Card of the Day - 2022-06-28

Here we have the famous French tennis player of the 1920s and 1930s, Jean René Lacoste.

He was born , coincidentally, on the 2nd of July 1904, the date this newsletter will also be born, and he was a French tennis player, one of a group of four who were at the top of their game in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and were rather amusingly given the nickname of “The Four Musketeers”, in fact if you look down his trading card database you will see that Cloetta, the Swedish confectionery and nut company, issued a set which became known as “Sportsmen” and card 56 shows him with a fellow musketeer, Henri Cochet, who we featured at the end of the week. 

Jean Rene Lacoste is titled on our card as being “The premier man player in the world”. He won seven Grand Slam singles titles, was World Number One in 1926 and 1927, and was on the winning Davis Cup team in 1927 and 1928. But it all started with the Olympics; where he took bronze, in tennis, in Paris, in 1924. 

At the time, he had several other interests in the business world, including fashion, and in fact he is now more remembered for fashion than for tennis, for in 1929 he introduced a tennis shirt, with its crocodile logo, named after his nickname of the time. 

This card was also issued by Churchman in a standard size as card 32/50, which we featured as our card of the day on the 16th of January 2023 

The standard sized set was also issued by John Player, but for export only.  

He died not that long ago, in October, 1996, aged 92.