Mildred Ella “Babe” Didrikson Zaharias is widely regarded as one of the greatest female athletes of all time and certainly the best female athlete of the first half of the 20th Century. She was an American athlete who excelled in athletics, golf, basketball and baseball. Didrikson is the only track and field athlete, male or female, to win individual Olympic medals in separate running, throwing and jumping events in the history of Olympic Games.
She won gold medals in 80m hurdles and javelin throw and secured a silver medal in high jump at the 1932 Summer Olympics, before turning to professional golf and winning 10 LPGA major championships. Didrikson also spent time with the House of David barnstorming team and is still recognized as the world record holder for the farthest baseball throw by a woman.
Babe Zaharias would become one of the most famous sportspeople in the United States in the 1940’s and a quite a celebrity. A colon cancer ended her life when she was only 45 years old but her legacy has lived on.
Birth, gifts and talents
Mildred Ella Didrikson was born on June 26, 1911, the sixth of seven children, in the coastal city of Port Arthur, Texas. Her mother, Hannah, and her father, Ole Didriksen, were immigrants from Norway. Although her three eldest siblings were born in Norway, Babe and her three younger siblings were born in Port Arthur.
She moved with her family to Texas, at the age of 4. She claimed to have acquired the nickname “Babe” on being compared to Babe Ruth upon hitting five home runs in a childhood baseball game, but her Norwegian mother had called her “Bebe” from the time she was a toddler. She changed the spelling of her surname from Didriksen to Didrikson.
Though best known for her athletic gifts, Didrikson had many talents. An excellent seamstress, she made many of her clothes, including her golfing outfits. She claimed to have won the sewing championship at the 1931 State Fair of Texas in Dallas; she did win the South Texas State Fair in Beaumont, embellishing the story many years later in 1953.
She attended Beaumont High School. Never a strong student, she was forced to repeat the eighth grade and was a year older than her classmates. She eventually dropped out without graduating after she moved to Dallas to play basketball. She was a singer and a harmonica player and recorded several songs on the Mercury Records label.
Her biggest seller was “I Felt a Little Teardrop” with “Detour” on the flip side. Already famous as Babe Didrikson, she married George Zaharias (1908–1984), a professional wrestler, in St. Louis, Missouri, on December 23, 1938. Thereafter, she was largely known as Babe Didrikson Zaharias or Babe Zaharias.
George Zaharias, a Greek American, was a native of Pueblo, Colorado. He did some part-time acting, appearing in the 1952 movie Pat and Mike. They had no children and they were rebuffed by authorities when they sought to adopt.
Didrikson gained All-American status in basketball. She played organized baseball and softball and was an expert diver, roller-skater, and bowler. Didrikson’s first job after high school was as a secretary for the Employers’ Casualty Insurance Company of Dallas, only in order to play basketball as an amateur on the company’s “industrial team,” the Golden Cyclones.
Representing her company in the 1932 AAU Championships, she competed in eight out of ten events, winning five outright, and tying for first in a sixth. Didrikson’s performances were enough to win the team championship, despite her being the sole member of her team.
1932 Olympic Games
Didrikson set three world records and one Olympic record, winning two gold medals and one silver medal for track and field in the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics. In the 80-meter hurdles, she equaled the world record of 11.8 sec in her opening heat on August 3, 1932. In the final, on August 4, 1932, she broke her record clocking 11.7, to take the gold.
In the javelin, she also won gold with an Olympic record of 43.69 meters. In the high jump, she took silver with a world record-tying leap of 1.65 metres on August 7, 1932. Fellow American Jean Shiley also jumped 1.65 metres, and the pair tied in a jump-off when the bar was raised to 1.67 metres. Shiley was awarded the gold after Didrikson was ruled to have used an improper technique.
In the following years, she performed on the Vaudeville circuit, traveled with teams like Babe Didrikson’s All-Americans basketball team and the bearded House of David team. Didrikson was also a competitive pocket billiards player. She was noted in the January 1933 press for playing a multi-day straight pool match in New York City against famed female cueist Ruth McGinnis.
Golf and baseball career
By 1935, Didrikson began to play golf, a latecomer to the sport in which she became best known. Shortly thereafter, she was denied amateur status, and so, in January 1938, she competed in the Los Angeles Open, a PGA (Professional Golfers’ Association) tournament. She shot 81 and 84, and missed the cut. In the tournament, she was teamed with George Zaharias. They were married eleven months later, and settled in Tampa, Florida, on the premises of a golf course that they purchased in 1951.
Didrikson became America’s first female golf celebrity and the leading player of the 1940s and early 1950s. In order to regain amateur status in the sport, she could compete in no other sports for three years. She gained back her amateur status in 1942. In 1945, she had participated in three more PGA Tour events, missing the second cut of the first but making the cut of the other two. Zaharias won the 1946 U.S. Women’s Amateur and the 1947 British Ladies Amateur – the first American to do so and three Women’s Western Opens.
Having formally turned professional in 1947, Didrikson dominated the Women’s Professional Golf Association and later the Ladies Professional Golf Association. She was a founding member of the Ladies Professional Golf Association, in 1950. Serious illness ended her career in the mid-1950s.
Zaharias won a tournament named after her, the Babe Zaharias Open of her hometown of Beaumont, Texas. She won the 1947 Titleholders Championship and the 1948 U.S. Women’s Open for her fourth and fifth major championships. She won 17 straight women’s amateur victories; a feat never equaled by anyone. By 1950, she had won every golf title available. Zaharias won a total of 82 golf tournaments in both amateur and professional.
While Zaharias missed the cut in the 1938 PGA Tour event, later, as she became more experienced, she made the cut in every PGA Tour event she entered. In 1945, Zaharias played in three PGA tournaments. She shot 76–76 to qualify for the Los Angeles Open. She then shot 76–81 to make the two-day cut in the tournament itself, but missed the three-day cut after a 79, making her the first (and currently only) woman in history to make the cut in a regular PGA Tour event.
She continued her cut streak at the Phoenix Open, where she shot 77-72-75-80. At the Tucson Open, she qualified by shooting 74-81 and then shot a 307 in the tournament. Unlike other female golfers competing in men’s events, she got into the Los Angeles and Tucson Opens through 36-hole qualifiers, as opposed to a sponsor’s exemption.
In 1934, Didrikson pitched a total of four innings in three Major League spring training exhibition games. On March 20, she gave up one walk and no hits in one inning for the Philadelphia Athletics against the Brooklyn Dodgers. On March 22, she pitched the first inning for the St. Louis Cardinals against the Boston Red Sox. On March 25, she played for the New Orleans Pelicans against the Cleveland Indians, pitching two scoreless innings and lining out in her only plate appearance.
Final years and death
Zaharias had her greatest year in 1950 when she completed the Grand Slam of the three women’s majors of the day: the U.S. Open, the Titleholders Championship, and the Women’s Western Open, a feat that made her the leader on the money list that year. Also, that year, she reached 10 wins faster than any other LPGA golfer, doing so in one year and 20 days, a record that still stands.
She was the leading money-winner in 1951 and 1952, took another major with a Titleholders victory, but illness prevented her from playing a full schedule in 1952–53. This did not stop her from becoming the fastest player to reach 20 wins in two years and four months.
In 1953, Zaharias was diagnosed with colon cancer. After undergoing surgery, she made a comeback in 1954. She took the Vare Trophy for lowest scoring average, her only win of that trophy, and her 10th and final major with a U.S. Women’s Open championship, one month after the surgery and while wearing a colostomy bag.
With this win, she became the second-oldest woman to win a major LPGA championship tournament. These wins made her the fastest player to reach 30 wins in five years and 22 days. In addition to continuing tournament play, Zaharias also served as the President of the LPGA from August 1952 to July 1955.
Her colon cancer recurred in 1955. Despite her limited schedule of eight golfing events that season, Zaharias won her last two tournaments in competitive golf. On September 27, 1956, Zaharias died of her illness at the age of forty-five at the John Sealy Hospital in Galveston, Texas. At the time of her death, she was still a top-ranked female golfer. She and her husband had earlier established the Babe Zaharias Fund to support cancer clinics. She is buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery in her hometown of Beaumont, Texas.
During her final years, Didrikson became known not only for her athletic abilities but as a public advocate for cancer awareness, at a time when many Americans refused to seek diagnosis or treatment for suspected cancer. She used her fame to raise funds for her cancer fund but also as a spokesperson for the American Cancer Society. Her work in this area was honored by US President Dwight Eisenhower on a visit to the White House.
Legacy
She was named the 10th Greatest North American Athlete of the 20th Century by ESPN, and the 9th Greatest Athlete of the 20th Century by the Associated Press. Standing 5 ft 7 in and weighing 115 lbs., Zaharias was physically strong and socially straightforward about her strength.
Zaharias was inducted into the LPGA Hall of Fame in 1951 (now part of the World Golf Hall of Fame). In 1957, she posthumously received the Bob Jones Award, the highest honor given by the United States Golf Association in recognition of distinguished sportsmanship in golf. It was accepted by her husband George, four months after her death. She was one of six initial inductees into the LPGA Hall of Fame at its inception in 1977.
Zaharias has a museum dedicated to her in Beaumont, Texas the Babe Didrikson Zaharias Museum. In 1973, Zaharias, who had lived in the Denver area for most of the 1940s and early 1950s, became one of the three inductees in the inaugural class of the Colorado Golf Hall of Fame Archived September 27, 2020, at the Wayback Machine.
In 1976, Zaharias was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. In 1981, the U.S. Postal Service issued an 18 cent stamp commemorating Zaharias. In 2008, Zaharias was inducted into the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame.
On January 7, 2021, Zaharias was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Donald J. Trump. The Associated Press chose her as the “Female Athlete of the Year” six times for track and field and for golfing, and, in 1950, overwhelmingly voted for her as the “Greatest Female Athlete of the First Half of the Century.”
The Associated Press followed up its 1950 declaration fifty years later by voting Zaharias the Woman Athlete of the 20th Century in 1999. In 2000, Sports Illustrated magazine also named her second on its list of the Greatest Female Athletes of All Time. She is also in the World Golf Hall of Fame. Zaharias is the highest-ranked woman, at No. 10, on ESPN’s list of the 50 top athletes of the 20th century. In 2000, she was ranked as the 17th-greatest golfer, and the second-greatest woman player by Golf Digest magazine.
Zaharias wrote an autobiography This Life I’ve Led. In 1975, the film Babe, based on Zaharias’ life, was released. She was inducted into the Texas Track and Field Coaches Hall of Fame, Class of 2016.
Zaharias appeared as a guest on the ABC reality show, The Comeback Story (1953–1954), explaining her attempts to battle colon cancer, which thereafter still claimed her life. In 1952, she appeared as herself in the Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn film Pat and Mike.
In 1975, Susan Clark portrayed Zaharias in a biographic TV movie titled Babe. In Jenifer Levin’s 1993 novel The Sea of Light, main character Mildred “Babe” Delgado is named after Zaharias by her mother Barbara, who considered Zaharias to be “my only hero.”
In 2007, Carolyn Gage began work on Babe, a full-chorus, full-orchestra musical about Zaharias. In June 2011, Little, Brown published a major biography of Zaharias, Wonder Girl, by author Don Van Natta Jr.
Family Guy has made numerous references to Babe Zaharias being one of the greatest Americans to have lived. In season 21 of The Simpsons, Marge dresses up as Zaharias for her Charity Chicks calendar with a history theme. On August 26, 2014, her story was portrayed in a “Sport Heroes” episode of the Comedy Central series Drunk History.
Babe Zaharias Golf Course
Several golf courses are named after her. In 1949, Zaharias purchased a golf course in the Forest Hills area of Tampa and lived nearby.
After her death, the golf course was sold. In 1974, the City of Tampa took over the golf course, renovated it, and reopened it, naming it the Babe Zaharias Golf Course. At some point afterward, it was accorded historical-landmark status.
In 1980, the Industry Hills Golf Club at Pacific Palms Resort in City of Industry, California built two courses, The Ike and The Zaharias. In 2010, the courses together won the National Golf Course Owners Association’s California Golf Course of the Year Award. This 18-hole course is named for Babe Didrikson Zaharias, one of America’s most decorated all-around athletes.
(The author is the winner of Presidential Awards for Sports and recipient of multiple National Accolades for Academic pursuits. He possesses a PhD, MPhil and double MSc. He can be reached at [email protected])