Babe Didrikson Zaharias

Mildred Ella Didrikson was the sixth of seven children born to Norwegian immigrants Hannah and Ole Didriksen in Port Arthur, Texas, and grew up in nearby Beaumont doing every physical thing available to a poor kid — she sewed her own clothes, played harmonica, hit five home runs in one sandlot game and picked up the nickname Babe for it. She never took to school, repeated eighth grade, and eventually dropped out of high school to play amateur basketball for an insurance company's team in Dallas. By 20 she was a three-time basketball All-American who could also pitch, dive, bowl and throw a baseball farther than any woman on record.

At the 1932 AAU championships she entered eight of ten events on her own and won or tied for first in six of them, taking the team title as a one-woman squad. Weeks later at the Los Angeles Olympics she won gold in the javelin and the 80-meter hurdles and lost a disputed jump-off for gold in the high jump on a technicality, becoming the only track and field athlete of either sex to medal in a running, a throwing and a jumping event. She turned to golf in 1935, played the men's Los Angeles Open in January 1938, and after regaining her amateur status won the U.S. Women's Amateur, the British Ladies Amateur, and, in 1950, the Grand Slam of women's golf, the same year she helped found the LPGA.

The gallery loved her, but the press spent two decades making an issue of what she looked like doing it — one sportswriter suggested women like her should stay home and wait for the phone to ring. Babe married professional wrestler George Zaharias in 1938 and built a public image around the marriage for the rest of her career. Her closest, most sustained relationship in her final years was with a younger golfer, Betty Dodd, who moved in with her in 1950 and stayed through the illness that followed. Historians who have studied the record describe the bond as both romantic and sexual, though neither woman used that language herself in anything that survives. She kept playing competitively through a 1953 colon cancer diagnosis, winning the 1954 U.S. Women's Open a month after surgery, in a colostomy bag.

Cancer returned in 1955, and she died at John Sealy Hospital in Galveston on September 27, 1956, at 45, and she and George had already started a fund to support cancer treatment clinics. The Associated Press had named her the greatest female athlete of the first half of the twentieth century in 1950, and named her that again for the whole century in 1999, the highest-ranked woman on lists otherwise dominated by men. A posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom followed in 2021. Chicago's Legacy Walk inducted her in 2014 for LGBTQ history, making explicit in her afterlife what her own era, and her own public marriage, had been built to leave unsaid.

Babe Didrikson Zaharias's life against the full span of the corpus.

• This Life I've Led book
  Her autobiography, published a year before her death 1955
• Ladies Professional Golf Association company
  Co-founded as one of the tour's founding members 1950
• Babe Zaharias golf course, Tampa building
  Purchased with George Zaharias and run as their home course 1949
• Babe Zaharias Fund company
  Established with her husband to support cancer treatment clinics 1953

• June 26, 1911 aged 0 Born in Port Arthur, Texas
• August 1932 aged 21 Wins two golds and a silver at the Los Angeles Olympics
• 1935 aged ~24 Takes up golf
• January 1938 aged 26 Plays the Los Angeles Open against male professionals
• December 23, 1938 aged 27 Marries George Zaharias
• 1947 aged ~36 Wins the British Ladies Amateur, the first American to do so
• 1950 aged ~39 Helps found the LPGA and completes the Grand Slam of women's golf
• 1953 aged ~42 Diagnosed with colon cancer
• September 27, 1956 aged 45 Dies in Galveston, Texas, at 45

• Billie Jean King b. 1943
  Tennis champion and advocate for gender equality who defeated Bobby Riggs in the famous Battle of the Sexes. successor movement
• Althea Gibson 1927–2003
  Tennis champion who broke the sport's color barrier and became the first Black player to win major singles titles. broke a color line the same decade
• Jackie Robinson 1919–1972
  First African American to play in Major League Baseball in the modern era, breaking the color barrier. fellow barrier-breaker, different sport
• Dwight D. Eisenhower 1890–1969
  34th President and Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II. honored her cancer advocacy at the White House