BABE IN THE WOODS

She came storming out of east Texas like a whirlwind, a raw-boned tomboy with more than enough braggadocio to go with her matchless athleticism, commanding Olympian headlines in 1932 and holding the spotlight as the world’s greatest female golfer for 25 years.

Mildred “Babe” Didrikson was one of a kind. Simply the greatest.

She might have been a product of Beaumont, Texas, but the canvas on which her portrait was painted was the city of Los Angeles.

It was here, in the summer of 1932, that she captivated the world by making outlandish statements about how good she was, proving it, and then bragging that she was even better than that.

“I came out here to beat everybody in sight and that’s just what I’m going to do,” she said on the eve of the Olympic Games. “The rest of ‘em are playing for second place.”

On opening day in the Coliseum, she won the javelin throw with a world record of 143 feet 4 inches, nearly a foot beyond the old record.

“My hand slipped, else I might have throwed it 155,” she said, matter-of-factly.

Three days later, in the 80-meter hurdles, she tied the world record of 11.8 seconds in a heat, then came back to win in a photo finish, beating Evelyne Hall in a record 11.7. When Hall protested that she had won, the Babe snapped, “Shucks, I slowed down a little to make it a good race.”

Her third and final event, the high jump, turned the trash-talking Texan into a more lovable personality. She lost in a jump-off for the gold medal to Jean Shiley, an honor student from Temple University, after they had tied at a world-record height of 5 feet 53/4 inches.

Didrikson used the western roll, Shiley the scissors. In the jump-off, Didrikson was disqualified for diving over the bar.

She refused to alibi, saying only, “I think they should have at least warned me earlier in the jumping. You don’t change your form in the middle of an event. But it’s OK with me. Miss Shiley is a great high jumper.”

In less than a week, Babe Didrikson had gone from a virtually unknown teenager to an international celebrity who gave a Depression-weary public something to cheer about. There was no TV in those days, but radio reports and newspaper tales of her exploits were gobbled up. She was a media darling.

The Babe never lacked for something to say.

“They wouldn’t let me in but three events. I’d win ‘em all and break all their records if they’d let me,” she said in a headline-grabber.

Not exactly.

Two weeks earlier in Chicago in the national AAU meet, which served as the Olympic trials, she had finished fourth in the discus and had not entered the 100, so was ineligible for those events.

However, in that meet, she had also won the shotput, long jump and baseball throw, besides the javelin, hurdles and high jump, scoring 30 points and winning the national championship for the Golden Cyclones of the Employers Casualty Insurance Co. of Dallas. As a one-woman team, she upset defending champion Illinois Athletic Club and its 22 competitors.

Thus, in winning the five Olympic events, she qualified for each of them, but the rules limited her to three, so she chose the three in which she had set world records.

Women in sports were not high priorities in the nation’s press at that time, so it was not until she burst onto the scene at the Coliseum that the world took notice of Didrikson.

It was also here that she began her golfing career.

In an interview with Grantland Rice, then the dean of sports columnists, she mentioned that she wanted to be a golfer, adding that she had played a few times in Dallas and had shot an 82.

The skeptical journalists, apparently forgetting that she had backed up her bragging in the Olympics, called her bluff.

“Frankly, we doubted the young lady’s veracity,” wrote Braven Dyer in the Los Angeles Times. But Paul Gallico of the New York Daily News suggested they arrange for a game with her at Brentwood Country Club.

She played with four men, all of whom were better than average golfers, so it came as a shock when Didrikson ripped her first drive about 15 yards past their best.

“The Texas girl hit one of the best drives I ever saw at Brentwood, and I’ve played there plenty,” Dyer wrote in The Times. “The ball sailed straight down the middle at least 250 yards.”

That match, she said later, inspired her to become a full-time golfer. Typically, she announced a week later that she planned to enter the U.S. Amateur that summer. It never happened.

A Beaumont car dealer had placed an advertisement in a hometown newspaper, using her picture--without solicitation--as an endorsement. The AAU declared her a professional, in much the same manner it had taken Jim Thorpe’s Olympic decathlon medal from him in 1912 for accepting $5 after playing in a semipro baseball game.

The ban not only prevented her from golf, but also from track and field, basketball and other sports.

In 1935, still frustrated after dabbling in such sideshows as playing infield for the bearded House of David baseball team and playing her harmonica while running on a treadmill in vaudeville houses, she decided she would work on her golf game. After four months of practice with professional Stan Kertes, she entered a tournament in Texas. She won, defeating medalist Peggy Chandler in the final.

“We really don’t need any truck drivers’ daughters in our tournament,” Chandler said haughtily.

The Texas Women’s Golf Assn. sent a letter to the U.S. Golf Assn., protesting that Didrikson was still a professional. The old Dodge endorsement had hit her again.

This time her response was to sign a $5,000 contract with the Wilson sporting goods company and do an exhibition tour with Gene Sarazen.

In January of 1938, she was back in Los Angeles for what was to become another landmark date in her life.

She entered the Los Angeles Open at Griffith Park, making headlines as the first woman to play in a men’s professional tournament. She was paired with George Zaharias, wrestling’s “Crying Greek from Cripple Creek,” and C. Pardee Erdman, a professor of religion at Occidental and a low-handicap amateur.

An item in The Times noted that it was “a strange sight to see former champions Jimmy Hines and Vic Ghezzi tramping along without a soul to gallery them while the mob trails La Didrikson, Zaharias and Prof. Erdman.”

Babe shot 84-81 and missed the cut. But she found a husband. From Griffith Park, she and Zaharias went dancing at the Cotton Club, fell in love and before the year was out were married.

“He just wrapped me in those big ol’ arms of his and I melted,” she said of the 300-pound Zaharias.

Zaharias persuaded her to get her amateur status back and return to playing golf. After petitioning the USGA, she was told she must sit out three years without playing, either as an amateur or a professional.

She did and it was in L.A. that she made her tournament debut as a recovered amateur, playing in the Women’s Southern California Golf Assn.’s Midwinter tournament at Los Angeles Country Club. She defeated Clara Callender Sherman of Annandale, 4 and 3, in the final. On the 10th hole, 405 yards and uphill, she used a driver and a six-iron for an eagle 2.

By the end of 1947 there was little challenge left for her. She had won 14 consecutive tournaments, embarrassed Clara Sherman, 11 and 9, in the U. S. Amateur final and been named woman athlete of the year three successive years by the Associated Press.

With Patty Berg, Betty Jameson and Louise Suggs, she helped form the LPGA and began a second career as a professional. She won the U.S. Women’s Open in 1948 and in the first two years of the LPGA, she won 13 of 23 tournaments, among them her second Women’s Open in 1950.

Often asked how she hit the ball so far, she loved to grin and say, “I just loosen my girdle and let the ball have it.”

Life was good for her and George. They built a home in Tampa, Fla., where she took up bowling and rolled a 268-234-214-- 716 series.

In 1950, she and George began to notice that she was tired a lot and had to struggle to finish tournaments. After winning the Babe Zaharias Open in Beaumont with a birdie on the final hole, she checked into a hospital the next day.

She was found to have cancer, underwent an emergency colostomy and spent 43 days in the hospital--with her golf clubs sitting in a corner of her room. Three months after the operation, she played in the Tam O’Shanter Open and was awarded the Ben Hogan Trophy for comeback of the year.

A year later, she won the U.S. Women’s Open by 12 strokes.

“This will tell people not to be afraid of cancer,” she said. “This is for those 15,000 letters I got. I’ll go on golfing for another 20 years.”

Sadly, though, the Babe had run out of miracles. She was soon back in the hospital and on Sept. 17, 1956, she died in Augusta, Ga., at 45.