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Babe Zaharias / By Charles McGrath
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Video: A Universal Newsreel account of Babe Zaharias's death in 1956. (2.1 MB, Credit: The National Archives)
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- From The New York Times, Sept. 1956: Babe Zaharias Dies; Athlete Had Cancer.
- Read the Britannica Online entry for Babe Zaharias.
first heard about Babe Zaharias from my mother, who couldn't have been less of a sports fan; though she alluded mysteriously to athletic glory in her youth, by the time I was born she was resolutely sedentary and took all her exercise at the ironing board. Nevertheless, she followed Zaharias's career, especially her stunning comeback in 1954, when less than a year after undergoing surgery for intestinal cancer, she won the U.S. Open by 12 strokes.
And when Zaharias died in 1956, I remember my mother explaining to me that the world had lost "a great sportswoman." The term in her mind had less to do with actual athletic accomplishment, perhaps, than with style and daring; my mother also used it to refer to another idol of hers, the cigar-smoking equestrian Eleanora Sears.
Babe Zaharias, 1949.
Credit: The New York Times
Zaharias got her nickname not from her looks or her youthfulness but because as a young girl in Beaumont, Texas, she could hit a baseball farther than the boys. She was a "natural" - good at everything she tried: baseball, basketball, diving, track and field, even pool and bowling. The sportswriter Grantland Rice once said of her, "The Babe is without any question the athletic phenomenon of all time, man or woman."
Her real name was Mildred; born on June 26, 1912, she was the sixth of the seven children of Ole and Hanna Marie Didrikson, Norwegian immigrants. She became a national heroine at the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, winning gold medals in both the javelin and the 80-meter hurdles. (She would have won the high jump too, if the judges hadn't objected to her controversial technique of diving headfirst over the bar.)
But it was as a golfer that Babe enjoyed her greatest success. Although she didn't take the game up seriously until her 20's, she proved an apt pupil - of Tommy Armour, among others - and went on to win 17 straight amateur victories in 1947 - a feat still unequaled, even by Tiger Woods. She capped the year with the British Ladies' Championship, the first time an American had ever won that event. She turned pro in 1948, and eventually won 33 tournaments, including 10 majors, 3 of them U.S. Opens. Except perhaps for Arnold Palmer, no golfer has ever been more beloved by the gallery.
In the process, she broke the mold of what a "lady" golfer was supposed to be. The ideal in the 20's and 30's was Joyce Wethered, a willowy Englishwoman with a picture-book swing that produced elegant shots but not especially long ones. Zaharias developed a grooved athletic swing reminiscent of Lee Trevino's, and she was so strong off the tee that a fellow Texan, the great golfer Byron Nelson, once said that he knew of only eight men who could outdrive her. "It's not enough just to swing at the ball," Babe said. "You've got to loosen your girdle and really let the ball have it."
Accused as a young woman of being "mannish" and a "tomboy," Babe in later life made a great production of being interested in what she called the "pretty things" - gardening, decorating, sewing her own clothes. In December 1938, she married George Zaharias, a 296-pound former wrestler (his nickname was "The Crying Greek from Cripple Creek"), whose idea of a greeting was to put her in an affectionate headlock. It was a cheerful, companionable marriage, but the great love of her life was probably another golfer, Betty Dodd.
Part of Babe's appeal for my mother and other women of her wifely, house-bound generation was that she was so modest and unpretentious - a regular gal. But these women must have responded to something else in Babe too: something that my mother, at least, would have been unable, or unwilling, to articulate - a dream of prowess and success, of being able to beat the men at their own games.
Charles McGrath is the editor of The Times Book Review.
