chang was actually dissed in the French press as a “chink” and “a little slant eyes with a vicious oriental mind.” But never mind such mindlessness, inch-for-inch, Chang was a beloved phenom throughout China and Asia who forever changed the landscape.
6. JESUS LOVES YOU: Chang, who signed his autograph “Jesus Loves You,” was the most outspoken Christian player in tennis history. It wasn’t just that he was so polite to ballkids, deferential to icons like Jimmy Connors, and would speak of Jesus during awards ceremonies. Chang’s Christianity was woven into his very person. After his days on tour, he briefly entered a seminary and both walked the walk and talked the talk. The man who loved the David and Goliath story also wrote of the value of virginity, contending that even young people who’ve lost their way could become recycled virgins. “People who have fallen short can become virgins again in the sight of God once they confess their sin and desire for God’s forgiveness,” he said.
5. THE CHAMPION OF EVERYTHING: Long before Lleyton Hewitt and Rafa Nadal, Chang used his dart-’n-dash speed as a weapon. “If success could be measured by the expenditure of sweat and the number of court miles covered,” Ron Atkin contended, “Chang would be the champion of everything.”
4. FAMILY OF FOUR: Tennis, religion and family defined the Changs — the closest knit family in tennis. An Asian clan navigating a country club sport in an Anglo world, they traipsed from Hoboken to New York, from Minnesota to San Diego, from Placentia to Coto De Caza and Washington to Nevada in pursuit of the dreams. Papa Joe was a chemist who not only taught Chang his strokes but on occasion imposed harsh punishments. Michael’s older brother Carl was intimate pal and coach in a manner that Roddick and Blake are to a degree replicating. But the central figure in the Chang family was mother Betty, who, when times were tough, would go to swap meets to unload items and sell seminary plots to make ends meet. For years, she traveled with Michael, doing his laundry, sharing his room and cooking the Chinese food and chicken soup he loves.
3. THREE IMAGES: Three photos portray Chang’s life — the shot of him lying flat on the clay at Roland Garros as an ecstatic overachieving teen who scored the first Grand Slam win of a new generation of Americans; the photo of him stroking a shot on the Great Wall of China; and, finally, the solitary shot of his brother Carl — forlorn and poignant — sitting alone in the U.S. Open’s stands contemplating all the ‘coulda-, woulda, shoulda- beens’ of life after his brother came so close but failed to reach the ‘92 U.S. Open final.
2. TWO POINTS: Chang’s singular triumph was forged by two of the most curious points in history. In the fourth round of the ‘89 French Open, against the then-dominant Ivan Lendl, the cramping unleashed an underhand serve that proved to be the biggest point of the match. Yet he had never served underhanded before. “[It was] a lightning thought that came out of nowhere,” he explained. Similarly he stepped within three feet of the service line, like some daring junior, and induced the exacerbated Lendl to offer a kind of “no mas” double fault that infamously ended the match. “The small mosquito,” wrote L’Equipe, “stung the man who scares young children.”
1. ONE TRIUMPH: Chang’s entire career was built on his sole Grand Slam triumph, his ‘89 French Open win which had so many subplots. Not only did this little known kid bring down Lendl, Edberg and the giants of the game, it was the first Grand Slam triumph of a new generation of Americans — the Fab Four — Chang, Sampras, Agassi and Courier — and it ended one of the dreariest droughts in American tennis history. Reflecting on the first American French Open winner in 44 years, Jim Sarni noted, “The last time an American man won the French Open, Napolean was the emperor. Or maybe it just seemed that way. Elvis hadn’t cut his first record, MacDonalds hadn’t cooked its first burger, and Brigitte Bardot hadn’t broken her first heart.”
