From time to time, even some of the greatest and most prolific heroes in all of sports fall through the cracks of obscurity and are lost to the world at large. Legends of the Periphery celebrates the best of the best among the forgotten, the bizarre, the esoteric and the obscure.
You’ve heard of the phrase a jack of all trades is a master of none? Such an idiom simply does not apply to Babe Zaharias, master golfer, basketball player and track & field superstar.
On June 26, 1911, in the city of Port Arthur, Texas, Mildred Ella Didrikson was born to Norwegian immigrant parents Hannah and Ole, the second youngest of seven children.
Although it’s somewhat unclear as to how Didrikson earned the nickname “Babe,” legend has it that the Texan hit five home runs in a single children’s baseball game, prompting comparisons to Babe Ruth.
Having moved to Beaumont, Texas at the age of four, Didrikson graduated from Beaumont High School in 1929 and soon turned her attention fully to athletic endeavours. After school, Didrikson began work at the Employers Casualty Insurance Company of Dallas with the intention of playing basketball as an amateur on the company’s industrial team, the Golden Cyclones. In 1931, Didrikson led the Cyclones to an AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) basketball championship.
Didrikson was a star on the AAU track and field scene, but in 1932 the Port Arthur native excelled on a much larger stage when she won Olympic medals in three separate events: the javelin throw, the high jump and the 80-metre hurdles. Babe, as the world quickly came to know her, set a new Olympic record in both the 80-metre hurdles and the javelin throw — earning two gold medals in the process — and tied for first place with Jean Shiley in the high jump. Although Didrikson actually qualified for five total events, she was allowed to enter only these three.
Within a few short years of her Olympic success, Didrikson decided to take up golf. In 1938, Didrikson qualified for Los Angeles Open, a men’s PGA tournament. Babe was teamed with George Zaharias in this tournament, and within one calendar year of meeting the two were married and Didrikson took her now famous name Babe Zaharias.
By the mid-1940s Zaharias had honed her golfing skills to the point that championship titles were starting to pile up. From 1946 to 1947 Zaharias won an astonishing 17 amateur tournament victories in a row, and by 1951 Babe was the leading money winner of the LPGA (Ladies Professional Golf Association) four years running. Amateur and professional titles combined, Zaharias compiled a career 82 total tournament victories.
In 1953, only three years removed from her most successful professional golfing season, Zaharias was diagnosed with colon cancer. Unwilling to let her condition affect her lifestyle, Zaharias continued tournament play and remained the active LPGA president from 1952-55. At the time of her death in 1956, Zaharias was still ranked one of the top women’s golfers in the world.
Apart from being a world renowned athlete, Zaharias was also an accomplished seamstress and musician: Zaharias recorded the song “I Felt a Little Teardrop,” among others, for Mercury Records and in 1931 won the South Texas State Fair sewing championship in her home town of Beaumont.
Today, the Texan remains the only woman to ever make the cut in a regular PGA tournament event. Zaharias also still holds the AAU track and field record for the now defunct event, the baseball throw.
