‘American Son’ looks back at the heyday of tennis star Michael Chang
The latest ESPN 30 for 30 documentary, directed by journalist Jay Caspian Kang, remembers the historic French Open run of an American tennis upstart like no other.
I’ve noted lately that tennis, in particular, seems to lend itself well to the sports documentary form, with two really great docs about John McEnroe in the last five years and a decent docuseries last year from Apple TV+ about Boris Becker.
The latest outstanding example is American Son, a new ESPN 30 for 30 documentary about Michael Chang, the Taiwanese-American tennis star who burst on the scene in the late 1980s and won the French Open in 1989 at the record-breaking age of 17.
Chang became the youngest men’s player to win a Grand Slam event, and while he’d be a top men’s player for quite a few years, it would remain his lone Grand Slam win.
The film, which features interviews with the now 52-year-old Chang and his mother, who steals the show, covers his early life — born to immigrants, he went from New Jersey to Minnesota to California — and the later part of his tennis career.
But the documentary's centerpiece is that run in 1989, specifically the epic, more than four-hour fourth-round match in that French Open, in which the unheralded Chang defeated Ivan Lendl, the world’s top men’s player at the time. (Lendl, interviewed in the film, is a mostly good sport about the whole thing.)
It’s not just that Chang made a run at a time — before the rises of Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras — when it was rare for American tennis stars to win major tournaments; he was the first American to win at Roland Garros in many years. He was also the first prominent Asian-American tennis player. That French Open run took place against the backdrop of the Tiananmen Square protests in China that spring.
Speaking of China, there was a bizarre incident, the full story of which we never quite got. The film was to premiere over a year ago at the Tribeca Film Festival before that premiere was canceled for mysterious reasons. Was it to appease China, as some in conservative media alleged at the time?
The film isn’t primarily about those protests in China and ends with a famous Reebok commercial that Chang shot on the Great Wall in the early ‘90s. And it’s not clear why they would go ahead and release the film now if it was about ESPN kowtowing to China.
The director, Jay Caspian Kang, is a prominent journalist who has worked for The New York Times and the New Yorker and wrote “The Loneliest Americans,” an outstanding 2021 book about Asian-American identity. He continues exploring such themes here while expertly weaving the archival footage with the contemporary interviews.
American Son is a 30 for 30 documentary that arrived with very little hype. It was released during the first week of the Olympics, even though it doesn’t have much to do with the Olympics. This is part of a continuing pattern of ESPN not hyping its 30 for 30 docs all that much, even when they’re quite good. This is the best one this year and probably my favorite since the Reggie White film last year.
American Son is now streaming on ESPN+ and Hulu.