Babe Didrickson Zaharias

Professional athletes today commonly transcend their sports, becoming larger-than-life figures in American culture. Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods immediately come to mind. Some of their broad appeal, of course, is generated by the vast sums of money now available to such dominant sporting figures. But much of it derives from the level of skill, the purity of achievement, that these athletes have brought to their respective sports. They represent the pinnacle of possibility.

Between 1930 and 1954, native East Texan Babe Didrikson Zaharias accomplished the same feat, becoming one of the most influential sports figures of the twentieth century. She almost single-handedly reshaped popular attitudes about female athletes. She was, quite simply, one of the greatest athletes-male or female-in American history.

Mildred Ella Didrikson was born to Norwegian immigrant parents in Port Arthur, Texas, on June 26, 1911. As a child she acquired the nickname "Babe" due to her sandlot baseball prowess in the era of Babe Ruth. A high school basketball star in Beaumont, at age eighteen she accepted an offer to play for a semi-professional team in Dallas and led the squad to a national title.

When the company she worked for sponsored a track-and-field team, Babe competed in the AAU championships of 1932 and placed in seven out of ten events, setting four world records in the process. In the Olympics later that year, she won three gold and one silver medal, again breaking three world records.

After the Olympics Didrikson turned professional and barnstormed the country with Babe Didrikson's All Americans, a women's basketball team, and with an infamous group of itinerant, bearded baseball players collectively known as the House of David. Soon, however, she decided that golf offered her a greater chance for financial remuneration, and embarked on the career that made her famous.

From 1932 until 1950, Babe won every important women's golf title, amateur and professional. At one point she won seventeen straight tournaments, a feat unequaled before or since. In 1938 she married professional wrestler George Zarahias, who thereafter managed her career. In 1948 she was one of the founding members of the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA), and was the organization's leading money winner from 1949 until 1951.

Early in 1953 Babe Didrikson Zaharias, as she was now known, was diagnosed with colon cancer. After surgery, she returned to the golf tour, winning five tournaments in 1954. But the disease had spread; on September 27, 1955, she died in Galveston.

Babe Didrikson Zaharias is buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Gardens in Beaumont, a privately owned and maintained cemetery. To get there, follow Interstate 10 to Beaumont and exit at Pine St. (exit 855B). Travel north on Pine Street to East Lucas; just beyond the intersection you will find the cemetery, at 4955 Pine Street.

Beaumont is also home to the Babe Didrikson Zaharias Museum, located one mile north of the Magnolia/Martin Luther King Dr. exit on I-10.

For more information about Babe Didrikson, see her autobiograhy, This Life I've Led (Boston: Barnes, 1955), or the New Handbook of Texas. Information about historic Beaumont can be found at http://www.cityofbeaumont.com. To learn more about East Texas history, contact the East Texas Historical Association at Stephen F. Austin State University or visit the ETHA web site at http://leonardo.sfasu.edu/etha/.