They called her ‘Babe’

Did you know a Texan actually co-founded the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA)? But before that, she showed prowess in several other sports. Texas Standard commentator W.F. Strong explains that she was so good at baseball, she was nicknamed after one of the greatest players of all time. Here is the story of Mildred “Babe” […]

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Before she was known as Babe, she
was Mildred Ella Didrikson, born
in Port Arthur, Texas in nineteen
eleven and raised in Beaumont.
The daughter of Norwegian
immigrants, her father was a
carpenter and her mother was 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

(00:21):
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
outthrow them, out hit them,
and outrun them.
Her hero was Babe Ruth, and she
swung a bat with the same swagger,

(00:42):
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 nineteen thirty two she was in
Los Angeles, representing the
US in the Olympics.
She entered three events, hurdles,

(01:03):
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 eight
events, but unlike male athletes,
women were restricted to competing
in only three.
Nonetheless, Texas had produced
an athlete the world had never seen

(01:24):
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
twenty two.
She hit the ball farther than most
men and with greater accuracy.
She was the first woman to play in

(01:45):
a PGA tour event.
This was in Los Angeles in nineteen
thirty eight.
She didn't come close to winning,
but she did meet her future husband
there, 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

(02:06):
dominated the field.
She won seventeen 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 nineteen forty

(02:26):
nine.
In her LPGA career,
she won forty one 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 nineteen fifty three.

(02:49):
Babe was diagnosed with colon
cancer.
Surgery followed, and the prognosis
was grim.
Reporters wrote her off and doctors
whispered that she would never
compete again.
But the Wonder Girl from Beaumont
wasn't ready to quit.
In nineteen fifty four she entered
the US Women's Open.
Pale, thin, scarred from

(03:10):
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, just forty five,
Babe Dietrichson's Harris
was gone.

(03:32):
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
have been proud of her.

(03:53):
I'm W.F.
Strong, these are stories from
Texas.
Some of them are true.