Stories From Texas

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Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-8-2025

Abstract

Before she was known as “Babe,” she was Mildred Ella Didrikson – born in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1911 and raised in Beaumont.

The daughter of Norwegian immigrants, her father was a carpenter, her mother a homemaker. They didn’t have much. The family home sat in the working-class part of town, with a yard just big enough for kids to run in.

Mildred was a wild one: fast, strong, fearless. The neighborhood boys used to laugh when she insisted on joining their games. But before long, they weren’t laughing because she could out-throw them, out-hit them, and outrun them.

Her hero was Babe Ruth. She swung a bat with the same swagger, so the boys nicknamed her “Babe.” The name stuck.

In high school, she excelled in basketball, then track and field – then anything with a ball, a bat, or timed by a stopwatch.

By 1932 she was in Los Angeles, representing the U.S. in the Olympics. She entered three events: hurdles, javelin, and high jump. She won two gold medals and a silver, setting world records with each of her gold medals in javelin and hurdles. She qualified for 8 events, but unlike male athletes, women were restricted to competing in only three.

Nonetheless, Texas had produced an athlete the world had never seen before – one who could, seemingly, do it all.

But Babe wasn’t done. Believe it or not, she next picked up golf and immediately excelled at this “gentleman’s game,” though she had never played before she was 22.

She hit the ball farther than most men and with greater accuracy. She was the first woman to play in a PGA tour event. This was in Los Angeles in 1938. She didn’t come close to winning, but she did meet her future husband, George Zaharias, a wrestler.

Realizing that she wouldn’t be able to compete at the highest levels of the PGA right away, she played in women’s amateur tournaments for many years and dominated the field. She won 17 gold championships in a row, including the British Women’s Amateur Golf Tournament. The galleries that followed her around ran out of superlatives to describe her play.

Babe co-founded the LPGA, the Ladies Professional Golf Association, in 1949. In her LPGA career she won 41 tournaments and ten major championships.

She was not just the best female golfer in the world – she was one of the best golfers, period. The Associated Press voted her Woman Athlete of the Half-Century.

And then came 1953. Babe was diagnosed with colon cancer. Surgery followed, and the prognosis was grim. Reporters wrote her off. Doctors whispered she would never compete again.

But the “Wonder Girl from Beaumont” wasn’t ready to quit.

In 1954, she entered the U.S. Women’s Open – pale, thin, scarred from surgery. She played anyway. And she didn’t just win, she won by twelve strokes, which was the greatest margin in the tournament’s history. Adding to this astonishing victory is that she did it while wearing a colostomy pouch.

Two years later, at just 45, Babe Didrikson Zaharias was gone. But in her short life, she had become a legend: The girl from Beaumont who was told “girls can’t do that” … and who went right on doing it anyway.

So the next time you see a young Texan girl running faster than the boys, throwing harder, hitting farther, tell her about Babe and how she would be proud of her.

Format

.MP3, 192 kbps

Length

00:04:00

Language

English

Notes

https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/mildred-babe-didrikson-zaharias-athlete-texas/

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© 2025 William F. Strong. Uploaded with permission of copyright holder.

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