This is how it works if you want to play professional golf. You play through childhood, win every local thing you can find, get into the qualifying system, play until you’re blind and score consistently well. Get your card, go out there, and do your best to keep it, much less win something. It’s a specialized résumé, and doesn’t allow a lot of energy to be spent elsewhere.
So, how’s this for a golfer’s CV? Mildred Ella “Babe” Didrikson Zaharias, the sixth of seven children from Norwegian immigrants in Port Arthur Texas, won the 1931 Southeast Texas Fair seamstress competition as an early competitor – that was after dropping out of the eighth grade to play basketball in Dallas.
This great pillar of the LPGA wasn’t done, though. A self-taught singer and harmonica player, she released a group of songs on Mercury Records, and her biggest seller was “I Felt a Little Teardrop.” Music’s a tough profession, too, just like golf. So far, however, that’s the only parallel.
Becoming a basketball All-American and track & field star, Babe played competitive baseball, was a first-rate diver, roller skater and bowler on her way to winning two golds and a silver in the L.A. Olympics. Continuing to play basketball for the Golden Cyclones, an “industrial” team, and winning most of her events in the Amateur Athletic Union Championships (setting world records in javelin, hurdles, high jump and baseball throw), Babe Didrikson certainly seemed on track for a stellar golf career – not.
In the following years, she toured on the vaudeville circuit with her own basketball team, and spent some time in competitive pocket-billiards before finally picking up a golf club and saying, “Well well…what’s this?” As a female celebrity invited to a men’s golf tournament, she wasn’t that far from making the cut, and at least went home with one of the golfers as Babe Didrikson Zaharias. Her husband was a professional wrestler and part-time actor. Hey, love is love – don’t try to understand it.
That still doesn’t fit the formula of a pro golfer, though, does it? Babe turned pro in 1947, and died only a few years later of colon cancer in 1956. By that time, she’d become the first female golfer to make the cut in a men’s event, backtracked to amateur status by swearing off every other sport for three years and winning everything there was to win (including the first British Women’s Open won by an American). She won the Grand Slam for women, received the Vare Trophy and the Bob Jones Award, and was named “Female Athlete of the Year” six times. Her total of 82 tournament wins is astonishing for such a short time span, some of which was spent under a cloud of illness, and her flamboyant personality broke it all open for women, with such force that resistant men would never be able to put the genie back in the bottle.
And, there were certainly some resistant men, including sportswriter Joe Williams, who suggested that it would be better if “she and her ilk stayed at home, got themselves prettied up, and waited for the phone to ring.” More enlightened writers such as Grantland Rice spoke of her “flawless muscle harmony” and “the best mental and physical coordination the world of sports has ever seen.”
It was an unusual way to become a pro golfer, to be sure, and it may not be generally viable in the modern day. So, for the local chess champion who spends her time weaving baskets and playing the accordion, but dreams of a career in golf, I’d get to the driving range right away. Not many people are going to get away with it the way Babe did.
