She was an Olympics gold medal winner in track and field, and an All-American basketball player in college.
She too was a legend on the course.
As a professional golfer, Mildred ‘Babe’ Didrikson Zaharias won 31 tournaments including three U.S. Women’s Opens. She also helped found the Ladies Professional Golf Association.
Winner of the 1941 San Francisco Women’s Match Play Championship, Didrikson didn’t even take up golf seriously until she was 21. She was introduced to the game by Grantland Rice in Los Angeles during the 1932 Olympics. According to Rice, the Babe regularly hit drives measuring 250 yards.
That led Didrikson to go on exhibition tours and to celebrity pro-ams. In 1938, during a tournament in California, she was paired with a professional wrestler named George Zaharias. They married later that year, and with Zaharias supporting his wife and managing her career, the Babe applied for amateur reinstatement. The USGA granted her wish in 1943, and immediately after World War II Zaharias went on a tear that included the U.S. Women’s Amateur in 1946 and the British Women’s Amateur in 1947.
The streak led her to again turn professional. She signed with sports promoter Fred Corcoran and went on to form the LPGA Tour. As a professional, Zaharias was just as dominant, winning 31 of the 128 events in which she played from 1948-1953.
When asked what the secret of her success was, Zaharias would usually answer with her favorite expression. “Aw, I just loosen my girdle and take a whack at it.”
Zaharias’ final seven victories, including the 1954 Women’s Open, came after she was diagnosed with cancer and had a colostomy. The Women’s Open victory, by 12 strokes over Betty Hicks at Salem CC in Massachusetts., was one of the five victories that year.
The pain returned in 1955, and although she won twice that year, it wasn’t long before the Babe was gone. She died Sept. 27, 1956, at the age of 45.
In her autobiography, This Life I’ve Led, Zaharias wrote, “All my life, I’ve had the urge to do things better than anyone else.”