Jean René Lacoste was a French tennis player and businessman. He is known worldwide as the namesake of the Lacoste tennis shirt. Lacoste was one of The Four Musketeers, French tennis stars. He won seven Grand Slam singles titles in the French, American, and British championships but never made the long trip to Australia to play in their championships. He was the World No. 1 player for both 1926 and 1927.
Background
He was nicknamed "the Crocodile" by fans because of his tenacity on the court.
Lacoste's mechanical mind never really lagged behind his athletic pursuits. A tenacious perfectionist, he had once been criticized by a coach for overtraining. His tendency to wear out practice partners proved so frustrating that Lacoste created the first the world's tennis ball machine, a hand-cranked device he called "lance-balle."
Later, Lacoste created the game's first metal tennis racket.
His inventive mind worked in areas outside of tennis, too. For the game of golf he developed a new polyurethane driver, which helped the sport transition to composite material-based clubs.
Between the mid-1960s and late 1980s Lacoste filed 20 new patents.
Over the last several years of his life, Rene Lacoste battled health issues. He suffered from prostate cancer and in early October 1996, had surgery on a broken leg. He died in his sleep from heart failure just four days after
Career
In 1933, Lacoste founded La Société Chemise Lacoste with André Gillier. The company produced the tennis shirt which Lacoste often wore when he was playing, which had a crocodile (often thought to be an alligator) embroidered on the chest.
In 1963, Lacoste created a sensation in racquet technology by patenting the first tubular steel tennis racquet. Until then, racquets had almost always been made of wood. This new racquet's strings were attached to the frame by a series of wires, which wrapped around the racquet head. The racquet was marketed in Europe under the Lacoste brand, but in the United States it was marketed by Wilson Sporting Goods and achieved critical acclaim and huge popularity as the Wilson T-2000, used by American tennis great Jimmy Connors.
There are numerous explanations of why Lacoste was originally nicknamed the Crocodile. A 2006 New York Times obituary about Lacoste's son, Bernard, provides an apparently authoritative one. In the 1920s, supposedly, Lacoste made a bet with his team captain about whether he would win a certain match. The stakes were a suitcase he had seen in a Boston store; it was made of crocodile (or alligator) skin. Later, René Lacoste's friend Robert George embroidered a crocodile onto a blazer that Lacoste wore for his matches.
The week of his death, French Advertising agency Publicis, who had been managing the account for decades, published a print ad with the Lacoste logo and the English words "See you later...", reinforcing the idea that the animal was perhaps an alligator.
The Four Musketeers were inducted simultaneously into the International Tennis Hall of Fame, in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1979.
French Championships:
Singles champion: 1925, 1927, 1929
Singles finalist: 1926, 1928
Doubles champion: 1925, 1929
Doubles finalist: 1927
Wimbledon:
Singles champion: 1925, 1928
Singles finalist: 1924
Doubles champion: 1925
U.S. Championships:
Singles champion: 1926, 1927
Mixed finalist: 1926, 1927