Babe Didrikson

Babe Didrikson
BORN 06.26.1911
PORT ARTHUR, TEXAS
DIED 09.27.1956
GALVESTON, TEXAS
CAREER ATHLETE
Babe Didrikson Zaharias
Babe Didrikson
Book 7
1911-1956
Page 3
THE BASICS
BABE DIDRIKSON WAS AN ALL- AMERICAN
BASKETBALL PLAYER, AN OLYMPIC GOLD MEDALIST
IN TRACK AND FIELD, AND A CHAMPIONSHIP
GOLFER WHO WON EIGHTY-TWO AMATEUR AND
PROFESSIONAL TOURNAMENTS. ALONG THE WAY,
SHE MASTERED TENNIS, PLAYED ORGANIZED
BASEBALL, AND WAS AN OUTSTANDING
DIVER, ROLLER SKATER, AND BOWLER. SHE IS
RECOGNIZED AS THE GREATEST WOMAN ATHLETE
OF THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.
A young Babe Didrikson.
Babe Didrikson
1911-1956
EARLY LIFE
H
Amelia with her family.
er given name was Mildred Ella, but except for a few schoolteachers, hardly anyone addressed
her as Mildred. Her family and friends, and later the world, knew her by her nickname, “Babe.”
As an infant, the sixth of seven children of Norwegian immigrants, she was called “Baby.” After
her younger brother arrived, she became “Babe,” a name adopted by the neighborhood boys
when she began to hit home runs in sandlot baseball games. “Babe Ruth was a big [baseball]
hero then,” she recalled, “and the kids said,
“SHE’S A REGULAR BABE RUTH. WE’LL CALL HER BABE.”
Raymond Alford met Babe at one of those Saturday sandlot games in Beaumont, Texas. He
became one of her best friends. “All the boys in the neighborhood would come and Babe
was always there,” he remembered years later. “Let me tell you, she was the only girl but she
was among the first to be chosen. She was not just hanging around to the last, no sir . . . .
Ordinarily we didn’t have anything to do with girls then. Babe was different. Once you saw her
play, you didn’t mind having her around.”
Babe could never pass up a ball game. One day, her mother sent her to the grocery store to
buy some hamburger for supper and told her to hurry. She ran all the way, bought the meat,
and headed home. On the way back, she saw some kids playing baseball in the school yard.
“I stopped to watch for a minute, and the next thing I knew I was in there playing myself,”
she wrote. “I laid the package of meat down on the ground. I was only going to play for a
couple of minutes, but they stretched into an hour.” Finally she spotted her mother marching
Book 7
Page 5
Babe Didrikson with her classmates.
Babe Didrikson
1911-1956
EARLY LIFE
down the street, searching for her. “I got the
meat, Momma,” she yelled, moving out of the
playground fast. “It’s right here.” She pointed
to the spot where she had left the package. A
big dog was standing there, lapping up the
last of that hamburger. “Poor Momma! She
couldn’t quite catch me,” Babe recalled, “so
she picked up an old piece of rope that was
lying on the ground and swung it at me. She
whipped me all the way home with that rope.
I was running as fast as I could to stay ahead
of her, but she could run fast too.”
Babe’s father, Ole, liked to boast that his
daughter had inherited her athletic ability from
him. But Babe gave the credit to her mother,
Hannah, who had been a champion skier
and ice skater in her native Norway. Hannah
and Ole had married in Oslo, Norway. Ole
Didriksen was a seafaring man, a ship’s
carpenter who had sailed around Cape
Horn seventeen times. One of his voyages
took him to Port Arthur, Texas, on the Gulf of
Mexico, in the heart of America’s booming
oil-drilling industry. Port Arthur offered plenty
of opportunities for an energetic young man,
and when Ole sailed back to Norway, he
told Hannah that the Gulf Coast would be
a good place to settle down. In 1905, he
returned to Port Arthur by himself and worked
as a carpenter for three years before he saved
enough money to bring his wife and three
small children to America. Hannah arrived in
1908 with the children-Ole, Jr.; Dora; and
Esther Nancy. Four more children were born in
Port Arthur: the twins Lillie and Louis in 1909;
Mildred Ella, the future “Babe,” on June 26,
1911; and Arthur, or “Bubba,” in 1915.
To accommodate his large family, Ole
Didriksen built a house in Port Arthur that
resembled a ship. But they didn’t live there
for long. Shortly after Bubba was born in the
summer of 1915, a savage hurricane struck
Babe with her brother and sister.
the Gulf Coast, uprooting trees and toppling
church spires. Huge tidal waves surged
through the streets of Port Arthur, flooding
the Didriksens’ sturdy, shipshape house.
Rather than rebuild, Ole decided to move
his family seventeen miles up the road to
the thriving oil-refining center and shipping
port of Beaumont. Babe had just turned four
when Beaumont became their new home.
Ole bought a two-bedroom house at 850
Doucette Street in a gritty working-class
neighborhood called the South End. The
house wasn’t nearly big enough for a family
of seven kids, and as the years passed,
Ole kept adding on to it until it became the
biggest house on the block. Doucette was a
busy street with a trolley line running down
the center. At one end of Doucette stood the
sprawling Magnolia Oil Refinery, spouting
steam and smelly gases from its many pipes
and chimneys. At the other end of the long
street were railroad tracks, over which oil-filled
While Babe was
growing up, her
family name was
entered incorrectly in
her elementary school
records. Instead of
“Didriksen,” it was
spelled “Didrikson.”
She never corrected
the error and
later adopted the
changed spelling.
Family members felt
that she “liked the
mistake,” that “it was
just another trait of
Babe to be or do
something that was
different.”
Book 7
Page 7
Babe Didrikson
1911-1956
EARLY LIFE
tanker cars constantly rolled north. Babe grew
up with a crowd of barefoot neighborhood
kids who made Beaumont’s South End their
rough-and-tumble playground. They hitched
rides on the backs of trolley cars and played
baseball with mitts they got free by sending
in Octagon laundry-soap wrappers. And they
swam in the Neches River, braving its water
moccasins and treacherous currents. A short,
wiry girl, Babe quickly became known as the
local tomboy. She was a daredevil, always
challenging the other kids to follow her on
some reckless exploit. She would hang out
at the railroad tracks with her sister Lillie, her
closest childhood companion. They would
hop on a moving freight car, wait until it was
moving “faster ‘n’ faster ‘n’ faster,” as Lillie
recalled, and then jump off. “Sometimes we
got skinned up,” said Lillie, “but we never
got hurt no worse than that.” A favorite
Halloween stunt among the neighborhood
kids was to rub soap on the Doucette Street
trolley tracks, so the streetcar would slide and
the motorman would have to slow down or
stop. Then the ringleader Babe, more often
than not-would jump onto the back of the car
and pull the trolley pole down off its wire,
so the motorman would have to get out and
replace it. Once Babe tripped and fell while
she was running alongside the streetcar. She
was nearly crushed under the car’s wheels.
Growing up, she almost seemed to court
trouble. At Magnolia Elementary School,
her antics often sent her to the office of the
principal, Effie Piland. “One day I heard
the kids outside yelling for me,” Mrs. Piland
recalled. “I went outside and there was
Mildred, sitting on top of the flagpole. She
had climbed to the top and I told her to come
down.” According to her brother Ole, Jr.,
Babe’s stunts earned her a second nickname:
“The Worst Kid on Doucette.” Whenever a
BEFORE I WAS IN MY TEENS,
I KNEW EXACTLY
WHAT I WANTED TO BE:
I WANTED TO BE
THE BEST ATHLETE
A very young Babe Didrikson.
window was broken by a baseball, she was
the one who got the blame. “She was just
too active to settle down,” Ole remembered.
“She always wanted to be running, jumping,
or throwing something.” Everyone who knew
Babe recognized her passion for sports and
her fierce determination to win any game she
played. She could run faster, throw a ball
farther, and hit more home runs than anyone
her age, and she took pride in beating the
boys at their own game. “She was the best at
everything we did,” said Lillie. Babe and Lillie
would often race each other down the block,
except that Lillie sprinted along the sidewalk
while Babe hurdled the hedges that separated
the front yards along their street. There were
seven hedges between the Didriksen house
and the corner, but one was higher than the
others, and Babe couldn’t get over it. She
went to the people who lived in that house
and asked if they would mind cutting their
hedge down to the right size. They agreed.
WHO EVER LIVED.
“I’d go flying over those hedges, and Lillie
would race alongside me on the pavement,”
Babe wrote. “She was a fast runner, and
had an advantage anyway, because I had
to do all that jumping. I worked and worked,
and finally got to where I could almost catch
her, and sometimes beat her.” Like most of
their South End neighbors, Babe’s parents
had to work hard to feed and clothe their
family. “There were times when things were
plenty tough,” Babe recalled. “The toughest
period ... came when I was still a little kid.
For several years there Poppa couldn’t get
work regularly. He had to go back to sea
now and again when he couldn’t find any
jobs in Beaumont. And Momma took in
washing.” The children had to help out, and
all of them found after-school jobs just as
soon as they were old enough. Babe mowed
the neighbors’ lawns and ran errands for the
grocery store down the block. When she was
in the seventh grade, she took a part-time job
Book 7
Page 9
I AM OUT TO BEAT
EVERYBODY IN SIGHT,
AND THAT IS
JUST
WHAT I'M GOING TO DO.
Babe Didrikson
1911-1956
EARLY LIFE
at a fig-packing plant. She had to peel the
bad spots off the figs as they came her way,
wash the figs in an acid solution, then toss
them back into the trough. Later she worked
at a potato-gunnysack factory, sewing up
burlap bags for a penny apiece. She was
fast, sewing a sack a minute, and was able
to make very good money for a schoolgirl.
“I’d keep a nickel or a dime for myself out of
what I made,” she wrote, “and put the rest
in Momma’s sugar bowl.” With such a large
family, there were plenty of chores to be done
at home, too. A big enclosed porch was
wrapped around two sides of the house. It
had sixteen windows that had to be washed
and a floor that needed scrubbing. That was
Babe’s job. Her mother insisted that there was
only one way to scrub a floor-on your hands
and knees. But Babe had her own secret
method. When her mother wasn’t watching,
she’d tie the scrub brushes to her feet and
“skate” the floor clean, “whistlin’ around
like some ballet dancer on ice skates,” Lillie
recalled. While times were often hard, the
Didriksens had “a wonderful family life,” as
Babe remembered. There was always music
in the house. Two of Babe’s sisters played
the piano, while her other sister played the
violin. Her father played the violin, too. Her
brothers played the drums. Her mother sang.
And Babe played a thirty-five-cent harmonica
she had bought with money she saved by
mowing lawns. “We had a family orchestra
going there on the front porch at night after
dinner,” she wrote. “Other kids would gather
around in our front yard. And you could see
the lights going off in houses all up and down
the block as people got through with their
dishes, and came out on their own porches to
listen.” Babe’s father was a talented storyteller.
He loved to spin fabulous yams about his days
at sea, holding his children spellbound with
tales about storms and shipwrecks and desert
islands. “What a bang we used to get out of
Book 7
Page 11
Babe posing for an action
shot with playing basketball
with her friend.
Babe Didrikson
1911-1956
his stories,” Babe remembered. “We’d huddle
around him and listen like mad. I’m not sure to
this day whether he was kidding some of the
time or not. ... It could all be true. Things like
that happened to those old seafarers.”
EARLY LIFE
True or not, Babe learned the art of storytelling
at her father’s knee, and when she became
a famous athlete, she did not hesitate to
embellish her own accomplishments in order
to impress her listeners. Ole Didriksen set up
a gymnasium for his children under a big
tree in the back yard. He made a weight
lifting device out of an old broomstick with
a flatiron at each end. And he put up bars
for jumping and chinning, and a trapeze for
acrobatic stunts. Babe and Lillie pretended
that they were in the circus. A neighbor who
lived across the street, whom they called Aunt
Minnie, had been a real circus performer.
She would come over and show the girls how
she could hang by her teeth and spin around.
“When the circus came to town Aunt Minnie
would take the whole bunch of us and show
us everything,” Babe recalled. “Then we’d
come back home and try to do the acrobatics
ourselves. Anything athletic I always seemed
to enjoy.”
Looking back years later, Babe admitted
that she had not been an easy child to
raise. “Poor Momma!” She exclaimed in her
autobiography. Once, Hannah made Babe
a beautiful new dress. The first time Babe
wore that dress to school, she ripped it at
the playground and came home with it torn
and dirty. When Hannah saw the damage,
she really blew up. She went after Babe,
forgetting that she had sprained her ankle
getting off the streetcar a couple of days
earlier. When Babe saw her mother hobbling
toward her on that swollen ankle, trying to
grab her, she said, “Momma, don’t run. I’ll
wait for you.”
Babe during a basketball game.
Book 7
Page 13
Babe practicing track and field.
Babe Didrikson
1911-1956
CAREER
I
n February, 1930, Colonel Melvorne J. McCombs of the Casualty Insurance Company recruited
Didrikson 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, Didrikson 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. Didrikson 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, Didrikson soon became the premier women's track and field performer in
the nation.
Between 1930 and 1932, Didrikson 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. Didrikson 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 that
twenty members, scored a total of twenty-two points to place second. In all, Didrikson 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.
Book 7
Page 15
“IS THERE ANYTHING
“
YOU DON’T PLAY?
A REPORTER ONCE ASKED.
Babe Didrikson
1911-1956
CAREER
“YEAH,DOLLS.“
BABE REPLIED.
Book 7
Page 17
THE MORE YOU
PRACTICE,
Babe Didrikson
1911-1956
THE BETTER.
The outstanding performance at Evanston
put Didrikson 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.
CAREER
Although Didrikson 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 in order 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, Didrikson won
two gold medals and a silver medal, set a
world's record, and was the co-holder 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 which
Book 7
BUT IN ANY CASE,
PRACTICE
MORE
THAN YOU PLAY.
Left:
Babe playing golf with her
future husband.
Right:
Babe and her husband at
their informal wedding.
saw two rulings of the judges go against
her. Didrikson 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 Didrikson's lasting fame as an
athlete.
After the 1932 Olympic Games, Didrikson
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 which she won five additional
times, in 1945, 1946, 1947, 1950, and
1954. After a controversy with the Amateur
Athletic Union concerning her amateur status,
Didrikson 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, Didrikson
played in an exhibition basketball game in
Brooklyn, participated in a series of billiard
matches, and talked about becoming a longdistance 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 back roads of America
playing against local men's teams. In 1934,
Didrikson 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, Didrikson was able to earn several
thousand dollars each month, a princely
sum during the depths of the Depression
During the mid-1930's, Didrikson's athletic
Page 19
Babe Didrikson
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,
Didrikson 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, Didrikson toured the country
with professional golfer Gene Sarazen,
participating mainly in exhibition matches.
1911-1956
CAREER
Babe signing autographs.
On December 23, 1938, Didrikson married
George Zaharias, a professional wrestler;
they had no children. Her marriage helped
put to rest rumors that she was in fact a male
and other attacks on her femininity. Zaharias
became her manager and under his direction
she won the 1940 Texas and Western Open
golf tournaments. During World War II, Babe
Zaharias gave golf exhibitions to raise money
for war bonds and agreed to abstain from
professional athletics for three years in order to
regain her amateur status. In 1943, the USGA
restored her amateur standing.
After the war, Babe 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 which has never been equaled by 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
Book 7
Page 21
Babe Didrikson
1911-1956
DEATH
Babe winning by a nose.
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) in
order 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, 1953. Although
many feared that her athletic career was over,
Zaharias 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.
IIn 1954, Zaharias 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
on September 27, 1956. Babe Didrikson
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 the greatest woman
athlete of all time. Beyond this, however,
Zaharias was a pioneer who struggled to
break down social customs which barred
women from various segments of American
Babe Didrikson with Babe Ruth.
life. During an era when society dictated that
women conform to a particular stereotype,
Zaharias persisted in challenging the public's
view of woman'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 sex and femininity, attacks
which she suffered without complaint.
During her final illness, Zaharias displayed
the kind of strength and courage which
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 which others have followed.
Book 7
Page 23
Babe Didrikson
Book 7
1911-1956
Page 27
DEATH
Babe during a match.
WOMEN BREAKING BARRIERS