In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!
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René Lacoste [FRA]Born: 2 July 1904
Died: 12 October 1996
Career: 1921-32
Played: Right-handed (one-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1926)
Major singles titles: 7
Total singles titles: 24
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Even before he sold millions of polo shirts embroidered with his personal insignia, René Lacoste had one of the best nicknames in tennis history. He was “The Crocodile.”
Or, maybe, the alligator. The debate is almost a century old. Lacoste’s game doesn’t offer an answer. Alligators are the more timid of the two, and Lacoste rarely ventured to the net. On the other hand, crocodiles are deadlier, and on the tennis court, he was certainly that.
Like any good nickname, it’s not entirely clear how it got started. The canonical story was told by a Boston sportswriter named George Carens. In 1923, Lacoste was in Boston for a Davis Cup tie against Australia. Carens sought out up-and-coming stars, so he tagged along one day when the French team went for a stroll around the city.
Lacoste spotted a crocodile-skin valise in a shop window. He loved it, and he made a deal with team captain Allan Muhr that if he won the opening rubber against Australia’s James Anderson, Muhr would buy him the bag. Alas, he lost to the veteran in straight sets, and the French team failed to advance. Still, Carens wrote about it, and the “crocodile” tag stuck. It seemed to fit René’s game. Carens said, “He was relentless, and chewed up his opponents slowly.”
That’s the story, anyway. It’s unclear where Carens worked at the time–his first job was at the Boston Herald, but someone else covered tennis for the Herald that summer. I can’t find any references to Lacoste as the Crocodile (or the Alligator) in the American press until 1925. In September of that year, John J. Hallahan of the Boston Globe wrote that the Frenchman “is now being termed ‘Crocodile.'”
In any event, the moniker stuck. The first time it popped up in the New York Times, it was in the mouth of Lacoste’s teammate Jean Borotra. Ahead of the 1927 US Nationals, Lacoste told American reporters it would be his last full season. Borotra didn’t commit to any particular species, but he thought it was just another reptilian ploy:
Ah, that crocodile, the poor alligator. He will be lucky to win his first match in the [US national] championship. He will never play again, poor fellow. Now I will tell one.
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Borotra, in his sarcasm, was half right. The 23-year-old Lacoste was at the top of his game.
A week after that comment appeared in the Times, the French team finally toppled Bill Tilden and the Americans for possession of the Davis Cup. The “Four Musketeers”–Lacoste, Borotra, Henri Cochet, and Toto Brugnon–pooled their efforts to wear out the great Tilden. Borotra and Brugnon lost the doubles, but they kept Tilden and Frank Hunter on court for five sets. Lacoste took advantage of the 34-year-old’s fatigue to beat him in singles the next day, and Cochet sealed the 1927 Cup victory with a four-set win over Bill Johnston.
The US Championships at Forest Hills the following week were little more than a victory lap for the Crocodile. Cochet lost early and Borotra fell to Tilden in the quarters, but Lacoste wouldn’t budge. He won four-set matches over Manuel Alonso and Johnston to reach the final, then bested Tilden once again, 11-9, 6-3, 11-9 in the final.
Big Bill, who had held the national title from 1920 to 1925, recognized that he had met his match. Tilden’s pen was as prolific as his racket, and he would often have reason to praise Lacoste in print. “In the perfection of his stroking, he is a machine,” he once wrote. “He was the genius–shrewd, analytical, superb in technique.”
Lacoste faced Tilden eight times between the 1925 Davis Cup Challenge Round and the 1929 Roland Garros semi-final. The stakes were always high. Every one of their encounters was either for a Davis Cup championship, or in the semi-finals or final of a grand slam. The Frenchman won six, and he pushed the American to five sets in the other two.
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Borotra was also half wrong. It was unthinkable that a sportsman as single-minded and accomplished as Lacoste would simply walk away. Yet soon, he would do just that.
1927 was his last trip to Forest Hills. 1928 was his final Wimbledon and his last Davis Cup. Apart from a one-off comeback in 1932, his farewell major came at the French Championships in 1929, one month before his 25th birthday.
In that final outing, Lacoste beat Tilden and Borotra to win his seventh major title. He entered only 17 in his entire career. Few men have ever packed so many tennis exploits into so little time.
Colorization credit: Women’s Tennis Colorizations
Everything about his career was astonishingly compressed. He only discovered the game when he was 15. It soon developed into an obsession, one that did not fit into the life his father had planned for him. Jean-Jules was a director of the Hispano-Suiza car company, and it was assumed that René, too, would pursue a career in business. The boy was particularly gifted in mathematics and would train as an engineer.
But nothing could shake tennis’s grip on the young Lacoste. Father and son came to an agreement. John Tunis explained in the New Yorker:
At last, however, he agreed to give his son two years to see what he could do. If at the end of those two years he was the fifth ranking player in all tennis, he was to have five years more. If not, he was to go into the factory and become an honest fellow…. That was in 1922. Never a boy applied himself as René Lacoste applied himself to tennis.
Lacoste quickly started winning, but not everyone was convinced he had the makings of a champion.
He beat Marcel Dupont, a national doubles titlist, in 1921. Dupont described him as “a mere schoolboy who can do nothing but poke the ball into the court.” Another potential rival, Paul Féret, concurred: “He is useless, this young Lacoste, he can do nothing but push the ball back and back.”
Dupont and Féret would both learn what Tilden was forced to discover just a few years later. René wasn’t just getting the ball back; he was edging opponents further and further away from their comfort zones. The Times captured the probing game style with a proverb: “It is the sort of genius that is defined as the infinite capacity for taking pains.”
The year that Lacoste made the deal with his father, he lost at Wimbledon in the first round. The following season, he reached the fourth round. In 1924, he made it to the final, where he lost a five-setter to Borotra.
At the end of the season, the experts made their evaluations, and Lacoste was ranked fifth in the world.
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The Crocodile never lost his sense of urgency. He knew that his opportunities to win the sport’s greatest honors were limited, and he prepared accordingly.
From his earliest days in competition, he jotted down the tactics of potential opponents. Racing to meet his father’s deadline, Tunis wrote, “He learned the science of ballistics, of dynamics, the laws of speed, of spin, of the flight of the ball. In note books he worked out angles of a tennis court by trigonometry.” Then he applied the theory to match play, treating every foe like an algebra problem.
While other players grouched about equipment, officials, and weather conditions, Lacoste refused to be distracted. He always kept eight to ten rackets in rotation, so he wouldn’t become too dependent on any of them.
A journalist asked if he blamed his defeat at Forest Hills in 1924 to the blistering heat. His response? “Ah, ça m’est égal [it doesn’t matter]. Changes of ball, changes of climate, changes of diet, all that does not affect me. Give me three days with a new ball in a strange country and I am as good as ever.”
He was equally impervious to surface. His first major title came at the French Championships in 1925. In the final, he straight-setted Borotra, the electric serve-and-volleyer. The slow clay was tailored to his patient game, but it hardly mattered. The two men met again for the Wimbledon championship a month later, and it took Lacoste just one more set to repeat his victory.
René’s persistence even worked on the fastest of amateur-era surfaces, indoor wood. In early 1926, he tagged along with Borotra to the US National Indoor Championships in New York City. Lacoste was as unflappable as ever. Allison Danzig, writing for the New Yorker, said of the semi-final, “Vincent Richards, for all of his knocking the cover off the ball, might as well have tried to hammer down a stone wall.”
Borotra may have been the best wood-court player of all time, but when the two Frenchmen met in the final, Lacoste broke his opponent’s resolve with a 15-13 first set. The Crocodile won in four. While Borotra didn’t mind facing Tilden, there was a limit to his appetite for a struggle. “Excuse me, please,” he said, “from Mr. Lacoste.”
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Lacoste’s preparation may have paid its greatest dividends in, of all things, a dead Davis Cup rubber.
Throughout the 1920s, the French made steady progress as they tried to become the first non-English speaking country to win the Davis Cup. The United States won the Cup back from Australia in 1920, and with Tilden at the top of his game, they had little trouble holding on.
Lacoste made his Cup debut in 1923, the year that he admired that crocodile-skin valise in Boston. For the first time, France came just one step short of the Challenge Round. They lost to Australia, who would stop them at the same stage in 1924. In 1925, they would finally get past the Aussies, but the Americans proved too strong in the championship round. Lacoste lost to both Tilden and Johnston, and he and Borotra lost the doubles in straight sets.
1926 wasn’t much better. France reached the Challenge Round again, but they lost the first four rubbers to the Americans. Lacoste fell to Johnston and Borotra lost to Tilden. Brugnon and Cochet failed to win a set in the doubles. The singles matches of the final day didn’t matter, but René wasn’t about to give up a chance to learn more about Tilden, the man who probably occupied more pages in his notebook than anyone else.
Tilden had needed five sets to beat Lacoste the year before, and the new, improved Crocodile was finally too much for the veteran to handle. Big Bill took the first set, and René came back to grab the second and third. Tilden grew as frustrated with his opponent’s imperturbability as his backhand:
The monotonous regularity with which that unsmiling, drab, almost dull man returned the best I could hit, seemingly without any effect upon him physically or mentally, piled almost irresistible pressure on my nervous system. I used to wish to God he would just once show some form of human reaction. I was often filled with a wild desire to throw my racket at him or hit him over the head.
Allison Danzig was pithier, writing that Tilden was “outguessed, outgeneraled, and outstroked.” Late in the third set, the American aggravated an old knee injury, and he probably should’ve retired. He played on, holding his own as Lacoste failed to work out how to put away an injured opponent. But the result was never really in doubt. While the Americans held on to the Cup, the French won a moral victory. Not only did they avoid a second straight shutout at the hands of the defenders, they finally beat Tilden.
The difference between 5-0 and 4-1 sounds merely academic. But René’s long-awaited victory helped the Frenchmen overcome the last mental block standing between them and international tennis dominance.
The floodgates opened. The next week at the US National Championships, all four of the quarter-finals pitted an American against a Frenchman, and only Vinnie Richards came through for the home team. Tilden lost a five-setter to Cochet. Lacoste beat Borotra in the final, dropping only eight games.
In 1927, as we’ve seen, the French finally triumphed. Big Bill had 50 weeks to plan yet another Davis Cup title defense, but with an aging body, a weak supporting cast, and ever-strengthening competition, there was only so much he could do. The next time the Musketeers got a crack at the American team, they pulled out a narrow victory. France would retain the Davis Cup until Fred Perry’s British team took it from them in 1933.
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Lacoste had barely reached the top of the tennis world when his own body began to let him down. At the start of 1928, he struggled through a tough five-setter on the Riviera against Henry Mayes, an opponent he should’ve beaten easily. Diagnosed with neuritis, he had to take a month off. A year later, he was coping with respiratory disease and stopping competing entirely.
His physical deterioration may have made a tough decision easier. 1929 was the end of the five-year term that his father had granted him to pursue the game. It wasn’t long before Lacoste was selling his signature short-sleeved, crocodile-emblazoned shirts. It turned out that René and his father had had little to argue about: He became a tennis champion and a success in industry, surpassing even Jean-Jules.
When Lacoste retired from competitive play, the rest of the circuit could finally breathe a sigh of relief. They had spent the last half-decade comparing the Frenchman to a machine, one that mere flesh and blood couldn’t hope to compete with. The New Yorker summed it up in 1926: “Mr. Tilden, after all, is human and will make an error. M. Lacoste is simply unreasonable.”