Babe Didrikson Zaharias: Every Sport She Touched
Texas
She grew up in Beaumont, the sixth child of Norwegian immigrants, on a block where her father had built backyard gymnastics equipment so the kids would have something to do. Mildred Didrikson got her nickname during neighborhood baseball games, when the boys who watched her hit decided she batted like Babe Ruth. The comparison was not flattery. It was recognition.
By the time she was a teenager in the late nineteen twenties, Mildred, Babe, Didrikson was the best athlete in any room she entered, and usually the best in a room she had not yet entered. She played AAU basketball for a Dallas employer team, led them to a national championship, and simultaneously entered national track and field meets as a one-woman team.
At the nineteen thirty-two Los Angeles Olympics she entered five events. She won gold in the eighty-meter hurdles and the javelin throw. She won silver in the high jump, though the judges controversially penalized her for her unorthodox diving style, which she had perfected on her own. She was twenty-one years old.
Then she took up golf.
By the time Babe Didrikson married wrestler George Zaharias in nineteen thirty-eight and became Babe Zaharias, she had begun methodically dismantling the records of a sport she had only recently learned. She won ten LPGA major championships. She was a founding member of the Ladies Professional Golf Association in nineteen fifty. She won the United States Women's Open three times. After a cancer diagnosis in nineteen fifty-three, she won the Open again in nineteen fifty-four, by twelve strokes.
She died in Galveston in September of nineteen fifty-six at forty-five and is buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Beaumont. The Babe Didrikson Zaharias Museum on Interstate Ten opened in nineteen seventy-six. The record she left, across track, field, golf, basketball, and baseball, has no real peer in American sports history, and it was built partly here, in this city, on a backyard obstacle course her father built because he believed his children should be able to move.
