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In individual sports, athletes answer only to themselves these days. Jockey Eddie Belmonte, who rode 212 winners and earned $235,000 in 1969, favors a wardrobe of rich brocades befitting a courtier at Versailles. Returning from a suspension last year, he fondly recalls how he walked into the jockeys' room. "I wore a bright orange suit. The pants had bell-bottoms and the jacket was a Nehru with no sleeves so you could see the yellow shirt I was wearing. I had a beard, and I thought I looked real good. When the other jocks saw me, they called me the Puerto Rican hippie. They say, 'You're too much.' "
Peacock that he is. Elegant Eddie is but one of dozens of flashy strutters in every corner of the sport aviary. At last count. Wide Receiver Dick Gordon of the Chicago Bears had 27 pairs of "creative" shoes ("They really express what's inside a guy"), ten suede suits, 35 pairs of pants, 50 shirts, 20 sweaters, eight multicolored caps, seven leather coats and two fur topcoats. The only problem, he says, is "that I'm a little short on underwear."
Walt Frazier of the New York Knickerbockers basketball team has a different problem: convincing people that he was wearing those broad-brimmed gangster hats and wide-lapel pin-stripe suits long before the movie Bonnie and Clyde came out. Chief ball hawk for the champion Knicks, Frazier says: "I dress kind of conservatively when we lose and I splash on the colors when we win." Since the Knicks are again runaway leaders, he is usually somewhere over the rainbow. He squires his girl friend around the discotheque circuit in his "Clydemobile," a white-and-canary Cadillac Eldorado that is a far cry from the Ford Pinto he pushes in TV commercials. His Knick salary plus endorsements, speaking engagements, interests in an athletes' managing firm and a hair-styling salon will earn him more than $100,000 this year. He needs it to support his weakness for maxicoats. Among his favorites: a pair of leather numbers with mink collars ($450 each), a black elephant skin ($950) and a sealskin ($2,000).
Even hockey players are breaking out of the brushcut mold. Upon joining the Boston Bruins three seasons ago, Derek ("Turk") Sanderson announced: "The square hockey world could use a change, and I'm the guy to change it." He grew a mustache, let his hair grow into a shaggy mop, spent $9,000 on a far-out wardrobe, and began mouthing off. N.H.L. President Clarence Campbell, he said, was a "stuffed shirt" for not letting him wear white skates. Famed old Gordie Howe of the Detroit Red Wings was "the dirtiest player in the league." Named Rookie of the Year, Sanderson naturally hurried into print with his autobiography. In I've Got To Be Me, he offered his philosophy: "I like a swinging chick who grooves on life. One who's kind of warm, wet and wild." In his bachelor digs he installed a bar, mood lighting, a wall-to-wall white fur rug, and a circular bed beneath a mirrored ceiling.