DIDRIKSON -- THE OTHER BABE

EVANSTON, IL, JUNE 1932 —  Collegiate women from across America gather for Olympic tryouts in track and field.  With temperatures topping 100, some sit on ice blocks or  worry about heat prostration.  But one team takes the heat in stride.  Her name is Mildred, but everyone calls her Babe.

She enters eight events.  Finishing one, she races to her next.  And wins.  And wins.  The 80 meter hurdles.  The javelin.  The shotput and broad jump.  She throws a baseball 90 yards.  She ties for first in the running jump, finishes fourth in the discus.  She wins six gold medals, breaks four world records and, with thirty team points, wins the AAU  championship all by herself.  Afterwards, she strolls off the field playing her harmonica.  That night she dances till three.

She stood 5’6” and weighed 128 pounds, yet no one dominated sports like Babe Didrikson.  Though less famous than that other Babe, Didrikson was equally astonishing.  Beloved for her spirit, she charmed crowds with her Texas bluster.  “Okay, Babe’s here!” she often drawled.  “Now who’s gonna finish second?”  But few athletes were more driven.  In her short life, she captured gold medals, golf titles, basketball championships, and in her battle with cancer, America’s heart.

Born in 1911, Mildred Ella Didrikson grew up in Beaumont, Texas.  A restless tomboy, she raced around the house, hurdled hedges, beat boys at their own games.  Boys who kept all those (eeeww!) girls off teams let Babe join in.  “Once you saw her play,” one remembered, “you didn’t mind having her around.”  After starring in sports at Beaumont High, Babe was recruited by a Dallas insurance firm with a women's basketball team.  Averaging 30 points per game, she led them to the national finals.  Then in 1932. . .

After her one-woman show at the Olympic trials, Babe headed for the games in L.A.  Sportswriters were skeptical.  One called her “a muscle moll.”  Another said female athletes should “stay at home, get themselves prettied up and wait for the phone to ring.”  Babe shrugged off sexism.  Asked if there was anything she didn’t play, she answered, “dolls.”

At the Olympics, women were limited to three events.  Babe chose the javelin, hurdles, and high jump.  Her first javelin throw broke her own world record.  With one gold, she moved on to the hurdles.  Just like jumping hedges, she later said.  She set another world record set in a heat, then broke it in the final.  Another gold.  She would have won a third in the high jump, but a judge ruled her technique illegal.  She settled for a silver, and national headlines — BABE BREAKS RECORDS EASIER THAN DISHES.

Capitalizing on fame, Babe pitched for an amateur men’s baseball team, took up bowling and billiards, and played basketball with Babe Didrikson's All-Americans.  But when she endorsed athletic gear, she lost her amateur status and the chance for future Olympics.  She toured on stage, playing harmonica and leaping in her track suit.  Then, desperate to compete again, she took up golf.

“I’d hit balls until my hands were bloody and sore.  I’d have tape all over my hands, and blood all over the tape.”  

By the late 1930s, Babe was winning tournaments and delighting crowds.  Teeing up five balls, she slammed each 250 yards, driving the last before the first landed.  She could balance  two balls, drive one and make the other pop into her pocket.  Her jocular style also won a husband.

At the 1938 U.S. Open, Babe was teamed with wrestler George Zaharias.  When the hulking Zaharias and the lean Babe married, George retired from the ring to become “sweetheart, husband, manager, adviser” to “the greatest girl in the world.”  George handled the business; Babe commanded the fairways.

But in 1953, Babe met her "toughest competition" – cancer.  Surgery removed much of her lower intestine, yet she willed herself back to the fairway and won four more tournaments.  Sportswriters praised her 1954 U.S. Women’s Open victory as "one of the most inspiring comebacks in all sports history."

When cancer returned, Babe continued to inspire, openly discussing her illness on TV, and playing her harmonica in children’s wards. “George, I hate to die,” she joked.  “I’m just learning to play golf.”  In September 1956, in a room strewn with cards from fans, she lost her final battle.  She was 45.  

Today, as female athletes sprint through doors she opened, Babe remains the champion.  “She is beyond all belief until you see her perform,” Grantland Rice wrote.  “Then you finally understand that you are looking at the most flawless section of muscle harmony, of complete mental and physical coordination the world of sport has ever seen."