From Horace Grant to Stephen Nedoroscik: Five Athletes Who Made Glasses Cool

Stephen Nodorscik captured the hearts of the world at the 2024 Paris Olympics when he took off his glasses like Clark Kent and performed a breathtaking routine on the pommel horse. While many athletes prefer contact lenses, some retailers, like Glasses USA, create specialty eyewear to protect athletes’ vision and eye safety.

Chicago Bulls icon Horace Grant was born with nearsightedness and became famous for wearing his glasses on the court. After undergoing laser surgery, he continued to wear glasses to protect his eyes. He told his fans in a Reddit AMA, “The first couple of years it was prescription glasses. My grandmothers, grandfathers, moms and dads would come up to me and say it was getting their grandkids and their kids to wear glasses. A lot of kids were getting bullied for wearing glasses, so I guess I made it kind of cool to wear them. So I kept wearing them without the prescription.”

Right fielder Reggie Jackson, also known as “Mr. October,” began wearing glasses later in his baseball career, bringing his four-eyed look to the plate. Yankees fan site Pinstripe Alley credits Jackson with “making glasses cool.”

Basketball is the sport with the highest number of eye injuries among athletes, and Kareem-Abdul Jabbar was one of the iconic users of protective eyewear. Heritage Auctions sold a pair of his 1974 glasses. In the description, they wrote: “Although Kareem first suffered an eye injury in a game in January 1968 during his junior season at UCLA, it wasn’t until his fifth NBA season with the Milwaukee Bucks in 1974-75 that a second injury prompted him to seek out protective eyewear. During a preseason game, an errant hand scratched Abdul-Jabbar’s eye, once again grazing his cornea and sending him into a rage during which the star center compounded his woes by hitting the backboard post, breaking his hand.” After missing the first 16 games of the regular season, Kareem returned with goggles similar in appearance to those a skier or scuba diver might use.

Tennis legend Billie Jean King believes she was the first woman to win Wimbledon wearing glasses. She said People In a May 2024 interview, she opened up about how much she still loves her signature glasses. “They’re my jewelry.” According to the outlet, King owns more than 16 pairs of glasses. “Because I change my jacket or my outfit. I’m in different moods. I might have two or three blue glasses, but they’re different blue glasses or different frames.” Her 1980 Wimbledon opponent, Martina Navratilova, also continued to incorporate the glasses into her game.

Even though she didn’t wear her glasses on the beam, Brazilian gymnast Rebecca Andrade charmed her fans by putting on her glasses to see her results. Andrade told Olympics.com that she actually prefers her view of the beam and vault to be a little blurry.

Perhaps the popularity of athletes like Nodorscik and Andrade will encourage more athletes to wear their glasses—at least when they want to—in the future! If so, Glasses USA is a great place to start looking for gear. They offer frames made with plastic lenses, which serve to lighten the weight of traditional glass lenses and prevent brittleness, as well as polarized lenses developed to protect outdoor athletes from glare.

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