COMMENTARY : A Year Later, Chang’s Victory Still Seems More Fantasy Than Reality

Give Kirk Gibson his home run, the U.S. hockey team its gold medal and Jack Nicklaus his green jacket for Mastering the field against all odds in 1986.

But if you want to complete the collection of sport’s most mind-bending, reality-rending storybook endings of the 1980s, give Michael Chang his due, too.

A year has passed since Chang won the French Open men’s tennis championship and reaction still hasn’t caught up with the accomplishment. Maybe everyone’s still trying to figure it out.

A year ago in Paris, Chang went where no American had ventured in 35 years--and might never visit again. Even if the footprints he left in the Roland Garros clay could be traced, it’s doubtful they’ll ever truly be duplicated.

John McEnroe never won in Paris. Neither did Jimmy Connors or Arthur Ashe or Stan Smith or any other American male who tried between Tony Trabert’s victory in 1955 and 1989.

And no one ever won it the way Chang did.

He was 17 years old.

He had been a professional for barely a year.

He stood 5 feet 8 inches.

He weighed 135 pounds.

He nearly had to default because of leg cramps.

He served underhanded.

And won by upsetting, in order:

--Ivan Lendl, the world’s No. 1-ranked player, in the round of 16.

--Andre Chesnokov, in the semifinal, one round after Chesnokov eliminated the defending French Open champion, Mats Wilander.

--Stefan Edberg, the 1988 Wimbledon champion, in the final.

Chang could call it a career right now and call it a good one. He could have stopped right after the Lendl victory--a five-set classic that should have been a straight-set blowout.

Lendl had everything going for him. Size. Strength. The experience of three previous French Open titles. The first two sets.

Chang?

He had leg cramps.

Battling back from a two-set deficit took so much out of Chang--and he had so little to start with. By the time he forced a fifth set, he was cramping so severely that it hurt to watch. He looked 17 going on 67, hobbling here, lurching there, trying to replenish himself with water and bananas during changeovers.

Eventually, Chang was reduced to desperate tactics. Trying to buy time, he sprayed lobs and moonballs back at Lendl. Looking for any possible advantage, he whipped an underhanded serve at 4-3, 15-30--and the maneuver so unnerved Lendl, he failed to win another game.

Finally, at match point, with Lendl down to his second serve, Chang played his last card. Limping nearly halfway to the net, Chang stopped there and awaited Lendl’s delivery. You wouldn’t play a child this way, but Chang was scrambling for any edge, in or out of the book.

Lendl went over the same edge. Flustered, he knocked his next serve into the net for a double fault, sending Chang to his knees and, then, to the semifinals.

How do you top that? Chang never has. But that’s what made his French Open all the more remarkable. Three rounds of anticlimax still awaited him, but he never let down. Rather than settle for life as a fourth-round footnote, Chang came back to beat Ronald Agenor, Chesnokov and Edberg.

For the first time in 3 1/2 decades, an American landed in Paris. But did America notice? Maybe for a couple seconds, on the way to the baseball highlights.

Chang didn’t even make the cover of Sports Illustrated, unless you count the postage stamp-sized teaser in the upper left-hand corner. That week, America’s weekly sporting journal put Sugar Ray Leonard and Thomas Hearns on the cover--and buried Chang inside behind reports on Game 3 of the NBA finals and the Baltimore Orioles.

If his victory wasn’t the decade’s most dramatic, it certainly was the most under-appreciated.

In the year that followed, Chang never really cashed in the way he should have, which is one reason why Chang recently switched management companies. Now he can be seen in a handful of endorsements--most notably, a TV commercial for Cathay Pacific Airlines--which is more often than he’s been seen in recent tennis tournaments.

Slowed by a freakish hip injury and a premature comeback, Chang has bailed in the first round of his last three tournaments. Today, he returns to Roland Garros the reigning champion--and probably a longer shot than he was in 1989.

Maybe there’s a cosmic price to be paid for such moments in time. Maybe you lease your own luck. Look what happened to Jim Craig, the hero goaltender who orchestrated the Miracle on Ice. Look what happened to Kirk Gibson’s knees.

Greatness comes with risks attached. Take your day in the sun now, worry about the skin cancer later.