Chang Shows Muster That He’s the Master

The 11,500-seat tennis stadium at Hyatt Grand Champions Resort has pretty much been Michael Chang’s home the last two years. And no matter how much he huffed and puffed, Thomas Muster could not blow it down here Saturday.

Muster, who would have been Charles Barkley had he played basketball, went down grunting and groaning and hissing to defending champion Chang, 6-1, 7-6 (7-1), in one of the men’s semifinals. In the other, Bohdan Ulihrach of the Czech Republic, who went from Bohdan Who to Bohdan Somebody four days ago by beating Pete Sampras, continued to prove that wasn’t a fluke by beating Jonas Bjorkman of Sweden, 6-3, 6-2.

That means that, for the second straight year, Chang will play an unseeded player in the final. In 1996, Chang cruised through a 7-5, 6-1, 6-1 final against Paul Haarhuis of the Netherlands.

It also means that, if Chang were to win today’s final and its $337,000 first prize, he will have taken $657,000 out of the Coachella Valley in 12 months without having to do battle on Sunday with anybody named Sampras, Agassi, Ivanisevic or Becker.

Nevertheless, it is hard to complain about the spoils of any player who has won nine straight matches in this Super Nine event, and who last lost here in the round of 16 in 1995. Chang, who also won here in 1992, has an overall record at Indian Wells of 26-6.

That loss in 1995 was to Muster, the No. 2-ranked player in the world and a 29-year-old Austrian who doesn’t so much play matches as he does muscle through them. He is the cliche “bull in a china closet.” He doesn’t just attempt to beat his opponents but tries to intimidate them along the way.

When asked after Saturday’s loss what approach he has taken to playing Chang in the past, whom he had beaten five of six times, he replied, “I just try to knock him off the court.”

Chang, No. 3 in the world but still a frequent victim of the Muster Monster, understood fully what he was facing.

“In the past, I felt, in certain regards, that he was stronger than I was,” Chang said. “Maybe, when you get into the long points or the grinding points, sometimes he was able to wear me down a little bit. . . . Hopefully, each time I go out and play Thomas from here on out, I really don’t have that. I’ll go out there with confidence, that he’s human.”

Muster was clearly human Saturday, allowing Chang to move inside the baseline and attack, something that Muster himself does with pride. He also was human in the second-set tiebreaker, in which he made six errors in the eight points and even double-faulted with a 79-mph serve.

Ulihrach, who has lived a charmed life here this week, won everything in straight sets after losing his first set in his first match to Hernan Gumy of Argentina. After Sampras, Ulihrach took out Francisco Clavet of Spain, Byron Black of Zimbabwe and Bjorkman, all good players but not exactly your cavalcade of stars.

Ulihrach is a 22-year-old clay courter who has gone on a hot streak here. All five of his titles on the tour have come on clay, and in 1995, for example, he had only two wins on surfaces other than the soft dust. Saturday, he dominated Bjorkman, the Swedish serve-and-volley expert, and took his ranking from No. 43 to the top 30, going into today.

Ulihrach said he had never been to California before and called it “paradise.”

Were he to beat Chang and pick up that $337,000 paycheck, it would constitute more than 70% of his entire earnings for last year. Even if he has to settle for the $177,000 runner-up check, that will be 37% of what he made all of last year.

Now that’s paradise.

Tennis Notes

The men’s singles final, best of five sets, will start at 11:30 a.m. on the Stadium Court. In the men’s doubles final, best of three sets, Mark Knowles of the Bahamas and Daniel Nestor of Canada (seeded sixth) will play Mark Philippoussis and Patrick Rafter of Australia (unseeded).