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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” Ella Didrikson.
The full transcript of this episode of Stories from Texas is available on the KUT & KUTX Studio website. The transcript is also available as subtitles or captions on some podcast apps.
W.F. Strong [00:00:00] 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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. I’m W.F. Strong, these are stories from Texas. Some of them are true.
This transcript was transcribed by AI, and lightly edited by a human. Accuracy may vary. This text may be revised in the future.
