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The only door inside the house is to the bedroom where George sleeps in a double bed and Babe in a single bed. She hates doors: "They clutter up the place." Scattered around the living room, bedroom and bathroom is a vast collection of tarnished trophies and medals, which, if melted down, would almost equal the combined weights of Babe and her hefty husband. "I've been meaning to put them under glass," Babe says.
Babe Didrikson was the sixth of seven children born to Ole Didrikson, a Norwegian ship's carpenter who sailed 19 times around the Horn before settling down in Port Arthur, Texas. A scrawny youngster, she rebelled against femininity; women were "sissies who wore girdles, bras and that junk." Instead of wasting time with dolls, Mildred Ella Didrikson exercised on a backyard weight-lifting machine built of broomsticks and her mother's flatirons. She beat boys at mumblety-peg, whizzed past them in foot races and razzle-dazzled them in basketball. Still in her teens, she burst into the headlines as the hit of the 1932 Olympic Games, winning the javelin throw and the 80-meter hurdles. She disdained lipstick, plastered her hair back, talked out of the side of her mouth with a thick Texas drawl and riveted reporters with such remarks as: "Are you the guy who took pictures of my feet in Jersey?"
WHEN she decided to concentrate on golf, she tightened up her game by driving as many as 1,000 golf balls a day and playing until her hands were so sore they had to be taped. She developed an aggressive, dramatic style, hitting down sharply and crisply on her iron shots like a man and averaging 240 yards off the tee. If a woman rival uses a six iron for a shot, Babe will likely as not use an eight out of sheer vanity. Once, when a man chivalrously offered her the honor in teeing off, she withered him with, "Naw, you better hit first cause it'll be the last time you get the honor—and you'd better bust a good one if you don't want to be outdrove 20 yards by a gal."
One day in 1938, George Zaharias, who had met Babe a year before when they were both playing in a golf tournament, looked into her eyes and said, "We get married on Friday or we're through." They got married on Friday.
Babe tried to stop bragging and boasting. She made George give up wrestling. She began giving herself home permanents ("I just follow the directions on the box"). With housewifely zest, she pitched into making curtains and raising flowers. But even in the garden there was competition. "I know I can't make my flowers grow any faster," she said, "but I want them to be the prettiest and the healthiest."^ In line with her determination to be a "grownup married woman and not a 14-year-old javelin thrower," she concentrated on golf hoping that some of its gentler graces would rub off on her. Some did.
As the best player and biggest draw in women's golf, Babe stopped wearing a chip on her shoulder. Instead of greeting all rivals with, "Yep, I'm gonna beat you," she began encouraging the younger girls on the circuit and established a working friendship with the older ones. When George is not traveling the circuit with her, she often rooms with Patty Berg, who has been her chief adversary for years.