#babe didrikson

Babe Didrikson: smashing records, shattering expectations, and redefining greatness, one swing at a time. 💥⛳ #MarchMadness

Mildred "Babe" Didrikson, star athlete from Beaumont, Texas, hurdles over a table in her room at the Biltmore, January 4, 1932. She was in town to sign contracts with various professional sport, radio, and writing concerns.

March 20, 1934

Babe Didrikson Zaharias (deceased)

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Lesbian

DOB: 26 June 1911  

RIP: 27 September 1956

Ethnicity: White

Occupation: Olympic athlete, athlete in golf, basketball, baseball and athletics (track and field), activist

Note 1: Won two gold medals in track and field at the 1932 Summer Olympics, before turning to prof golf and winning 10 LPGA major championships. 

Babe Didrikson Zaharias. Hulton Archive/Getty. [Source]

Babe Didrikson Zaharias

Born Mildred Ella Didriksen in 1911, Babe Didrikson would come to be one of the most incredible athletes of the 20th century. She was born to Swedish immigrants in Port Arthur, Texas. Her parents encouraged her and her siblings to pursue athletics and Babe earned her nickname playing sandlot baseball games with the neighborhood boys. They thought she hit like Babe Ruth. She played basketball in High School and was recruited her senior year by the Employers Casualty Company of Dallas to help form their company basketball team. In 1931 she led the company team, the Golden Cyclones, to the Amateur Athletic Union Basketball Championship. Her employer then asked her to expand their athletics program and she would gain greater fame as a track and field star. In 1932, her team won the championship, despite the fact that she was the only member of the team.

Babe Didrikson in the U.S. Women’s Track and Field competition, 1932.  Three Lions/Getty Images [source]

She would continue her track and field success at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, winning two gold medals and one silver, breaking three Olympic records. She would have been awarded three gold medals, but she was ruled to have used an "improper technique" -- going head first over the bar -- in the high jump during a tie breaker. After the Olympics she performed on the Vaudeville circuit, showing off her athletic prowess, and as a barnstormer with an otherwise all-male baseball team, the House of David.

Didrikson became interested in golf during the 1932 Olympics and took lessons with Stan Kertes during her travels. In 1935, she won the Texas Women's Amateur Championship, but was then disqualified from future amateur events because she was giving paid endorsements. She supported herself with exhibitions and celebrity pro-am tournaments. At one of these in 1938, she met her future husband, pro-wrestler George Zaharias. Zaharias was also a sports promoter and would thereafter manage his wife's career.

Babe Didrikson Zaharias at the All-American tournament at Chicago’s Tam-O’Shanter Country Club, Chicago, Illinois, 1951. (Credit: Underwood Archives/Getty Images) [source]

Didrikson regained her amateur status in 1943. She would win 17 consecutive tournaments before turning pro in 1947. In 1948 she worked with other professional women golfers to form the Ladies Professional Golf Association and create a tournament schedule for professional women golfers. Didrikson would be the highest earning golfer in the LPGA from 1949-1951. She became president of the LPGA in 1950, a position she would hold for the rest of her life.

In 1953, Didrikson was diagnosed with cancer. Despite a colostomy, she returned to the professional golf circuit in 1954. She would win seven tournaments over the next year, including the US Woman's Open, until the cancer came back in 1955. Didrikson died in September of 1956. Didrikson was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1951, was posthumously given the Bob Jones Award, the highest award in golf, and was in the first class of inductees into the LPGA Hall of Fame in 1977. The US Postal Service issued commemorative stamp for her in 1981.