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Didrikson Zaharias: A Brief Biography

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Mildred “Babe” Didrikson Zaharias was a very well known and talented woman. She broke many olympic records and achieved more points than a whole entire second place team could have ever achieved in the 1932 Olympics. All around she was an amazing athlete and a very inspirational woman. Babe was born on June 26, 1911 in Port Arthur,Texas. That exact date was the day there was a huge blast on a barge in Port Arthur. Babe was the sixth of seven children to be born by Norwegian immigrants Ole Nickolene and Hannah Marie (Olson) Didrikson. In 1915 her family moved to Beaumont, Texas where a deadly hurricane hit and her brother Arthur Storm was born. 1915 was also the part of Babe’s life where she started to become a skilled athlete on some rustic equipment her father gave her brother and sisters. Babe actually got her nickname from sandlot games she would play with neighborhood boys who thought she batted like Babe Ruth. By high school, around 1930, she became very talented and that is when she got recruited to Spark’s, a company’s semi professional women’s basketball team. Between 1930 and 1932 she led the Golden Cyclones to two finals and a national championship where they were voted All-American each …show more content…

Later on her life she found another sport that she grew a fascination for, Golf! Since golf was one of the few sports that didn’t accommodates women, she made up her mind to become a championship player. Her first tournament was the Fort Worth Women's Invitational in November 1932; at her second, the Texas Women's Amateur Championship the following April, she captured the title. On December 23, 1938 Babe was married to a man named George Zaharias, who she met when she qualified for Los Angeles Open, a men's Professional Golfers' Association

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