Babe Didrikson Zaharias

American athlete

• Born: June 26, 1911
• Birthplace: Port Arthur, Texas
• Died: September 27, 1956
• Place of death: Galveston, Texas

Participating in numerous sports in which she excelled and set several records, Zaharias is recognized as the greatest woman athlete of the first half of the twentieth century.

Early Life

Babe Didrikson Zaharias (bayb DEE-drihk-sehn zeh-HAR-ee-ehs) was born Mildred Ella Didriksen in Port Arthur, Texas. Her mother, née Hannah Olson, was born in Norway and immigrated to the United States in 1908; her father, Ole Didriksen, also born in Norway, came to Port Arthur in 1905 and worked as a sailor and carpenter. Throughout her adult life she was known as Babe Didrikson Zaharias, taking the name Babe from the sports hero Babe Ruth and the spelling of her surname, Didrikson, to emphasize that she was of Norwegian rather than Swedish ancestry.

After the 1915 hurricane that devastated Port Arthur, the family, which included Zaharias’s sister and two brothers, moved to nearby Beaumont. Growing up in the rugged south end of the city, Zaharias was a tomboy who shunned feminine qualities and excelled at a variety of athletic endeavors. She was slim and of average height but had a muscular body and was exceptionally well coordinated. Her hair was cut short and she usually wore masculine clothing. As a youth, she had a belligerent personality and was constantly involved in fights and scrapes.

At Beaumont High School, Zaharias was outstanding at a number of sports, including volleyball, tennis, baseball, basketball, and swimming, but she was not popular with her classmates. She was a poor student, usually passing only enough courses to remain eligible for athletic competition. All of her energy was directed toward accomplishment on the athletic field, where she had no equal. Her best sport was basketball, which was the most popular women’s sport of the era. During her years with Beaumont, her high school team never lost a game largely because of her aggressive, coordinated play.

Life’s Work

In February, 1930, Colonel Melvin J. McCombs of the Casualty Insurance Company recruited Zaharias to play for the company’s Golden Cyclone basketball team in Dallas. She dropped out of high school in her junior year and took a job as a stenographer with the company with the understanding that she would have time to train and compete in athletics. During the next three years, 1930-1932, she was selected as an All-American women’s basketball player and led the Golden Cyclones to the national championship in 1931. She often scored thirty or more points in an era when a team score of twenty for a game was considered respectable. While in Dallas, she competed in other athletic events, including softball. She was an excellent pitcher and batted over .400 in the Dallas city league. Increasingly, however, her interest was drawn to track and field and she became a member of the Golden Cyclone track team in 1930. Profiting from coaching provided by the Dallas insurance company and relying on her innate athletic ability, she soon became the premier women’s track-and-field performer in the nation.

Between 1930 and 1932, Zaharias held American, Olympic, or world records in five different track-and-field events. She stunned the athletic world on July 16, 1932, with her performance at the national amateur track meet for women in Evanston, Illinois. She entered the meet as the sole member of the Golden Cyclone team and by herself won the national women’s team championship by scoring thirty points. The Illinois Women’s Athletic Club, which had more than twenty members, scored a total of twenty-two points to place second. In all, Zaharias won six gold medals and broke four world records in a single afternoon. Her performance was the most amazing feat by any individual, male or female, in the annals of track-and-field history. The outstanding performance at Evanston put her in the headlines of every sports page in the nation and made her one of the most prominent members of the United States Olympic team of 1932.

Although Zaharias had gained wide recognition in her chosen field of athletics, many of her fellow athletes resented her. They complained that she was an aggressive, overbearing braggart who would stop at nothing to win. During the trip to Los Angeles for the Olympic Games, many of her teammates came to detest her, but her performance during the Olympiad made her a favorite among sportswriters and with the public. At Los Angeles, she won two gold medals and a silver medal, set a world’s record, and was the coholder of two others. She won the javelin event and the eighty-meter hurdles and came in second in the high-jump event amid a controversy that saw two rulings of the judges go against her. She came very close to winning three Olympic gold medals, which had never been accomplished before by a woman. She became the darling of the press, and her performance in Los Angeles created a springboard for her lasting fame as an athlete.

After the 1932 Olympic Games, Zaharias returned to Dallas for a hero’s welcome. At the end of 1932, she was voted Woman Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press, an award that she won five additional times, in 1945, 1946, 1947, 1950, and 1954. After a controversy with the Amateur Athletic Union concerning her amateur status, she turned professional in late 1932. She did some promotional advertising and briefly appeared in a vaudeville act in Chicago, where she performed athletic feats and played her harmonica, a talent she had developed as a youth. Struggling to make a living as a professional athlete, she played in an exhibition basketball game in Brooklyn, participated in a series of billiard matches, and talked about becoming a long-distance swimmer. In 1933, she decided to barnstorm the rural areas of the country with a professional basketball team called Babe Didrikson’s All-Americans. The tour was very successful for several years, as the team traveled the backroads of America playing against local men’s teams. In 1934, she went to Florida and appeared in major-league exhibition baseball games during spring training and then played on the famous House of David all the men on the team sported long beards baseball team on a nationwide tour. As a result of her many activities, she was able to earn several thousand dollars each month, a princely sum during the depths of the Depression.

During the mid-1930’s, Zaharias’s athletic interests increasingly shifted to golf. Receiving encouragement from sportswriter Grantland Rice, she began intensive lessons in 1933, often hitting balls until her hands bled. She played in her first tournament in Texas in 1934 and a year later won the Texas Women’s Amateur Championship. That same year, she was bitterly disappointed when the United States Golf Association (USGA) declared her a professional and banned her from amateur golf. Unable to make a living from the few tournaments open to professionals, she toured the country with professional golfer Gene Sarazen, participating mainly in exhibition matches.

On December 23, 1938, Zaharias married George Zaharias, a professional wrestler; they had no children. Her marriage helped put to rest rumors that she was a man and other attacks on her femininity. Her husband became her manager, and under his direction she won the 1940 Texas and Western Open golf tournaments. During World War II, Zaharias gave golf exhibitions to raise money for war bonds and agreed to abstain from professional athletics for three years to regain her amateur status. In 1943, the USGA restored her amateur standing.

After the war, Zaharias emerged as one of the most successful and popular women golfers in history. In 1945, she played flawless golf on the amateur tour and was named Woman Athlete of the Year for the second time. The following year, she began a string of consecutive tournament victories, a record that has never been equaled by any man or woman. During the 1946-1947 seasons, Zaharias won seventeen straight tournaments, including the British Women’s Amateur. She became the first American to win the prestigious British championship. In the summer of 1947, Zaharias turned professional once again, with Fred Corcoran as her manager. She earned an estimated $100,000 in 1948 through various promotions and exhibitions but only $3,400 in prize money on the professional tour, despite a successful season. In 1948, Corcoran organized the Ladies Professional Golfer’s Association (LPGA) to help popularize women’s golf and increase tournament prize money. During the next several years, the LPGA grew in stature, and Zaharias became the leading money winner on the women’s professional circuit.

In the spring of 1953, doctors discovered that Zaharias had cancer, and she underwent radical surgery in April. Although many feared that her athletic career was over, she played in a golf tournament only fourteen weeks after the surgery. She played well enough the remainder of the year to win the Ben Hogan Comeback of the Year Award. In 1954, she won five tournaments, including the United States Women’s Open, and earned her sixth Woman Athlete of the Year Award. During 1955, doctors diagnosed that the cancer had returned, and she suffered excruciating pain during her final illness. Despite the pain, Zaharias continued to play an occasional round of golf and through her courage served as an inspiration for many Americans. She died in Galveston, Texas, on September 27, 1956.

Significance

Zaharias was a remarkable woman in many respects. Her place in American sports history is secure in her athletic accomplishments alone: In addition to her six Woman Athlete of the Year Awards, she was named the Woman Athlete of the Half Century by the Associated Press in 1950. No other woman has performed in so many different sports so well. She is arguably one of the greatest athletes, female or male, of all time.

Beyond this, however, Zaharias was a pioneer who struggled to break down social customs that barred women from various segments of American life. During an era when society dictated that women conform to a particular stereotype, Zaharias persisted in challenging the public’s view of women’s place in society. She not only insisted on pursuing a career in sports but also participated in sports considered in the male domain. In her dress, speech, and manner, Zaharias refused to conform to the ladylike image expected of female athletes. She did it successfully because she was such an outstanding athlete. It nevertheless took courage, because she was subjected to the most insidious rumors and innuendos concerning her gender and femininity, attacks that she endured without outward complaint.

During her final illness, Zaharias displayed the kind of strength and courage that was a trademark of her career. She was a great athlete, but beyond that she was a courageous pioneer blazing a trail in women’s sports that others have followed.

Bibliography

Gallico, Paul. The Golden People. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965. A moving tribute to Zaharias is part of this anthology by a sportswriter who covered her career.

Hutchison, Kay Bailey. American Heroines: The Spirited Women Who Shaped Our Country. New York: William Morrow, 2004. Hutchison, a U.S. senator, provides profiles of women who made history, including Zaharias.

Johnson, William O., and Nancy P. Williamson. Whatta-Gal: The Babe Didrikson Story. Boston: Little, Brown, 1975. This popular biography offers the fullest account of Zaharias’s life but tends to be uncritical.

Miller, Helen Markley. Babe Didrikson Zaharias: Striving to Be Champion. Chicago: Britannica Books, 1961. A juvenile book aimed at high school students; glorifies Zaharias’s life.

Rader, Benjamin G. American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games to the Age of Spectators. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1983. Gives an overview of American sports history, in the context of which Zaharias’s career can be best understood. Rader attempts an assessment of her place in history.

Schoor, Gene. Babe Didrikson: The World’s Greatest Woman Athlete. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978. Strictly a popular account that adds a few details and stories omitted by Johnson and Williamson.

Warren, Patricia Nell. The Lavender Locker Room: Three Thousand Years of Athletes Whose Sexual Orientation Was Different. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Wildcat Press, 2000. This book about lesbian and gay athletes includes the chapter “Babe Didrikson Zaharias: Golfing Amazon of the Newsreels.”

Wimmer, Dick, ed. The Women’s Game: Great Champions in Women’s Sports. Short Hills, N.J.: Burford Books, 2000. A compilation of magazine articles, interviews, and book excerpts about great women athletes, including a chapter about Zaharias.

Zaharias, Babe Didrikson, with Harry Paxton. This Life I’ve Led: My Autobiography. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1955. Avoids the rough spots in Zaharias’s life but is good on her family and personality. Useful when read in conjunction with other sources.