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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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