He Needs to Work on Image

You can tell right away that Michael Chang isn’t a tennis player.

I mean, he doesn’t grunt as if he were lifting a locomotive wheel when he hits a two-ounce ball full of air 60 feet. He doesn’t throw rackets. He doesn’t curse umpires, the crowd, line calls, ball boys, locker room attendants or post-match interviewers.

He doesn’t spit at the chair over a call. He doesn’t come on court in a scraggly beard, his hair sticking out of the back of his cap like a horse’s tail. And he doesn’t cut his T-shirt so that his belly button shows on every shot.

He doesn’t blame passing airplanes when he loses. So far as I know, he has never referred to members of the All-England tennis Establishment as “the pits.”

How can he call himself a tennis player? He obviously has no clue how one is supposed to behave. He’s an impostor. He’s not even spoiled.

Why doesn’t he push over cameras, refuse to go on playing unless members of the press are removed from the premises? Act like a brat? How else is the world supposed to know he’s American and a tennis player?

Never mind his backhand. Practice his profanity. Forget tennis, learn tantrums.

Some years ago, when Michael Chang first hit the tennis circuit, a player who drew him in the first round approached another player for advice on how to play him. The other fellow thought a moment, then scratched his chin and said “Bring a lunch.”

When Chang came into view, the tennis community thought it knew the spot for him. Short in stature, slight, he was going to be one of those players they called “Bitsy” or “Bunny” or even “Bobby” (as in Riggs).

They had seen this act before. This was going to be one of those pesky guys who never got past the quarterfinals, a perennial 10th seed who played deft but sub-championship tennis. An opponent with an upper case O. What the fight game would call a “club fighter.”

His serve was not overpowering, his ground strokes handle-able. He went to the net slightly more often than the groundskeeper. He played railroad-gun tennis, at longer range than the Battle of Jutland.

Then he won the French Open. The youngest player ever to do that. Tennis gawked in wonder. This 17-year-old upstart had routed two of the icons of the game, Ivan Lendl and Stefan Edberg.

Tennis is a game of attrition, trench warfare. There are no shortcuts to victory. Even if you roll out of bed with a 140-m.p.h. serve and a rocket follow-up volley, you need four points per game, six games per set and you get the serve only every other game. Unless the other guy rolls over and plays dead--they do this a lot in tennis--you feel like you’ve climbed a mountain even when you win.

Michael Chang doesn’t roll over. He’s like a fighter who keeps getting up. You have to beat Michael Chang. He won’t do it for you.

Wee Willie Keeler would understand Michael Chang’s game perfectly. Like Willie, Michael has to “hit ‘em where they ain’t.” In Michael’s case, this means getting his opponent leaning one way, then hitting the ball another.

Michael is like that drum-playing bunny in the battery commercial. He keeps going and going and going.

“I basically try to learn from every match,” he says. “I look at my game as one that, let’s face it, is not going to blow you off the court. But just having a big serve won’t make you a winner. You can’t always rely on the serve.”

His own first serve, which was only in double figures when he began play, can now get “up to 113 m.p.h. So I try to kick it in, put it in places the racket can’t handle.”

Most guys hate to play five sets. Michael knows that if he doesn’t, he loses. It was not coincidence that Chang played the longest match in U.S. Open history against Stefan Edberg in the semifinals this year--5 1/2 hours. It has been said that, if it weren’t for the tiebreaker, Chang’s matches would not last hours, they would last days. As usual, in the fifth set, Michael was fresh and burst through, 3-0 and 4-2, before Edberg’s craftiness won out.

You used to be able to make book on the same two names making the finals in the grand slam events each year. But, now, Boris Becker or Pat Cash or Mats Wilander goes from Who’s Who to Who’s He? in one season. Chang just seems to move up a few seedings each year. His best finish in a U.S. Open up to this year was the round of 16. This year, all of a sudden, he reached the semifinals.

He plays Pete Sampras next Thursday at 7 p.m. in the Disneyland Challenge match, an exhibition at the Bren Center on the UC Irvine campus. It will be a contrast in styles, the elegant, classic serve-and-volley of Sampras and the go-get-it-and-hit-it-back of Chang. Playing Chang can sometimes be like being locked in a dark cellar with a wildcat. You may win, but you don’t feel like eating for a week.

“I plan to play 10 more years, but only if I improve every year,” Chang says.

It may not be his tennis that needs the upgrading, it may be his deportment. He has to learn to 1) grunt, 2) curse, 3) throw things, 4) kick things or, at least, 5) dress like a guy leaving a hotel fire.

Come to think of it, he won’t have far to go to get lessons. Ilie Nastase is playing in the doubles at the Disneyland Challenge. Ilie is to court behavior what that other great Transylvanian, Count Dracula, was to blood transfusions.

Chang has the rest of the game. He simply needs to work on his obnoxiousness.