Mildred Ella (Babe) Didrikson
Zaharias, athlete, was born on June 26, 1911, in Port Arthur,
Texas, the sixth of seven children of Norwegian immigrants Ole
Nickolene and Hannah Marie (Olson) Didriksen. Ole Didriksen was
a seaman and carpenter, and his wife was an accomplished skater
in Norway. In 1915 the family moved to Beaumont, Texas, where
the children, with the encouragement of both parents, became
skilled performers on the rustic gymnasium equipment that their
father built in the backyard. Mildred Didrikson, who changed the
spelling of her surname, acquired her nickname during sandlot
baseball games with the neighborhood boys, who thought she
batted like Babe Ruth. A talented basketball player in high
school, Didrikson was recruited during her senior year in 1930
to do office work at Employers Casualty Company of Dallas and to
spark the company's semiprofessional women's basketball team,
the Golden Cyclones. Between 1930 and 1932 she led the team to
two finals and a national championship and was voted
All-American each season. Her exceptional athletic versatility
prompted Employers Casualty to expand its women's sports program
beyond basketball. Didrikson represented the company as a
one-woman team in eight of ten track and field events at the
1932 Amateur Athletic Union Championships. She placed in seven
events, taking first place in five—shot put, javelin and
baseball throws, eighty-meter hurdles, and long jump; she tied
for first in the high jump and finished fourth in the discus
throw. In three hours Didrikson singlehandedly amassed thirty
points, eight more than the entire second-place team, and broke
four world records. Her performances in the javelin throw,
hurdles, and high jump qualified her to enter the 1932 Olympics,
where she again broke world records in all three events. She won
gold medals for the javelin and hurdles and, despite clearing
the same height as the top finisher in the high jump, was
awarded the silver medal because she went over the bar head
first, a foul at that time.
Didrikson received a heroine's
welcome on her return to Texas. She had started another
basketball season with the Golden Cyclones when the Amateur
Athletic Union disqualified her from amateur competition because
her name appeared in an automobile advertisement. Her family was
badly in need of money, and Didrikson turned professional to
earn what she could from her status as a sports celebrity. Never
hesitant to capitalize on her own abilities or to turn a profit
from showmanship, she spent 1932-34 promoting and barnstorming.
She did a brief stint in vaudeville playing the harmonica and
running on a treadmill and pitched in some major league
spring-training games; she also toured with a billiards
exhibition, a men's and women's basketball team called Babe
Didrikson's All-Americans, and an otherwise all-male, bearded
baseball road team called the House of David. Since golf was one
of the few sports that accommodated women athletes, Didrikson
made up her mind to become a championship player, and between
engagements she spent the spring and summer of 1933 in
California taking lessons from Stan Kertes. Her first tournament
was the Fort Worth Women's Invitational in November 1932; at her
second, the Texas Women's Amateur Championship the following
April, she captured the title. Complaints from more socially
polished members of the Texas Women's Golf Association led the
United States Association to rule her ineligible to compete as
an amateur, thus disqualifying her from virtually all tournament
play. Didrikson resumed the lucrative routine of exhibition
tours and endorsements, impressing audiences with smashing
drives that regularly exceeded 240 yards. She met George
Zaharias, a well-known professional wrestler and sports
promoter, when she qualified at the 1938 Los Angeles Open, a
men's Professional Golfers' Association tournament. They were
married on December 23, 1938, and Zaharias thereafter managed
his wife's career. She regained her amateur standing in 1943 and
went on to win seventeen consecutive tournaments, including the
British Women's Amateur Championship (she was the first American
to win it), before turning professional in 1947. The following
year Didrikson helped found the Ladies Professional Golf
Association in order to provide the handful of professional
women golfers with a tournament circuit. She was herself the
LPGA's leading money winner between 1949 and 1951. In 1950 the
Associated Press voted her Woman Athlete of the Half-Century.
In April 1953 Didrikson
underwent a colostomy to remove cancerous tissue. Despite
medical predictions that she would never be able to play
championship golf again, she was in tournament competition
fourteen weeks after surgery, and the Golf Writers of America
voted her the Ben Hogan Trophy as comeback player of the year.
In 1954 she won five tournaments, including the United States
Women's Open. Portrayed as a courageous survivor in the press,
Didrikson played for cancer fund benefits and maintained her
usual buoyant public persona, but in June 1955 she was forced to
reenter John Sealy Hospitalqv
at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston for
further diagnosis. Medical treatment was unable to contain the
spreading cancer, and Didrikson spent much of the remaining
fifteen months of her life in the hospital. In September 1955
she and her husband established the Babe Didrikson Zaharias
Fund, which financed a tumor clinic at UTMB. She died at John
Sealy Hospital on September 27, 1956, at the age of forty-five,
and was buried in Beaumont. Didrikson's exuberant confidence,
self-congratulatory manner, and cultivation of her celebrity
status irritated some fellow athletes, but she was the most
popular female golfer of her own time and since. She enjoyed
playing to the gallery in her golf matches, and her wisecracks
and exhibitions of virtuosity delighted spectators. She was
voted Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press six times
during her career. Between 1940 and 1950 she won every women's
golf title, including the world championship (four times) and
the United States Women's Open (three times). She established a
national audience for women's golf and was the first woman ever
to serve as a resident professional at a golf club. In 1955, a
year before her death, she established the Babe Zaharias Trophy
to honor outstanding female athletes.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Current Biography,
1947. William Oscar Johnson and Nancy P.
Williamson, "Whatta-Gal": The
Babe Didrikson Story (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1975). New York Times,
September 28, 1956.
Notable American Women: A
Biographical Dictionary (4 vols.,
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971-80).
Babe Didrikson Zaharias, This Life
I've Led (New York: Barnes, 1955).
Susan E. Cayleff
- Handbook of Texas
Online, s.v. ","
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/ZZ/fza1.html
(accessed March 4, 2008).
(NOTE: "s.v." stands for sub verbo, "under the word.")
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