This Kid Isn’t Nasty Enough to Become a Tennis Champion

You know tennis in this country is in scandalous condition when a couple of guys named Boris and Ivan are playing for our national open title. I can remember when guys named Boris and Ivan would be heavies in a B movie, not headliners at center court.

So, a lot of people were enormously heartened when, for the first time in 34 years, a Yank won the French Open this year. In the process, he made Ivan look terrible and beat up on a guy named Andrei and the obligatory Swede in the process. At the ripe old age of 17.

Right away, Michael Chang became the darling of American tennis, the Yankee Doodle Dandy who is going to lead us back to the glory days of Big Bill Tilden, Donald Budge, Jack Kramer and Arthur Ashe.

Is he?

Nah!

I hate to be a party-pooper, I hate to rain on the parade but I have to tell you, I have checked out young Master Chang and, from what I can see, he has no chance.

Oh, I’m not worried he doesn’t have this cannonball serve. Neither did Bobby Riggs nor Vic Seixas and they won Wimbledon and the U.S. Nor am I concerned that he’s always playing guys who are bigger, stronger and sometimes faster than he is. That never bothered Bitsy Grant.

No, my concern is, they haven’t groomed him in the proper things to become a tennis champion today. Oh, they taught him all the backhand volleys, the lobs in the lights, the drop shots, the forehands down the line.

But they have to teach him racquet-smashing, linesman-bashing, umpire-baiting. He’s about 1,000 swear words short of being a great tennis champion.

They’ve concentrated on all the wrong things. Anyone with an eye in his head could see what it takes to succeed in tennis today. A rotten disposition. A bad temper. A crybaby mentality.

As near as I can see, Michael Chang hasn’t perfected any of those techniques. He isn’t even a spoiled brat. How in the world is he going to compete at a world-class level until he learns how to intimidate officials, rattle opponents, strain international relations, bully ball-boys, insult the customers, sulk, pout, whine--do all the things we’ve come to love and expect from a real tennis champion?

I think Master Michael should immediately take to his room, armed with video cassettes of Ilie Nastase, John McEnroe, Jimmy Connors, and take notes. Get a stop-action on the place where John McEnroe describes the England of Lord Tennyson, King Arthur, Richard the Lion Hearted and William Shakespeare as “the pits.” Get a shot of Ilie Nastase spitting all over a luckless lady linesperson he’s in such a sputtering rage at over an out call. Turn up the sound when some of the better gutter language begins to issue from the mouths of Jimmy Connors and McEnroe. Learn championship tennis the right way.

Look at Michael Chang on court. He just stands there, poker-faced, inscrutable, patient--mostly patient, damnably patient. He’s like that silent kid in the schoolyard you never wanted to get in a fight with because you knew he’d fight you for three days if necessary. And you’d have to kill him to win.

Michael Chang is that way. It’s all right with him if every match goes four hours. Or five or six. He’s as solemn as a funeral. He seldom changes expression. He just stands there and beats the ball back at you, usually in places you least expect to see it.

But watch him when a call goes against him. That’s when you know he’s got a long way to go. He just bows his head, bounces the ball twice, raises his racket, serves. No outbursts. No shrieks. He never approaches the chair, the neck cords standing out in his throat, his face red, his language X-rated. When he wins, he thanks God. When he gets time off, he reads the Bible.

What kind of a way is that to get ready for Wimbledon? When’s the last time anybody with good manners like that got to be No. 1 in this country?

Is there still time for Michael to learn all the little things you have to learn to play big-time tennis, to become the first-class jerk you apparently have to become to succeed on the tennis tour?

Probably not. He doesn’t have the background for it. Michael, you see, is not one of your Long Island sons of riches who got into tennis because his yacht sank. Michael was born in Hoboken. Mom and Dad, Betty and Joe Chang, were emigres to this country. Joe’s family left China to escape Mao’s revolution in 1948. Betty is the daughter of a Chinese diplomat, born in India.

Temper tantrums do not run in the family. Michael is going to have to learn them.

When the family moved to Southern California, Michael got a tennis racket instead of a surfboard because he may be the only guy in his crowd who gets seasick on shore.

“I get sick just running on the beach,” he says.

He passed on baseball because he saw a replay of a beaning incident on television one night.

“They kept playing it over and over till it made you sick,” he says. “I decided if I was going to get hit by a ball, it would be a tennis ball.”

He got so precocious at tennis, he won his first national tournament before he was 10 and his first national junior by the time he was 15. That got him into Wimbledon, where he was the youngest to play there in 60 years.

Michael has had a variety of tennis instructors over the years but the four he relies on most are Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. None of them counsel throwing the racket, vilifying the umpire, snarling at the press. The religiosity goes back to a family thing.

“My great grandmother in China became ill with cancer and when it was diagnosed as terminal, my grandmother went to a friend who asked her if she had considered consulting Jesus Christ,” Michael explains. “She did. Her mother recovered and is now 90-some years old, still living.”

A strong strain of Christianity flows through the Chang family to this day.

“I was bored by it when I was a kid but one day I heard a preacher say the secret of life was locked up in the Bible,” Michael says. “I got curious. I found out that everything the Bible tells you to do is the right thing. I made up my mind to be a better person.”

The question is, does being a better person make you a worse player? Michael Chang is top seeded at the Volvo/Los Angeles tournament at the UCLA tennis center this week, which means you can bring the kids and won’t have to hold your hands over their ears whenever he misses a shot or a call. If Michael Chang uses the Lord’s name, he’s praying, not cursing.

Still, American tennis has a reputation to uphold. If Michael can’t live up to it, maybe we can just arrange to play some old McEnroe tapes the next Grand Slam he’s in. Otherwise, the way Michael plays it, the world might start liking Americans.