June 25, 2009 - In that seemingly never-ending list of things adults lament that young people today don’t know, we will submit that most people — young and old alike — can’t name the best athlete to ever come from Texas.
A football fan might say Bobby Layne or Earl Campbell; a baseball fan would be sure to put Nolan Ryan in the conversation; and the golfer will point to Ben Hogan.
Wrong, wrong and wrong. History notes the best athlete to ever hail from Texas was Babe Didrickson Zaharias, usually referred to simply as “Babe,” same as that other Babe, the one with the surname Ruth.
Born Mildred Ella Didrikson in Port Arthur in 1911, she grew up in Beaumont and was given the nickname Babe by neighborhood boys who marveled that she could hit a baseball like Babe Ruth. She probably could.
As a high school basketball player, she was recruited by the Employer’s Casualty Company of Dallas to augment its women’s basketball team, the Golden Cyclones.
Asked by the team’s star forward what position she thought she could play, Babe asked her what position she played. When the player told her, Babe replied, ‘Well, that’s what I want to be.” And it came to pass.
Competing at the 1932 Amateur Athletic Union Championships, Babe won five events, tied for first in another event and finished fourth in another. That amounted to 30 points and four world records, eight more points than the second-place team, which was clearly outnumbered by Babe.
The world records got her into the Olympics where she entered three events and won gold medals in the javelin throw and hurdles. She was given the silver medal in the high jump because she went over the bar head first, which wasn’t allowed at the time.
Called the Texas Tomboy in the press, she was often criticized for not being feminine enough, but she became as big a celebrity as Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan is today. She staged exhibitions of her athletic skills and even pitched an inning for the bearded House of David barnstorming baseball team. In a country hungry for heroes in the middle of the Depression, sportswriters elevated her into something of a demigod.
Legendary sportswriter Grantland Rice wrote of her: “She’s beyond all belief until you see her perform. Then you finally understand that you are looking at the most flawless section of muscle harmony, of complete mental and physical coordination that the world of sport has ever seen.”
In 1938, she met and married wrestler and sports promoter George Zaharias, who had made a name for himself as a professional wrestler. The name he made for himself was his billing as “The Crying Greek from Cripple Creek.” He was also a sports promoter and managed Babe’s career as a barnstormer and professional golfer.
Oh yeah, the golf. The first time Babe ever played the game she shot an 86, a score that some avid golfers might strive for as a lifetime goal. She took some lessons and practiced the game until her hands turned bloody and then started entering amateur tournaments. At one point, she won an astounding 13 tourneys in a row and in the process became the first American to win the British Women’s Amateur championship.
Using her celebrity as leverage, she helped found the Ladies Professional Golf Association, which allowed for a tournament circuit like the PGA pros enjoyed. To no one’s surprise, Babe was the tour’s leading money winner from 1949 -51.
In 1953, she was diagnosed with cancer. That same year, she went on the “Ed Sullivan Show” and played the harmonica, which led to a brief recording career. Fellow golfer Betty Dodd accompanied her on guitar.
“Babe really had a lot of talent on that harmonica,” Dodd told Golf Journal in 1991. “She had her own style — Played her own sharps and flats. But we had to keep buying her new harmonicas. She’d blow ‘em out.”
Her recovery from cancer was followed closely by newspapers running daily dispatches under headlines like “Babe Takes Ride, Feels Better.” Four months after her first operation she entered a tournament in Chicago and finished third. In 1954, she won the U.S. Women’s Open by 12 strokes.
A victory at the Peach Blossom Classic in 1955 was her last. The cancer returned, leading to more surgery in 1956. She died in September of that year, and is memorialized today in the Texas Sports Hall of Fame in Waco, and at the Babe Zaharias Museum in Beaumont.
