48 Fun Facts About Babe Didrikson Zaharias

Besides sport, in what domestic skill did Babe compete, making many of her own golfing outfits?

Sewing was a point of pride: by her own account a dress she made took a prize at the Texas State Fair, though her biographers trace the ribbon to a smaller local fair.

Which instrument did Babe play in her vaudeville act after the 1932 Olympics?

Harmonica tunes and a run on a treadmill were part of the act, a brief turn on the vaudeville stage that turned her Olympic fame into money her family badly needed.

In which Texas refinery town, also Janis Joplin's home town, was Babe Didrikson born?

Port Arthur is where her father, a seaman and ship's carpenter, had settled; he later rigged up a backyard gym for his seven children, with a broomstick and flatirons for a barbell.

From which country had Babe's parents Hannah and Ole emigrated?

Norway is also where her mother had been an accomplished skater, and the family name was spelled Didriksen until Babe changed the ending herself.

Babe Didrikson said she got her nickname after hitting five of what in one childhood game?

Home runs, five in one game, made her 'Babe' after Babe Ruth in her telling, but the name may owe as much to her mother, who had called her 'Baby' since she was small.

What was the profession of George Zaharias, whom Babe married in December 1938?

Wrestler George Zaharias was a heavyweight villain of the ring when the two were paired at a golf tournament; after the wedding he became her manager.

Babe grew up and is buried in which Texas city, famous for the 1901 Spindletop oil gusher?

Beaumont is where she starred for the high school basketball team until a Dallas company hired her away, and where a museum in her name now stands.

Babe Didrikson took her first job as a secretary at what kind of Dallas business just to play on its basketball team?

An insurance company put her on its payroll as a secretary because paying her to play would have cost her amateur status; her real job was scoring baskets.

Which Dallas company basketball team did Babe lead to the 1931 AAU championship?

The Golden Cyclones won that national title with Babe as their All-American forward, while she was also winning national titles for the same company in a second sport.

As her club's only athlete at the 1932 AAU meet, Babe won which prize?

The team championship went to a team of one: Babe scored 30 points by herself, eight more than a runner-up club that had fielded over twenty athletes.

Babe won 1932 Olympic gold in which race, lowering the world record to 11.7 seconds?

The 80-meter hurdles final was so close that runner-up Evelyne Hall was credited with the same world-record time, and Babe, by her own account, won it by a nose.

Babe opened her 1932 Olympics by winning gold in which throwing event, with a record 143 feet 4 inches?

Javelin was new to the women's Olympic programme that year, and Babe settled it with her opening throw of the Games, which a German rival then missed by 19 centimetres.

Why did Babe get silver after tying for first in the 1932 Olympic high jump?

Diving over the bar was the judges' charge: her head crossed before her body, a style then illegal that she had used unchallenged all afternoon, and Jean Shiley took the gold.

Babe's three medals at the 1932 Olympics came in which three kinds of event?

Running, throwing and jumping medals all came barely two years after she had first tried the sport, having joined her employer's new team in 1930.

Why did the AAU bar Babe from amateur sport months after the 1932 Olympics?

A car advert used her name, and that was enough: months after a heroine's welcome home, the Olympic champion was shut out of the amateur basketball season she had just begun.

Which famous bearded barnstorming baseball team did Babe tour with after the Olympics?

The House of David team came from a Michigan religious colony whose men were forbidden to cut their hair; Babe was the one woman, and the one bare chin, on its road team.

According to Babe, what have you got to loosen before you really let the golf ball have it?

Your girdle was her answer when people asked how she drove the ball some 250 yards; her athletic, full-blooded swing broke the mould of the polite ladies' game.

Why did the USGA bar Babe from amateur golf in 1935?

Pay for playing other sports was the stated reason, since she had barnstormed in basketball and baseball; she was not restored as an amateur golfer until 1943.

As of 2023, Babe was the only woman to have done what in a regular PGA Tour event?

Made the cut, and she did it in 1945; when Lexi Thompson teed up in 2023 as only the seventh woman to play a PGA Tour event, Babe's feat was still unmatched.

In 1947 Babe became the first American to win which championship?

The British Ladies Amateur had never gone to an American until Babe won it at Gullane in Scotland in June 1947; that August she announced she was turning professional.

Babe's famous unbeaten run in amateur golf began the year after which war ended?

World War II ended in 1945, and over the next two seasons she won at least 13 amateur tournaments in a row; she herself always put the streak at 17.

The Associated Press named Babe Female Athlete of the Year six times: five for golf and once for which sport?

Track and field won her the 1932 vote, after her two Olympic golds; the other five awards were all for golf, the last of them for her comeback from cancer surgery in 1954.

Charles McGrath wrote that only which golfer was perhaps more beloved by the gallery than Babe?

Arnold Palmer is the modern yardstick for crowd appeal; Babe earned hers by playing to the gallery, with wisecracks and exhibitions of virtuosity that delighted spectators.

What happened when Babe tried to enter the 1948 U.S. Open?

The USGA said men only and turned her entry down; it was 2006 before a woman, Michelle Wie, won a local qualifier for the same championship, falling short at the final stage.

Pitching for the Athletics against Brooklyn in March 1934, Babe Didrikson escaped the inning with what rare feat?

A triple play ended her inning: the Dodgers, then a byword for blunders, hit into three outs behind her, and a Cleveland paper joked it was at least a new kind of mistake for them.

In spring 1934 Babe pitched an exhibition inning for which club, the "Gashouse Gang" of Dizzy Dean?

The St. Louis Cardinals gave her the first inning against the Red Sox, who scored three runs; manager Frankie Frisch then pulled her, grumbling that a woman's place was in the home.

At the 1931 national championships Babe set a women's record of 296 feet in which long-discontinued event?

The baseball throw was a women's championship event until 1957; her 296 feet beat the runner-up by more than 44 feet, and no longer throw by a woman has come to light.

When Babe set out to master golf, she was said to hit as many as how many practice balls a day?

1,000 balls a day was the regime, on top of hours of lessons, and she kept swinging until her hands were blistered and bleeding.

Which fellow champion was among the golfers who founded the LPGA alongside Babe?

Patty Berg was among the handful of women professionals who set up the tour with her; Babe was its star attraction, and the crowds she drew gave women's golf a national audience.

Which fellow golfer became Babe Zaharias's close companion for the last six years of her life?

Betty Dodd was a young Texan golfer whom Babe introduced in public as her protégée; in private they were inseparable, travelling the tour together and sharing the Zaharias home until Babe died.

With what disease was Babe diagnosed in 1953?

Colon cancer did not keep her quiet or still: when many Americans avoided even seeking a diagnosis, she talked about hers in public and was playing a tournament fourteen weeks after surgery.

Which major did Babe win by twelve strokes in 1954, the year after her cancer surgery?

The U.S. Women's Open was her third and the last of her ten majors; after the operation, doctors had predicted she would never play championship golf again.

Which trophy for lowest scoring average did Babe win for the only time in 1954?

The Vare Trophy was nearly new: fellow founder Betty Jameson had donated it in 1952 in honour of the amateur champion Glenna Collett Vare, and it was first presented in 1953.

What office did Babe hold in the LPGA from 1952 to 1955?

President was her title for three years, which means she led the players' association straight through her own cancer surgery and her return to the tour.

Which book was Babe's 1955 autobiography?

This Life I've Led appeared in 1955, the year she won her last two tournaments and learned her cancer had returned; she died the following September.

Babe's autobiography is three years off on which date?

Her birth was in 1911, as her gravestone and a baptismal certificate show, but her autobiography says 1914, which would have made her 18 at the Olympics rather than 21.

Which occupant of the White House honored Babe's cancer-awareness work when she visited?

Dwight Eisenhower received her as a spokeswoman for the American Cancer Society; in 1955 she and her husband set up a fund in her name that paid for a tumor clinic in Texas.

On ESPN's 1999 ranking of North America's greatest athletes, tenth-placed Babe was the highest-ranked what?

Woman No. 1 on a list headed by Michael Jordan: tenth place overall was a long way from the columnist of her day who wrote that she should stay home, get prettied up and wait for the phone to ring.

In 1999 the Associated Press named Babe the Woman Athlete of which period?

The 20th century crown was voted 43 years after her death, which means the panel ranked her above every woman athlete who had competed since.

Which athlete did Sports Illustrated for Women rank just ahead of Babe on its list of the greatest female athletes?

Jackie Joyner-Kersee, like Babe, was an all-rounder who started on the basketball court: she went to UCLA to play basketball and long jump before the heptathlon made her name.

Which USGA sportsmanship honor did Babe receive posthumously in 1957?

The Bob Jones Award, the USGA's highest honour, was only in its third year; her husband George accepted it four months after her death.

In 1953 Babe won the very first playing of an LPGA tournament that was named after whom?

Herself: the Babe Zaharias Open was staged in her home town in April 1953, and she won it shortly before learning she had cancer.

Which famed sportswriter called Babe "the athletic phenomenon of all time, man or woman"?

Grantland Rice championed her in print from the 1932 Olympics on, and by one account it was at his suggestion that she took up golf in earnest.

Which honor was Babe awarded posthumously on January 7, 2021?

The Presidential Medal of Freedom reached her 64 years after her death, in a single White House ceremony for three golfers; the other two were Annika Sörenstam and Gary Player.

Which Florida Gulf Coast city, Babe's last home, reopened her old golf course under her name in 1974?

Tampa took over a wreck: after her death the course had closed and grown wild, and its clubhouse burned down in 1962, before the city restored it and kept Babe's name on it.

Babe appeared as herself in which 1952 Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn film?

Pat and Mike was written to show off Katharine Hepburn's own athletic skill, and real champions, Babe among them, play themselves as her character's opponents.

Which actress won an Emmy for the 1975 TV movie Babe and married co-star Alex Karras?

Susan Clark and Alex Karras, the former football star who played Babe's husband, married in 1980 and went on to play the adoptive parents in the sitcom Webster.

Emily Deschanel played Babe in a 2014 "Sports Heroes" episode of which Comedy Central series?

Drunk History has storytellers recount true events after a few drinks while actors lip-sync their words; the same episode cast Jason Momoa as Jim Thorpe.