Former tennis great Michael Chang the focus of new ESPN documentary

In the most emotionally significant moment of “American Son,” the new ESPN “30 for 30” documentary that will debut Monday night, the now 52-year-old Michael Chang reads a letter sent to him by tennis legend Arthur Ashe shortly after Chang turned pro at age 15. 

Ashe, who was the first (and remains the only) Black man to win the US Open, Australian Open and Wimbledon singles titles, was keenly aware through his life and career that every word he said and move he made on a tennis court would be scrutinized more than his peers.

And with Chang arriving in pro tennis as a completely new and unique entity — a first-generation American whose parents emigrated from Taiwan — Ashe felt it was important to give the young prodigy some advice about what he’d face as an “other” in a predominantly white sport.

“You can discreetly use it to your advantage,” Ashe wrote. "Continue your pleasant demeanor. Be polite, smile a little more at times if you can manage it. Do you think that I, being Black, would have survived 10 minutes if I had acted like (John) McEnroe? No way. Michael, you don’t have any choice. If you act like a jerk, the whole Asian-American community suffers because you will soon be the most well known Asian-American in the country.”

Chang, at the time, didn’t quite understand what Ashe meant or why he wrote the letter. Though Chang was obviously aware of his ethnicity and family’s background, he was also a 15-year-old whose life revolved around playing tennis, who just wanted to fit in and whose parents — like many in that generation — were generally more preoccupied with assimilating into American life than building a connection to their heritage. 

“I don't think it’s true as much anymore, but our generation where the parents came post-1965 from Taiwan, Korea, to some extent India, I think there was a much more aggressive form of assimilation,” said Jay Caspian Kang, the author and staff writer at The New Yorker who directed the film. “I just found myself really identifying with Michael because I went through kind of a similar experience growing up in North Carolina, and there was like a kind of implicit idea that you would, like, you’re going to have to figure this out. You’re American now. Figure it out.”

Though Chang was one of the great players of his generation, winning 34 ATP titles and reaching No. 2 in the world, he is in some ways the least-known member of the four American tennis icons who all came up together and largely dominated that era of the sport. 

Pete Sampras won 14 Grand Slam titles and was widely considered the greatest player of all-time until Roger Federer came along. Andre Agassi was, and in some ways still is, a cultural icon. Jim Courier burned out after a short stretch of dominance but remains relevant as one of the sport’s preeminent commentators.

All of them would be interesting documentary subjects. So why Chang? 

For Kang, whose family is Korean, it starts with the “Linsanity” phenomenon during the 2011-12 NBA season — an event that often mischaracterized Jeremy Lin as the first big Asian-American star in sports. Kang, 44, wrote a lot about Lin during that era but remembered watching the 17-year-old Chang win the 1989 French Open. When Kang began to play tennis recreationally as an adult, the convergence of his interests and experience led him to the idea that Chang’s breakthrough and what it meant both for sports globally and Asian-American culture was worth re-examining.

“It occurred to me that I should try to make a sports documentary about Michael and what it must have been like in the 80s for him when there were far fewer Asian-Americans, when people didn’t really know how to talk about any of this stuff,” Kang said. “It made this interesting figure to me where somebody has all this pressure on him but nobody knows how to articulate the pressure. He doesn’t really know how to think about it because he’s so young. It felt like it was a precursor to what happened with Jeremy in a lot of ways. By the time Jeremy came along, the country was much more ready for it.”

“American Son,” which begins with Bryant Gumbel interviewing Chang on the "Today" show after his unexpected French Open title, is really three stories packed into one 75-minute film. 

The first explains Chang’s rise as a tennis prodigy who was traveling the country with his mother, Betty, while winning the biggest junior tournaments in the nation. Though many doubted Chang’s long-term potential because of his size (he only grew to 5-foot-9), he won the national under-18 championships at age 15 (beating Courier in the final) and earned a wild card into the US Open, where he actually won a first-round match. 

The second element of the documentary explores the tension around families like the Changs assimilating into American culture. “I never instilled (in) my kids – ‘We are Asian,’” Betty Chang says at one point in the film. “I’m never emphasizing race so much.”

The third prong of the story centers around the Tiananmen Square protests and what it was like for Chinese-Americans to watch from afar as the government cracked down on demonstrators calling for political and economic reforms. 

All three of these threads converge at the 1989 French Open, where Michael Chang and his mother are watching the scenes from Tiananmen Square on television every night while he’s making an unlikely charge through the draw. Though Chang isn’t completely grasping the situation, it’s bringing him closer to the idea of his own identity. 

Meanwhile, a large chunk of the movie is devoted to Chang’s fourth-round match against Ivan Lendl, the three-time French Open champion and No. 1 player in the world. A huge underdog anyway, Chang lost the first two sets but managed to somehow turn the match around and win a fifth set despite suffering such debilitating cramps that he even resorted to an underarm serve. 

Chang went on to win another five-setter over Stefan Edberg in the final, becoming the youngest French Open champion, the first person of Asian descent to win a Grand Slam title and the first American to win at Roland Garros in 34 years. 

“God bless everybody, and especially those in China,” Chang said during his victory speech. 

Though Chang never won another major — he lost in the finals of the 1996 US and Australian Opens and the 1995 French — lifting that trophy in 1989 had significant ripples in terms of integrating Asian markets into the worldwide tennis conversation, including a proliferation of pro tournaments and subsequent waves of players from China and Japan. 

“Reebok, for example, had this whole play to try and attract the Chinese middle class,” Kang said. “They didn't really know what to do with it or how to do it. And then Michael just obviously became the vehicle for that. He’s like a much bigger star still today in Asia than he is here stateside. He sort of was the first American athlete who has Asian origin on a huge stage to really break through. Now you have other people, but back then it was really just him.”