Le Crocodile

They are known as "alligators" in the U.S. and "crocodiles" in 84 other countries. By any nationality or nomenclature, the French sports shirts, with a familiar-looking reptile embroidered on them, sell exceedingly well. Last year the Paris-based firm of Chemise Lacoste sold 1,700,000 of the shirts, 50% in France and the remainder in the crocodile-alligator world beyond. This month, as Lacoste's factories reopen after a vacation layoff, the order backlog has reached 200,000, and Chemise Lacoste has also gotten an unexpected bonus. Catherine Lacoste, 22-year-old daughter of Founder Rene Lacoste, last month outplayed the pros and, as an amateur, won the U.S. Women's Open golf tournament in Hot Springs, Va. "I don't know if it's because my daughter won or not," says Rene Lacoste with a smile, "but everybody seems to want our shirts now."

Lacoste is much more than a shirtmaker. He is already enshrined in an athletic valhalla that Daughter Catherine may never reach. Son of a prosperous Parisian airplane-engine maker, Lacoste dropped out of mechanical engineering studies to play tennis. He played so well that he was twice Forest Hills and Wimbledon champion as well as three-time champion of France. He was a member of the only French team that ever won the Davis Cup (1927, with Jean Borotra, Henri Cochet and Jacques Brugnon as fellow team members). Lacoste played so fiercely that sportswriters dubbed him le Crocodile. When he left the tournament circuit in 1929, he remembered the name. Competitors like Big Bill Tilden had worn starched long-sleeved men's shirts on the courts, but Lacoste was so uncomfortable in them that he had a British haberdasher make him cotton polo shirts with collars attached. When other tennis players adopted the shirt, La coste himself went into business making sports shirts and took the crocodile as his trademark. At first the shirts were almost all white and sales were restricted to France; since the war, how ever, Lacoste has branched out in col ors (20 now) and countries.

Today le Crocodile is 63, white-haired, bespectacled -- and rich. He and Wife Simone Thion de la Chaume La coste, herself a onetime amateur golf champion, have three houses and move with the season. As he has grown older, Lacoste has turned more and more of a broad business empire over to his sons. Bernard Lacoste, 36, a Princeton graduate, bosses the sporting goods com pany, oversees a line that includes sweat ers, socks and tennis-racket covers. Son Francois, 34, a Stanford University-trained physicist, is a research and development director at Lacoste's other major company. In 1934, Lacoste teamed with the Bendix Corp. to form Air Equipement, a French company, to make airplane starters. The com pany has since been merged into D.B.A.

(for Ducellier-Bendix-Air Equipement), which last year had sales of $100 mil lion in mechanical items ranging from disk brakes for Fiat cars to hydraulic systems for the Concorde SST. Lacoste himself still oversees such other en terprises as his interests in a shipbuilding firm constructing 200,000-ton supertankers and in Le Nickel, the French corporation dominated by the Rothschilds that is the world's third largest nickel producer. Yet he still thinks about tennis, has developed a racket with a steel shaft frame that delivers more spring with the ping than the old wood en racket. The new racket has already court-tested by tournament play ers, will soon be produced with that crocodile emblem.

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