The Incredible Babe Didrikson Zaharias
I had the great fortune to meet the incredible Babe Didrikson Zaharias in the early fifties at Metropolis Country Club, probably not too long before she died. Everyone was in awe of her; she was definitely the greatest woman athlete that ever lived, and possibly the greatest of all athletes. She was chosen Female Athlete of the Year six times by the Associated Press and female “Athlete of the Half Century” in 1950, also by the Associated Press.
Babe was born Mildred Ella Didrikson in Port Arthur, Texas, on June 26, before women even had the vote. The year varies. (Once when she stated her year of birth as 1919, a friend commented that meant that she won the Olympics at thirteen!) As a result of her outstanding performance on her high school basketball team, she was put on a company league. She was a secretary for the Employers Casualty Company of Dallas. (She excelled even at that, typing 86 words per minute.) At that time, the only way women could play organized sports was through company teams. She played for the Golden Cyclones, the Employers Casualty team. In 1932, her company sent her to compete in the national Amateur Athletic Union Championships, which doubled as tryouts for the Olympics. Of ten events, Babe entered 8 and won six. She broke world records in four and set an American record in a fifth (shot put).
Babe qualified for five events at the 1932 Olympics, but women were only allowed to enter three. In those three, she won two gold medals (javelin and 80 meter hurdles) and silver in the high jump. She shared the record in the high jump. She was not awarded the gold, as her style of jumping head first was against the rules at the time. “The uncertainty of the ruling is evidenced by the half-gold, half-silver medal awarded to Babe, perhaps the only such mongrel in Olympic history.” In the mid-thirties, Babe took up golf. Who would have known that she would outshine even her own past in this new field? She won seventeen amateur tournaments, two of which were the 1946 United States Women’s Amateur and the 1947 British Amateur, being the first woman to win the latter. She won thirty-one professional tournaments in eight years, among them three United States Women’s Open Tournaments. In 1949, she co-founded the Ladies Professional Golf Association. In 1951, she was one of the original LPGA Hall of Fame inductees.
Babe had now entered a “genteel” sport and this was a big help to her image. Although she was, according to Grantland Rice, a “perfect specimen”, no one ever thought of her as beautiful. She endured much ribbing about masculinity, partly because of the sports in which she excelled. A reporter once asked her if there were anything she didn’t play and she answered “Dolls”. Friends helped her “feminize” her image. She married professional wrestler, George Zaharias, in 1938.
In 1953, in her early forties, Babe was diagnosed with colon cancer. She was one of the first public figures to admit it. After her first colostomy, in great pain, she played and won five LPGA tournaments, including her third United States Women’s Open Tournament. In 1956, the cancer returned and she underwent another operation. The “perfect specimen” weighed 62 pounds. She succumbed on September 27th. President Eisenhower took a moment from his news conference to pay a tribute to Babe.
To say that Babe was competitive would be an understatement. A hurricane destroyed Port Arthur when she was a toddler and the Didriksons moved to Beaumont. She and her older sister, Lillie, used to race to school. Lillie would run on the sidewalk in front of the houses. Babe, however, would sprint through the front yards of the houses. One particular house had a hedge that was higher than the others. This hurdle was keeping her from winning the race. She asked the owner of the house to please cut his hedge to the height of the other hedges. He did.
Today, if an athlete excels at two sports, they are considered a superstar. Babe was world class at ten sports. Just imagine what she could have accomplished if she had had today’s equipment for women, instead of the clunky, ill-fitting and poorly designed equipment and apparel that was available to her! Her excellence challenged and changed the common ideas of what a woman could and could not do with her life. Babe paved the way for every female athlete that followed her.