DIDRIKSON, MILDRED "BABE" 1911-1956

Track & field star

Greatest Woman Athlete

Most observers generally agree that Babe Didrikson Zaharias was the finest woman athlete of all time, which was exactly what she always wanted to be. There was nothing she could not do short of winning the Kentucky Derby (as one sportswriter said)—and the 1930s were only the beginning of her extraordinary, though tragically short, career. Born in Port Arthur, Texas, she earned the nickname "Babe" because as a schoolgirl she could hit home runs like Babe Ruth. She played on every sports team in high school and became a high-school basketball star. She played for an AAU-sanctioned insurance-company team in Dallas—the Golden Cyclones—and led the team to a national championship in 1931, while reaching the finals in 1930 and 1932 as well. She made all-American three times. Since few sportswriters followed women's sports, not many people knew about Babe at first.

One-Woman Team.

Didrikson competed for her company (she was a clerk-typist) in AAU track-and-field meets in Dallas and Jersey City. Her second-place finish in the 1930 broad jump beat a world record, and the next year she threw a baseball 296 feet. In 1932, at the AAU Nationals/Olympic tryouts in Evanston, Illinois, in about two and a half hours Babe won five events (shot put, javelin, long jump, baseball throw, and 80-meter hurdles, setting a world record in the hurdles and javelin); tied one (the high jump, another world record); and finished fourth in the discus. She won the title for her company single-handedly, scoring eight points higher than her nearest competition, a team of twenty-two women from the University of Illinois. People knew about Babe Didrikson now.

Olympic Hero

At the 1932 Olympics Didrikson won gold medals in the javelin and 80-meter hurdles, again breaking her own world record in both events. She might have won another gold medal in the high jump, but her "western roll" style of diving over the bar was ruled illegal, even though she had been using it all along. Although she broke her own world record of 5 feet, 5 inches, as did Jean Shiley (with whom she also tied at the qualifying matches in Evanston), Didrikson was awarded the silver and Shiley the gold. Babe was named American Woman Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press in 1932, an honor she would win five more times in her career.

Professional

Because her name and picture were used for an automobile advertisement, the AAU suspended Babe in 1932. She turned professional. In the 1930s she played vaudeville, toured with the Babe Didrikson5s All-Americans basketball team, and pitched for the Philadelphia Athletics and the House of David team. The AAU soon reinstated her, to their own benefit, hers, and the public's.

Taking Up Golf

Though she always thought of herself as feminine, Didrikson experienced stereotypical comments due to her masculine physique. Furthermore, women's sports were only just beginning to be taken seriously. Having played all sports, Didrikson knew something about golf and often seriously considered taking up the sport. Sportswriter Grantland Rice always believed that Didrikson ("Grant's girl," she was sometimes called) could become great at golf, a sport in which she could compete with men one-on-one, as she had with Rice and his newspaper pals. She was winning amateur events in 1934 and 1935 but was again disqualified because of her prior professional status. She did a series of exhibitions with Gene Sarazen in 1936, waiting patiently for opportunities for professional women golfers. In the meantime, she married wrestler George Zaharias.

In the 1940s and 1950s she would win countless amateur and professional titles and help to found the Ladies' Professional Golf Association. She died of cancer at the age of forty-four.

Source:

Mildred Babe Zaharias and Harry Paxton, This Life I've Led: My Auto-biography (New York: Barnes, 1955).

DIDRIKSON, MILDRED "BABE" 1911-1956

Olympic medalist, golfer

Babe

As a young girl, Mildred Didrikson was such a powerful home run hitter on the baseball field that her friends nicknamed her "Babe," after Babe Ruth. The name stuck. Didrikson grew up near Port Arthur, Texas, and showed her athletic talent early. A high-school all-American basketball star, Didrikson went on to play in an industrial athletic league, leading her team to two finals and a national championship. She once scored 106 points in a basketball game. Didrikson then turned to track and qualified for the United States team at the 1932 Olympics. Described variously in the press as Whatta-Gal Didrikson, the Texas Tornado, and the Terrific Tomboy, she won gold medals in the javelin, with a world-record throw, and the 80-meter hurdles, in which she set a U.S. outdoor record time. She tied the winner in the high jump but was given a second-place silver medal because of her unconventional style. At the 1932 Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) championships, she entered eight of ten events and won five.

Rounded Athlete

In the 1930s there was no competitive setting in which a woman athlete could earn a living. Didrikson was suspended from the AAU in 1932 for allegedly appearing in a Chrysler Corporation advertisement, and she decided to turn professional. She toured with a mixed-gender basketball team called Babe Didrikson's All Americans and pitched at major league baseball spring-training games in 1934. She earned $1,500 a month and played some four hundred games with a male baseball team called the House of David. She once struck out New York Yankee great Joe DiMaggio. Sportswriter Grantland Rice described her as "the most flawless specimen of muscle harmony, of complete mental and physical coordination the world of sport has ever known"; in his opinion she was the greatest athlete of either sex in the history of American sports.

Golf

Didrikson took up golf in 1932, and in November 1934 she shot seventy-five to qualify in her first tournament, the Fort Worth Women's Invitational. Her first tournament victory was in April 1935, when she won the Texas Women's Amateur Championship, and the United States Golf Association immediately made her a professional, a disappointment because there were only two professional golf tournaments for women at the time. In 1938 she married George Zaharias, a professional wrestler and promoter, who began to manage her career. He arranged for her to sit out of professional play for three years, between 1940 and 1943, to regain her amateur status. During that time she played in professional tournaments but refused cash prizes. Once the tournaments resumed after the war, Zaharias played a full schedule and won a series of fourteen consecutive titles, including the British Women's Amateur Championship, the first ever won by an American, in 1947. Though she was known for her long drives, it was her precise short game that won tournaments for her.

LPGA

Babe Didrikson Zaharias turned professional again in August 1947 and founded the Ladies' Professional Golf Association in January 1948. From 1949 to 1951 she was the top LPGA money winner. In 1953 she won her third United States Women's Open by 13 strokes, her last victory. She died of cancer in 1956. Babe Didrikson Zaharias was named Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press in 1932 for track and in 1944-1946 and 1950 for golf. In 1950 she was named the greatest female athlete of the first half of the twentieth century by the AP.

Source:

Elizabeth A. Lynn, Babe Didrikson Zaharias (New York: Chelsea House, 1989).

Mildred Didrikson Zaharias

Called "the athlete phenomenon of our time, man or woman," Mildred "Babe" Didrikson Zaharias (1913-1956) participated in almost every sport. She excelled as an Olympic athlete and as a golfer.

Mildred Didrikson, known throughout her life as Babe, was born June 26, 1913, at Port Authur, Texas. She always credited her father for her interest in sports. Babe first came to national attention when the Dallas-based basketball team for which she played forward won the national AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) championship. Her outstanding play earned her an All-American award in 1929. In 1932 she entered the tryouts for the Olympic games at the national AAU's women's track and field championship. Of the eight events that she entered, she won five—shot put, baseball throw, long jump, javelin, and 80-meter hurdles. In a single afternoon she set four world records, scoring an incredible 30 points. The second place finisher, with only 22 points, was an entire women's athletic club.

Later that year she competed in the Olympic games held at Los Angeles. She won gold medals in two events— hurdles and javelin—and set world records in both. For her performance the Associated Press (AP) named Babe the Woman Athlete of the Year. She would win that award five more times. Later, in 1950, she was named AP's Woman Athlete of the First Half of the Twentieth Century.

Meanwhile, Babe took up other sports—football, boxing, baseball. She played for the touring baseball team of the House of David and pitched an inning for the then Brooklyn Dodgers and in an exhibition game for the St. Louis Cardinals. She even managed to strike out the equally famous Joe DiMaggio. It was for such all-around skills that sports writer Grantland Rice called her "the athlete phenomenon of our time."

After the 1932 Olympics Babe turned to golf and in 1934 won her first tournament. Due to a technicality, she was declared ineligible to compete as an amateur and as a result played as a professional until she was reinstated as an amateur in 1944. In 1938 Babe married former professional wrestler George Zaharias, who became her biggest supporter. She won 17 straight amateur tournaments, and in 1947 she became the first American to win the prestigious British Women's Amateur Championship.

She then gave up her amateur standing and, with Patty Berg, founded the Ladies Professional Golf Association. She won the Women's Open in 1948 and 1950 and the Tampa Open in 1951. In 1953 she contracted cancer, but after an operation she returned to win the Women's Open in 1954 and received yet another AP Woman Athlete of the Year Award. The cancer, however, proved to be terminal, and Babe died on September 27, 1956. She was 43.

Further Reading

To relive the excitement that Babe Didrickson Zaharias created, a reading of contemporary newspaper accounts, particularly those of Grantland Rice, are a must. The definitive biography is William O. Johnson's Whatta-gal: The Babe Didrikson Story (1977). Younger readers might enjoy Gene Schoor's Babe Didrikson, the World's Greatest Athlete (1978). □

Zaharias, Mildred Didrikson (“Babe”) (1911–1956), athlete.Considered the most versatile female athlete of the twentieth century, she began her sports career as an industrial‐league basketball player in her hometown, Beaumont, Texas, leading her team to national championships. In the 1932 track and field Olympic trials, she won six gold medals and set four world records in one afternoon. At the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, she set world records in the javelin and 80‐meter hurdles (winning two gold medals) and she gained a silver medal in the high jump. At baseball she once hit seven home runs in seven times at bat, pitched exhibition innings with major league teams, and was nicknamed “the Babe” (after Babe Ruth). She won tennis and bowling tournaments and toured the United States giving billiards exhibitions and in 1938 married the wrestler George Zaharias. Her greatest fame came in the sport of golf where she revolutionized the game, won a record eighty‐two tournaments, and helped create the Ladies Professional Golfers' Association. The Associated Press named her “Female Athlete of the Year” six times and “Best Female Athlete of the First Half Century” in 1951. She received numerous other honors and awards and appeared on a commemorative U.S. stamp in 1981.

Zaharias defied convention, and manipulated the media image to enhance her celebrity. Crude, crass, and controversial, she created a persona that both captivated the public and perpetuated the stereotype of female athletes as “unnatural” in a period when delicacy and femininity were revered. A sports legend and role model, “the Babe” symbolized pure athleticism, and she lived for competition. She died at forty‐five of cancer.
See also Gender; Popular Culture; Sports: Amateur Sports and Recreation; Sports: Professional Sports.

Bibliography

Betty Hicks , The Legendary Babe Didrikson Zaharias in Women in Sport: Issues and Controversies, ed. Greta L. Cohen, 1993, pp. 38–48.
Susan E. Cayleff , Babe: The Life and Legend of Babe Didrikson Zaharias, 1995.

Greta Laquia Cohen

Babe Didrikson (Mildred Didrikson) , 1913–56, American athlete, generally considered the greatest woman athlete of modern times, b. Port Arthur, Tex. At an early age Babe Didrikson excelled in basketball, baseball, and track. In 1932 she won five events, tied for first in another, and finished fourth in still another event in the National AAU track and field championships. Two weeks later she won two events in the Olympic games in Los Angeles with record performances and was disqualified in a third while tied for first. From 1934 on she devoted herself to golf. In 1938 she married George Zaharias, a wrestler. She gained wide notice as Babe Didrikson Zaharias. She won the U.S. Golf Association amateur competition (1946) and 15 tournaments in 1946–47. She was the first American woman to win the British amateur title (1947), and after turning professional in 1947 she won 33 tournaments (including the U.S. Open in 1948, 1950, and 1954) before succumbing to cancer. She wrote Championship Golf (1948).