Babe Didrikson Zaharias - The OG
TRACK & FIELD - OLYMPICS - GOLF - LPGA
BASEBALL - SOFTBALL - BASKETBALL
ARCHETYPE: THE OG
Day 77/135
Athletic Accomplishments
Mildred Ella “Babe” Didrikson Zaharias. It’s quite a name for quite an athlete that most of us never had the chance to see compete.
Zaharias gained international recognition as THE single best athlete of her time. She was good at things like diving, roller-skating, and bowling. But those were nothing compared to her world-class status playing golf, basketball, baseball, and track and field.
The Didrikson family immigrated to the United States from Norway, where they had Mildred. While her Norwegian mother called the child “Bebe” as a toddler, Babe claimed that she earned the nickname after Babe Ruth, thanks to crushing five homers in a childhood baseball game. You gotta love the swagger.
As a track athlete, Babe won the 1932 national AAU championships BY HER DAMN SELF. The sole representative of Employers Casualty, she competed in eight of the ten meet events, scoring 30 points, eight more than the runner-up team, which had 22 athletes. You want to talk about a flex?
At the 1932 Olympics, she set four world records and won three medals: two golds (80 m hurdles and javelin) and one silver (high jump). She remains the only athlete to ever win individual Olympic medals in a running, throwing, and jumping event.
She was also an exceptional golfer, winning a total of 82 golf tournaments, including 17 straight amateur victories, and every golf title available in 1950, when she became a founding member of the LPGA.
For all her talents, the Associated Press named Didrikson Zaharias the Female Athlete of the Year six times (1932, 1945, 1946, 1947, 1950, 1954). In 1976, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, and in 1977, the LPGA Hall of Fame.
In 2021, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom..
Character Archetype: The OG
Born in 1911, Babe Didrikson Zaharias is by far the earliest athlete on the 135 Challenge roster. But after winning three Olympic track and field gold medals, 10 LPGA majors, and competing at a world-class level in basketball, softball, baseball, and softball, you cannot talk about women’s sports without including this multisport phenom. When asked if there was anything she didn't play, she said, "Yeah, dolls."
She was named the 10th Greatest North American Athlete of the 20th Century by ESPN. Pretty elite, considering the 9 people above her are all men, and that only 8 women on the entire 100-person list are women.
My point is not to complain about women’s lack of inclusion on a 20th Century list. But rather to point out women’s lack of inclusion in sport in the 20th Century, period. Perhaps I’ll let sportswriter Joe Williams of the New York World-Telegram sum up his thoughts on Zaharias:
“It would be much better if she and her ilk stayed at home, got themselves prettied up and waited for the phone to ring.”
Do you even understand what kind of a woman you’d have to be—in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s—to endure this kind of smug patriarchal bullshit and still show up every day trying to get better?
Do you know how undeniably good you’d have to be for the sports media—still 89 percent male—to put you in the Top 10?
Zaharias is the OG baller. The originator of the talk shit and back it up club. The mother of all dragons. When we talk about standing on the shoulders of giants, Babe Zaharias is the tallest of them all.