The guy who refused to quit

It was the fourth round at the 1989 French Open, and the 17-year-old Chang already had defied long odds by pushing Ivan Lendl, the world's No. 1-ranked player, to a deciding fifth set.

With leg cramps leaving him unsteady on his feet atop the red clay at Roland Garros in Paris, Chang tried to relieve his distress by swigging water, chomping on bananas and standing during changeovers. He resorted to lofting lob shots to slow the pace and wiped out a two-set deficit against the three-time French Open champion.

Then, early in the fifth set, he figured he'd had enough.

"I was this close to going up to the chair umpire and saying, 'I can't play anymore,' " Chang, 37, says during an interview near his Mission Viejo home, holding his right thumb and forefinger millimeters apart. "I actually walked to the service line and the umpire was looking at me -- and Lendl was looking at me -- and it crossed my mind to say, 'Who am I kidding here? I'm playing against the No. 1 player in the world, I'm throwing these lob shots and I can't move worth beans.' . . .

"And I started to think to myself, 'I'll get into the locker room and people will pat me on the back. I'll get to the press conference and people will say, 'Great effort today.' "

But even at that age -- before he forged his reputation as a dogged competitor who refused to quit on points, much less matches -- Chang knew he had to carry on.

"So when I got to that service line," he says, "I had an unbelievable conviction of heart like, 'Hey, what are you doing?' It was almost as if God was saying, 'You fought this hard to win the third and fourth sets and now you're going to call it quits?' It dawned on me that if I were to quit then, it would be that much easier to quit every other time I experienced difficulty.

"And so my thought process after that was, 'Maybe I can't control the winning or losing, but I can finish the race.' "

It was a blueprint he followed the rest of his career, the Southern California-reared son of Chinese emigrants maximizing his potential as much through perseverance as skill.

Recharged mentally, he ousted Lendl in a match lasting more than 4 1/2 hours. Once, he even served underhanded, unnerving the usually stoic Lendl.

Marveled Tony Trabert, a former French Open champion, "I've never seen a player show so much courage on a tennis court."

Days later, the 15th-seeded Chang topped third-seeded Stefan Edberg in a five-set final, becoming the youngest male winner of a Grand Slam tournament and the first U.S. winner at Roland Garros in 34 years -- since Trabert won in 1955.