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Associated Press
Mildred Ella Babe Didrikson Zaharias blasting out of a sand trap in 1947.
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... Didrikson, who was born 100 years ago, was perhaps America’s greatest all-around athlete, male or female.
No athlete excelled at more sports and games than Didrikson. She was an all-American basketball player, a two-time Olympic track and field gold medalist and a golf champion who won 82 tournaments, including an astonishing 14 in a row. One of the 13 founding members of the L.P.G.A., Didrikson became the first woman to play against men in a PGA Tour event and the first American to win the British Women’s Amateur Championship. She was also an outstanding baseball, softball, tennis and billiards player, diver and bowler.
At 13 she was just a poor, foul-mouthed Beaumont girl who preferred to play baseball and basketball with the boys because they were better athletes than the girls.
A brash, tough-talking Texan who spent her life hurdling obstacles placed in her way by chauvinistic sports fans, sexist reporters and class-conscious golfers, Didrikson often showed up in the clubhouse before a tournament and bellowed to her female competitors: “The Babe’s here! Who is going to finish second?”
Perhaps Didrikson’s most spectacular athletic achievement occurred at the amateur track and field championships in Evanston, Ill., on July 16, 1932. She was the lone representative of Employers Casualty Insurance Company of Dallas, competing against company teams of 12, 15, even 22 women. When Didrikson was introduced, she ran onto the field by herself, her arms waving wildly. The crowd gasped at the audacity of this “one-woman track team” (a phrase Didrikson coined).
Over the course of three hours on a sweltering track, she sprinted from event to event, with barely enough time to catch her breath. She finished first in five events: broad jump, shot-put, javelin, 80-meter hurdles and the baseball throw. She tied for first in a sixth event, the high jump. In qualifying for three Olympic events, she amassed a total of 30 team points for Employers Casualty. The second-place team, the Illinois Women’s Athletic Club, scored 22 points — with 22 athletes.
She went on to Los Angeles for the 1932 Olympics and won gold medals in the javelin and the 80-meter hurdles and a silver medal in the high jump. Almost overnight, she had become the most famous female athlete in the world.
... It was not until Didrikson took up golf that she began to transform her image and personality. She embraced golf in part to try to conform, somewhat, to America’s expectations of how a female athlete should look and act in the 1930s. She bought a new wardrobe and applied lipstick. Some writers still ridiculed her looks. (“I know I’m not pretty, but I try to be graceful,” she said.) And in December 1938, she married George Zaharias, a professional wrestler. He helped sell her makeover to the news media and to the public.
Golf was the toughest game for Didrikson, but she mastered it by practicing for 10 hours a day until her hands were bloodied and blistered. From 1946 to 1947, she won 14 consecutive tournaments, including the British Women’s Amateur Championship in Gullane, Scotland.
Perhaps her most lasting legacy is as a founding member of the L.P.G.A. The women’s tour was created in large part to showcase Didrikson’s booming drives, soft touch around the greens and the effortless way she made members of the gallery laugh and cheer. “I just loosen my girdle and let the ball have it,” she liked to say.
Tournament organizers paid her $1,000 under the table just to show up; it did not take long for other female golfers to become envious of her stardom. But they also knew it was Didrikson whom the people were coming to see.
“Babe was an entertainer,” said Marilynn Smith, a Kansas pro and L.P.G.A. founding member, who won 21 tour events in her career. “She knew you’re not just out there hitting a golf ball.”
Didrikson received a diagnosis of rectal cancer in April 1953. Doctors told reporters she would never play professional golf again. She tried to give her clubs to a friend, but soon she vowed publicly that she would come back to play tournament golf and win.
Fifteen months after a colostomy, she won the United States Women’s Open at Salem Country Club in Peabody, Mass., by an amazing 12 strokes. Afterward, she shared her victory with her doctors and the thousands of cancer patients who had written to her and rooted for her.
Didrikson became a tireless crusader against cancer. She spoke openly about her illness in an era when public figures preferred to keep theirs a secret.
Twenty-six months after her triumph at Salem Country Club, she was dead. On the morning she died in a Galveston, Tex., hospital, President Dwight D. Eisenhower began his news conference in Washington with this salute: “She was a woman who, in her athletic career, certainly won the admiration of every person in the United States, all sports people all over the world, and in her gallant fight against cancer, she put up one of the kind of fights that inspire us all.”
No athlete excelled at more sports and games than Didrikson. She was an all-American basketball player, a two-time Olympic track and field gold medalist and a golf champion who won 82 tournaments, including an astonishing 14 in a row. One of the 13 founding members of the L.P.G.A., Didrikson became the first woman to play against men in a PGA Tour event and the first American to win the British Women’s Amateur Championship. She was also an outstanding baseball, softball, tennis and billiards player, diver and bowler.
At 13 she was just a poor, foul-mouthed Beaumont girl who preferred to play baseball and basketball with the boys because they were better athletes than the girls.
A brash, tough-talking Texan who spent her life hurdling obstacles placed in her way by chauvinistic sports fans, sexist reporters and class-conscious golfers, Didrikson often showed up in the clubhouse before a tournament and bellowed to her female competitors: “The Babe’s here! Who is going to finish second?”
Perhaps Didrikson’s most spectacular athletic achievement occurred at the amateur track and field championships in Evanston, Ill., on July 16, 1932. She was the lone representative of Employers Casualty Insurance Company of Dallas, competing against company teams of 12, 15, even 22 women. When Didrikson was introduced, she ran onto the field by herself, her arms waving wildly. The crowd gasped at the audacity of this “one-woman track team” (a phrase Didrikson coined).
Over the course of three hours on a sweltering track, she sprinted from event to event, with barely enough time to catch her breath. She finished first in five events: broad jump, shot-put, javelin, 80-meter hurdles and the baseball throw. She tied for first in a sixth event, the high jump. In qualifying for three Olympic events, she amassed a total of 30 team points for Employers Casualty. The second-place team, the Illinois Women’s Athletic Club, scored 22 points — with 22 athletes.
She went on to Los Angeles for the 1932 Olympics and won gold medals in the javelin and the 80-meter hurdles and a silver medal in the high jump. Almost overnight, she had become the most famous female athlete in the world.
... It was not until Didrikson took up golf that she began to transform her image and personality. She embraced golf in part to try to conform, somewhat, to America’s expectations of how a female athlete should look and act in the 1930s. She bought a new wardrobe and applied lipstick. Some writers still ridiculed her looks. (“I know I’m not pretty, but I try to be graceful,” she said.) And in December 1938, she married George Zaharias, a professional wrestler. He helped sell her makeover to the news media and to the public.
Golf was the toughest game for Didrikson, but she mastered it by practicing for 10 hours a day until her hands were bloodied and blistered. From 1946 to 1947, she won 14 consecutive tournaments, including the British Women’s Amateur Championship in Gullane, Scotland.
Perhaps her most lasting legacy is as a founding member of the L.P.G.A. The women’s tour was created in large part to showcase Didrikson’s booming drives, soft touch around the greens and the effortless way she made members of the gallery laugh and cheer. “I just loosen my girdle and let the ball have it,” she liked to say.
Tournament organizers paid her $1,000 under the table just to show up; it did not take long for other female golfers to become envious of her stardom. But they also knew it was Didrikson whom the people were coming to see.
“Babe was an entertainer,” said Marilynn Smith, a Kansas pro and L.P.G.A. founding member, who won 21 tour events in her career. “She knew you’re not just out there hitting a golf ball.”
Didrikson received a diagnosis of rectal cancer in April 1953. Doctors told reporters she would never play professional golf again. She tried to give her clubs to a friend, but soon she vowed publicly that she would come back to play tournament golf and win.
Fifteen months after a colostomy, she won the United States Women’s Open at Salem Country Club in Peabody, Mass., by an amazing 12 strokes. Afterward, she shared her victory with her doctors and the thousands of cancer patients who had written to her and rooted for her.
Didrikson became a tireless crusader against cancer. She spoke openly about her illness in an era when public figures preferred to keep theirs a secret.
Twenty-six months after her triumph at Salem Country Club, she was dead. On the morning she died in a Galveston, Tex., hospital, President Dwight D. Eisenhower began his news conference in Washington with this salute: “She was a woman who, in her athletic career, certainly won the admiration of every person in the United States, all sports people all over the world, and in her gallant fight against cancer, she put up one of the kind of fights that inspire us all.”