Jim Courier and Guy Forget went the distance in a classic final in Indian Wells.
At the 1989 Masters tournament, the season-ending championship featuring the top-eight male professionals, five of the players were American—and two of them were teenagers: the surprise French Open champion Michael Chang and three-time major semifinalist Andre Agassi.
It was expected that the Swiss Indoors champion Jim Courier would be joining his young peers the next year at the event. Instead, the former Nick Bollettieri pupil stagnated in the follow-up to his breakout campaign, failing to reach a final on the year and remaining ranked in the 20s.
Seeking a change, he partnered with Jose Higueras, the United States Tennis Association coach who guided Chang to that French Open title and in 1991, the partnership yielded results as Courier reached the second final of his career in Indian Wells, Calif., part of the ATP Championship Series. Along the way, he defeated Agassi and Emilio Sanchez, both ranked in the top 10 at No. 4 and No. 8, respectively.
In the final, he would face the hottest player of the already-brief season, world No. 5 Guy Forget. The veteran Frenchman’s results were starting to match his ability as he’d won two titles so far in 1991 and entered the match with a 21-2 record on the year.
Competing against each other for the first time, Forget’s booming left-handed serve and topspin-heavy groundstrokes were able to keep Courier off-balance and he would go on to take the first set 6-4 in the best-of-five encounter.
Having tempered his groundstrokes and beginning to incorporate more strategy into his game under Higueras, Courier leveled the match by winning the second set 6-3. Forget, playing in his eighth career final, regained the momentum to claim the third and went up 3-1 in the fourth to stand only a few more holds away from his biggest title. Courier, though, was far from done and won the next six games to send the match to a fifth and final set.
In the decider, both players held serve through 12 games, forcing a tiebreak to decide the champion. On the third point, a questionable call led to Courier getting a 2-1 lead, one that he would stretch to 5-2. The American took the next one as well to end up with four match points. Forget saved two of them, but on the next point, a missed volley clinched the title in Courier’s favor, his first in more than a year.
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This was the first final on U.S. soil for both Courier and Forget.
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Courier’s victory was the third by a young American in the ATP Championship Series since 1990. Agassi won in Miami and Chang triumphed in Toronto that year.
'85
The last American to win the title at this tournament was Larry Stefanki, back in 1985, when the event was held in La Quinta, Calif.
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