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SI Flashback: Farewell to the Babe A longtime friend admires the legendary Babe Didrikson
Issue date: October 8, 1956 By Paul Gallico
It is now close to 25 years since I first laid eyes on Babe Didrikson in the lobby of the Chapman Park Hotel in Los Angeles upon the occasion of the 1932 Olympic Games. She was then a rawhide kid of 18 with short-cut, sand-colored hair, a well-defined Adam's apple and a faint down on her upper lip. I watched her "up" to a big girl who was wearing the jacket of an Olympic competitor, pin her with her gray-green eyes and announce levelly -- "Ah'm gonna whup yo' tomorrow." We sportswriters thought that this was cockiness. There was no way for us to know at the time that it was just a simple declarative sentence spoken by a simple declarative person. It took all of us some time to find out that the lithe girl form Port Arthur, Texas, who apparently not made like other girls of sugar and spice, but instead of whipcord, steel springs and Monel metal, enclosing the heart of a lioness, had also the makings of an extraordinary woman. None of us who watched this unknown and unheralded youngster foresaw that she would become the greatest woman golfer who ever lived, a champion of champions, and then thrill a nation with the courage and gallantry of her battle against cancer. There were many sports in which the Babe excelled superlatively - all track and filed events, basketball and golf - but there was hardly any game at which she could not have become a champion, and these included swimming, diving, billiards, lacrosse, bowling and tennis. But she also invaded the men's fields. Her record for throwing a baseball still stands. She could pitch, hit and cover a bag. She could peg a football and kick left-footed. Once she even thought of boxing. Nothing came of it, but it is recorded that when she threw a punch it wasn't a roundhouse or a fly-swatter like a woman, but straight down the old trolley wire a la Ruby Goldstein, a sharpshooter of our era. While it is true that none of the Babe's track and field or Olympic records, with the exception of the baseball throw, are still on the books today, no girl before or since had matched her record of events won in a diversity of sports. Nor had any other woman even approached her in the number and caliber of golf championships captured, some of them played while suffering from pain, illness and physical handicaps that would have seen most grown men laid up in the hospital. Competitively, the record she brought to Los Angeles in 1932 has never been equaled. I refer to her performance on July 16, 1932 at the National Women's AAU Track and Field Championships and Olympic tryouts at Evanston, Illinois, in which she was entered by herself as a one-woman team representing the Employers Casualty Company of Dallas, Texas. Singlehanded the Babe won the team title with an aggregate of 30 points. In second place was the famous Illinois Woman's AC, with 22 points, collected by a full complement of girls. Now consider that in such comprehensive competitions as pentathlons or decathlons, the entrants usually excel in one of two events, are good in several more and do the best they can in the others. Thus there is a balance and the battle tends to even out. But in this incomparable performance, the girl, barely turned 18, was pitted against the best specialists in the entire country in each event, never less than half a dozen of them and sometimes even two and three from one team. On the day that the Babe staged and won a private octathlon. She entered eight of the 10 events scheduled. Five of these -- the 80-meter hurdles, the baseball thrown, the shotput, the broad jump and the javelin toss -- she won outright; and in the high jump, although she equaled the world record jump of winner Jean Shiley, she was just nosed out of a tie. She placed fourth in the discus throw, picking up another point. During the course of the afternoon she set three world's records and was shut out only in the 100-meter dash, when she was just nipped in the semifinal heat. I cannot think of any male athlete, with the possible exception of old Jim Thorpe, who has come even close in spread-eagling a track meet all by himself in this manner. Two weeks later the Babe went to the Olympics in Los Angeles. Allowed to participate in only three events, against the best women of every nation, she won two of them, setting world's records in each (the javelin throw and the 80-meter hurdles). She was languaged out of the third, the high jump. After she tied with Jean Shiley for first place, at a world-record height, Babe cleared the bar in the jumpoff but was ruled to have dived over. Thus she lost the record and the event. The roll that she used, incidentally, is legal today. But prior to these events this wonderful little girl -- the sixth child born to a poor Norwegian cabinetmakers and his wife, who emigrated to port Arthur, Texas, later moving to Beaumont -- had already been a star basketball player named three times on the women's All-America team. In one game, Babe is recorded to have tanked the ball for an individual total of 106 points. And she was likewise a home run hitting star in soft ball, a crackerjack at pool and billiards and good enough at swimming and diving to appear in exhibitions. All this, however, was only the beginning of a career that was to take her to an alltime record as a golf champion, including the distinction of becoming the first American girl to break the jinx and win the British Women's Amateur championship. Much has been made of Ms. Zaharias' natural aptitude and talent for sports, as well as her competitive spirit and indomitable will to win, with both of which she was endowed in full measure. But not nearly enough has been said or written about the patience and strength of character expressed in her willingness to practice for endless hours, and her recognition even as a child that with all her natural ability she could reach the top and stay there only by means of incessant drill and hard work. 'Ah'm gonna whup yo'The hours of practice the Babe devoted in her life to various games ought to be made compulsory reading for every fresh kid who can swim, skate, run, ski a little or is handy at sports and thinks that all he or she needs to do is get out there and the opposition will swoon away. When the Babe leveled on a sister athlete and husked, "Ah', gonna whup yo" it wasn't brag (though a element of gamesmanship was involved). She had put in the necessary hours of slavery to perfect her form and to he able to deliver the goods; and she just knew she could. At 16, preparing for her first track and field meet, she would work two hours in the afternoon with her teammates and then go out alone after supper and practice from two to three hours more until darkness enveloped her, working on her step-timing for the jumps, her balance in the weight events and her starts in the sprints. She learned golf the same way. The first full game she ever played followed the 1932 Olympics when she paired with Grantland Rice against Olin Dutra and the writer at Brentwood. She had a fine natural swing and could paste the ball as far as a man, but that isn't golf and the Babe knew it. When she decided to go for the game seriously, she took lessons, drilled and practiced for hours on end until her hands were a mass of blisters. She taped and bandaged them and kept on, stopping only when the bandages became soaked with blood. Golf was where Babe Didrikson reached her greatest heights. Who will ever duplicate her most impossible feat of winning 17 major golf tournaments in a row, including the National Women's Amateur, Tam O'Shanter All-American, North and South, August Titleholder tourney, Broadmoor, Texas Women's Open, and finishing the sweep by capturing the British Women's Amateur championship? Only a golfer who has known the agonizing treachery of which his nerves and body are capable in letting him down in tight corners can appreciate the accumulative tension of extending a winning string of tournaments of match play against the best girl and woman golfers culled from a nation of over 143 million people and crowning this achievement by winning the one that had defied American girls for more than half a century. Nor must it be forgotten that when the Babe had finished this grueling struggle, she was the darling of the Scots and Britons in the gallery, as well as the pet of the whole village of Gullane. She not only beat the best they had; she made them love her. And this is perhaps the clue as to why it may be another 50 or 75 years before a performer as Mildred Didrikson Zaharias again enters the lists. For even if some yet unborn games queen matched her talent, versatility, skill, patience and will to practice, along with her flaming competitive spirit, and manages, let us say, to run an unbroken string of tournament victories in her specialty to 20, there still remains the little matter of courage and character, and in these departments the Babe must be listed with the champions of alltime. Indeed her unique quality has been noted, for in addition to being chosen Woman Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press poll of sportswriters and broadcasters for the years 1932, 1945, 1946, 1947 and 1950, she was named the woman athlete of the half century. In 1953 Mildred Zaharias was stricken with cancer and suffered one of the most dangerous and excruciating of all operations, a colostomy. Yet just three and a half months after the operation, this incredibly brave and unquenchable girl was back on a golf course again in competition in the Tam O'Shanter All-American championship in killing midsummer heat in Chicago. She did not win it. The miracle was that she fought her way back that far. Her presence on the first tee was an act of heroism that should have been rewarded with the Congressional Medal of Honor. The value of her example in inspiration to others, and the magnificence of the banner she waved aloft to those of less courage and steadfastness, cannot be overestimated, Ten months after her operation, the Babe won the Serbin Tournament in Florida, and that same year, 1954, she took the National Women's Open and this time, the Tam O'Shanter "All-American" too. She never spared herselfThe following year all of her splendid courage was called upon again. The trouble was that she had too much of it. No longer the wiry rawhide tomboy of 18 who could practice and compete all day and dance all night, Babe was now a mature woman of 41 who had never spared herself. One a car trip vacation with two girl friends on the Texas coast she ruptured a disk in her spinal column getting the car out of the sand when it got stuck. In agony with the pain in her back, she played three more tournaments, winning one at Spartanburg, South Carolina, before she was finally forced into the hospital for an operation on the ruptured disk. Hospitalized late in 1955 for a recurrence of cancer, her fiery fighting spirit remained undimmed and the golf clubs still accompanied her. During her first operation and again for her second they stood in the corner of her room where she could see them, play mentally over old courses, plan to correct old mistakes. They were her beloved tools, and they will be forever with her. Without them she would surely be remembered, but with them she carved herself and imperishable niche in the great American world of sports, and likewise in the hearts of all of us who loved her for what she was, a splendid woman. Issue date: October 8, 1956
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