Babe Didrikson won a national team title as a team of one
At the 1932 national athletics championships, Mildred Didrikson represented a Dallas insurance company all by herself. She entered eight of the ten events, won five outright and tied for first in another. Her points alone beat every full squad in the meet, and her company took the team championship with a roster of exactly one.
Weeks later, at the Los Angeles Olympics, she won the 80 metre hurdles in 11.7 seconds and the javelin with an Olympic record, and shared the best high jump with teammate Jean Shiley, only to receive silver when her technique was ruled improper. No other track and field athlete, man or woman, has won individual Olympic medals in running, throwing and jumping. Her record from that summer has a dark side too: before the Games she threw water at two Black teammates, Tidye Pickett and Louise Stokes, who were later dropped from the team.
Born in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1911 to Norwegian immigrants, she grew up in Beaumont. She liked to say she earned the nickname Babe, after Babe Ruth, by hitting five home runs in one childhood game, though her mother had called her Bebe since she was a toddler. She sewed her own golf outfits, recorded songs on harmonica, and in 1934 pitched in Major League spring training games, once escaping an inning with a triple play.
Golf became her great sport, though she only took it up around 1935. In 1938 she played a men's professional event, the Los Angeles Open, where she was paired with the wrestler George Zaharias; they married later that year. In 1945 she made the cut in regular PGA Tour events, something no other woman has done. She strung together 17 straight amateur wins, helped found the LPGA in 1950 and won 82 tournaments in all, including 10 majors.
Colon cancer was diagnosed in 1953. She returned after surgery and, a month later, won the 1954 U.S. Women's Open while wearing a colostomy bag. She died in 1956, aged 45, having spent her last years with her close companion, the golfer Betty Dodd.
Source: Babe Didrikson Zaharias
