Babe

by Don Van Natta Jr.

Mildred Ella Babe Didrikson Zaharias has, in many ways, become America’s all-but-forgotten sports superstar. And nowhere is Didrikson’s faded sporting legacy felt more powerfully than here in her hometown, where she hopped hedges along Doucette Street and learned how to play golf at Beaumont Country Club.

Off Interstate 10, a modest, circular brick museum, built in 1976 as a tribute to Babe, is easy to miss. Its smudged glass cases are stocked with the loot collected during Didrikson’s fabulous sporting life: the medals, trophies, golf clubs and get-well telegrams and letters, from housewives and schoolchildren, prime ministers and presidents, now yellowed and fading. It is open every day except Christmas.

On a good day, the museum attracts a handful of visitors. On many days, though, no one steps foot inside.

At a local awards dinner this month for gifted high school golfers, only two winners said they had visited Babe Didrikson’s museum. Even in her own backyard, the young golfers now prowling the courses where Didrikson learned the game barely know her name.

“Every time I tell her story, people have trouble believing everything she was able to do during her life,” said Beaumont’s mayor pro tem, W. L. Pate Jr., the president of the Babe Didrikson Zaharias Foundation. “And she did so much in so little time.”

Didrikson died of cancer at 45 on Sept. 27, 1956, and she was buried here, at Forest Lawn Cemetery. On a memorial near her burial site, there is the old Grantland Rice line about how winning and losing are not what matters but rather how one played the game.

It is unclear how the lines came to be engraved into the stone. What is clear is Didrikson never subscribed to them.

“I don’t see any point in playing the game if you don’t win,” she often said. “Do you?”

But if her name may mean increasingly little to a young generation of sports fans, Didrikson, who was born 100 years ago, was perhaps America’s greatest all-around athlete, male or female.

No athlete excelled at more sports and games than Didrikson. She was an all-American basketball player, a two-time Olympic track and field gold medalist and a golf champion who won 82 tournaments, including an astonishing 14 in a row. One of the 13 founding members of the L.P.G.A., Didrikson became the first woman to play against men in a PGA Tour event and the first American to win the British Women’s Amateur Championship. She was also an outstanding baseball, softball, tennis and billiards player, diver and bowler.

Read more: