1932
BABE DIDRIKSON’S UNIFORM
Mildred “Babe” Didrikson was the finest female athlete of the first half of the twentieth century and one of the best ever, male or female. A first-class competitor in three sports—basketball, track-and-field, and golf—she probably could have added more to that list if she had tried. Part of the reason for her wide-ranging excellence, it has to be said, is that the competition was thin. But mostly she was just brilliant.
The daughter of Norwegian immigrants, young Mildred grew up in Beaumont, Texas, surrounded by boys and oil rigs. After hitting five home runs in a sandlot game, she became known locally as “Babe,” a nickname she embraced.1 At an early age, she knew she wanted to be a professional athlete. The problem with that ambition was that there was no such thing for women.
Other than high school basketball, softball teams, and athletic clubs, girls and women who wanted to play sports didn’t have many options. One reason for this was general disdain for the idea of women competing against each other. But another, surprisingly, was that much of the women’s sports establishment agreed. The biggest objection was medical. Tennis, swimming, and golf, in mild doses, were acceptable. Maybe archery. But strenuous exercise, many authorities asserted, would weaken women and quite possibly displace their uteruses or otherwise jeopardize their reproductive capacity.2 Plus, it just wasn’t nice for females to sweat and grunt and do all the things they needed to do to become good athletes.
The International Olympic Committee, which could usually be relied on to be small-minded, wasn’t entirely so in this regard. Having banned women from track-and-field since the founding of the modern games in 1896, the IOC was startled when an enterprising Frenchwoman, Alice Milliat, drew enthusiastic crowds to the Women’s World Games in 1922 and 1926, which featured a dozen track-and-field events. The international athletes performed well, setting numerous world records.
Not willing to see its athletic monopoly eroded, the IOC agreed to add 10 women’s track-and-field events to the 1928 Olympics. (Then it reneged, and offered only five—a breach of faith that so infuriated the British that they refused to send a women’s team.)3 America’s female sports establishment, the Women’s Division of the National Amateur Athletic Federation, was disgusted at the “sacrifice of our school girls on the altar of an Olympic spectacle.”4 The Women’s Division would later campaign against any women’s participation in the Olympics. The group lost that battle, but did manage to banish a great deal of women’s intercollegiate athletic competition in the 1920s in favor of intramurals and insipid “play days.” One does wonder what the good ladies of the Women’s Division were thinking. After all, millions of American women endured endless hours in farms and factories—labor considerably more taxing than, say, throwing a javelin.
Didrikson was probably unaware of all this byplay; Beaumont was several worlds away from the rarefied air of women’s sports politics. Instead, she found her way to the industrial leagues, in which company-sponsored teams played unapologetically competitive sports. These leagues were particularly popular in the South and Midwest. In 1930 the Employers’ Casualty Insurance Company of Dallas hired Didrikson, then 19, mostly to play basketball for the Golden Cyclones (the firm specialized in cyclone insurance). Dressed in sleeveless tops and satin shorts,5 the team drew up to 4,000 spectators to their games. She was an all-American in 1930–1932 and led the team to the national championship in 1931. The company also started a track program, and Didrikson took up the sport with characteristic enthusiasm, training in event after event.
Track was a good fit for Didrikson, whose ego was as prodigious as her talent. She was an accomplished trash talker, with a line of Texas crude that could startle even the grizzled male sportswriters who would later chronicle her career. At this point, however, she was relatively unknown. That would change forever at the Amateur Athletic Association national meet in 1932, which also served as the Olympic qualifying meet. Employers’ Casualty had entered a team of one, Babe Didrikson. Wearing the uniform shown opposite, she entered eight events, won five, tied for first in another, set three world records—and won the team standings easily, all by herself.
At the Los Angeles Olympics, she could only contest three events; women couldn’t stand any more strain than that, the IOC had decided. One reason for this protective attitude was the 800-meter final at the Amsterdam Games in 1928. One eyewitness reported that “knocked out and hysterical females were floundering all over the place”6 at the end of the race. Another reported seeing “11 wretched women, five of whom dropped out before the finish, while five collapsed after reaching the tape.”7
Film of the race, however, shows nothing of the kind. Of the nine runners (not eleven), eight finished; one tripped near the end. There was no flopping or floundering. Three runners broke the world record. “The sensational descriptions are much exaggerated I can assure you,” noted Harold Abrahams, the 100-meter winner in 1924 (of Chariots of Fire fame).8 No matter. The mass collapses of 1928 became conventional wisdom; the 800-meter race was not restored to women until 1960.
So Didrikson entered the 80-meter hurdles, the javelin, and the high jump—a curious combination of events that shows her remarkable athletic range. She won the first two, setting two more world records, and came in second in the high jump, though she also broke the world record in that. (The judges ruled that Didrikson had violated jumping technique; perhaps they, too, wanted to take the braggart down a peg.) Nevertheless, she was the breakout star of the Olympics, crowned as such by no less than famous sportswriter Grantland Rice, who dubbed her “the most flawless section of muscle harmony, of complete mental and physical coordination the world has ever known.”9
To make a living, Didrikson turned to exhibitions and vaudeville, sometimes running on a treadmill to show her speed; she also played a mean harmonica. She toured with the semi-pro House of David baseball team, whose shtick was that they all had beards. It was pretty small-time, but it paid the bills, while keeping her in the public eye.10 And she began to play golf.
Golf may be the sport that least rewards the natural athlete; raw ability will only get a player so far. Didrikson’s golf education began in earnest in 1935, when she went on an exhibition tour with Gene Sarazen, then the top male pro. She pleased the crowds by booming her drives farther than any woman they had ever seen; more important, she soaked up Sarazen’s golfing wisdom. And she practiced—more than anyone, said Sarazen, except maybe Ben Hogan. But she was still stuck. There was no pro tour, and she wasn’t allowed to compete as an amateur because she had already made money from golf (and other sports).
Marriage in 1938 to George Zaharias, a handsome and rich professional wrestler, provided some breathing space. By sitting out paid golf for a while, she could reclaim her amateur status, which she did in 1943. That gave her access to the most prestigious tournaments. After the war, she began to win—and win and win. In 1946–1947, she won 17 of 18 tournaments.11 Perhaps her favorite was in 1947, when she became the first American to win the British Women’s Amateur, held in Scotland. Something about the brash Texan appealed to the Scots, and when she did a Highland fling after the last round, they were entirely won over.
Didrikson went on to become one of the founders of the Ladies Professional Golf Association in 1948, and for a while, her star power was the only thing that kept it going.12 As the tour grew, she made more money than friends, an inevitable consequence of her voluble arrogance.
But the public loved her. She would banter with spectators between shots, and in her broadest Texas drawl say things like “I couldn’t hit an elephant’s ass with a bull fiddle today.”13 Asked how she managed to drive the ball so far, her much-repeated response was: “I just loosen my girdle and let ’er fly!”14
Her success couldn’t last forever, but it ended horribly. In 1953 Didrikson was diagnosed with colon cancer. Showing a courage and determination that left even her detractors awed, she won the US Women’s Open in 1954 by the record margin of 12 strokes—while wearing a colostomy bag under her skirt. But she couldn’t lick cancer. It came back in 1955, and she never played again. She died the following September.
Babe Didrikson might not have been the greatest golfer of her era—a good case can be made for Britain’s Joyce Wethered. And Glenna Collett-Vare, an American whose heyday was in the 1920s, was more dominant than Didrikson for longer.15 Nor was she the first great multisport female athlete. In the early twentieth century, Eleanora Sears, a daughter of Boston privilege and a direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson, played good tennis and was an excellent horsewoman; she was also a race-walker and a squash player. In a unique double, Mary K. Browne reached the semifinals of the US Amateur in both tennis and golf in 1924; she lost to Helen Wills in the tennis and Glenna Collett in the golf. Ora Washington was an eight-time singles winner of the American Tennis Association’s national tournament for African American tennis players; she was also a spectacular basketball player whose team, the Philadelphia Tribune, lost only a handful of games in 18 years.16
Didrikson was gifted, funny, and arrogant. What she wasn’t, was a role model. Many women looked at her muscles and chiseled features and saw a living stereotype of all the awful things sports could do to the female form. Men didn’t like that she was so much better at sports than most of them would ever be. One male pundit quipped that Didrikson played sports because “she cannot compete with other girls in the very ancient and honored sport of man-trapping.”17
The fact that Didrikson was decidedly out of the mainstream meant that her feats did little to draw more women into sports or to change the negative perceptions of athletic women. In 1953 the IOC even considered eliminating all women’s events.18 The evolution in attitudes, women’s among them, toward talented sportswomen, would take decades. What Babe Didrikson did, however, was important. She forced people to recognize that women could be great athletes. And she had a whale of a time doing it.
1932
BABE RUTH’S “CALLED SHOT” BAT
I
t was a legendary moment in a legendary career.
In the fifth inning of the third game of the 1932 World Series against the Chicago Cubs, the score was tied 4–4; the Yankees were up two games to none. The Chicago bench was riding Ruth hard, and the fans had joined in. Two had thrown lemons at him, and a whole bunch had laughed a little too hard when a fly ball skipped past him for two bases.1 Ruth tipped his hat after the miscue. But the fans had also been rude to his wife, Claire, and the insults might have been getting to him. At age 37, Ruth could still turn anger into pulverizing action. During the regular season, he had hit 41 home runs, batted in 133, and hit .341.
Another lemon rolled to his feet, as Ruth clutched his bat near the knob, his feet close together. He took strike one from pitcher Charlie Root, then waved his hand in the general direction of center field. He watched two balls go by. After a called strike two, he repeated the gesture. Root threw his fifth pitch, a curveball that didn’t curve—and Babe clouted it well beyond the center field fence for his fifteenth (and last) World Series home run. He dropped the bat shown opposite, and as he trotted past first base, made rude gestures toward the Cubs bench and some kind of pushing motion as he approached third.2 The Cubs dugout had gone silent.
The next day, the legend began. While many accounts of the game noted the byplay between Root and Ruth, the most widely circulated write-up3 stated that the Babe had pointed to center “so as to call his shot.” It didn’t take long for the tale to become an accepted truth.
Root, of course, said it never happened. If the Babe had been doing any such thing, the pitcher said, the slugger would “have ended up on his ass.”4 Eyewitness testimony was divided. The video evidence is ambiguous.
Ruth himself did not clarify matters. In his 1948 autobiography, he said he hit the ball “in exactly the spot I had pointed to.”5 But in 1933, he was equally definitive: “Hell no,” he told a reporter who asked if he had called the shot. “Only a damn fool would have done a thing like that.”6 In other instances, the Babe was uncharacteristically coy, neither confirming nor denying his intent.
In a sense, it hardly matters. In a sport that treasures its myths, this one was too good to cross-examine. Perhaps the best summation came from Tom Meany, an early biographer: “Whatever the intent of the gesture, the result was, as they say in Hollywood, slightly colossal.”7 Not that Ruth needed the publicity. Widely regarded as the greatest baseball player ever,8 he fundamentally changed the game. Consider: in 1920, his first season with the Yankees, Ruth hit 54 home runs—or more than all but one team.9 And on May 25, 1935, the day he hit his 714th and last home run—the ball featured on the cover of this book—he was hundreds in front of his nearest rivals, Lou Gehrig (378) and Rogers Hornsby (302).
Recognizing the power of power to put runs on the board and fill seats, management and players began to go for the home run in a way that had never happened before. No other player has had that transformative an influence. Ruth still ranks first in slugging percentage and on-base plus slugging percentage; he also has more home run titles (12) and RBI titles (6) than anyone else. Nor has any other player been as versatile. Ruth was a pitcher before he was a slugger, posting a league-best 1.75 earned run average (ERA) in 1916. He compiled a career record of 94–46, with a 2.28 ERA. If he hadn’t made the Hall of Fame as a slugger, he might well have got there as a pitcher. That can be said of no other player.
1935
PROGRAM FROM THE FIRST NIGHT BASEBALL GAME
T
he Negro Leagues did it. The minor leagues did it. Football did it. But long after night play was routine in other contexts, major league baseball would not allow the lights to go on.
The reasons given were ludicrous. Games couldn’t start until the sky was pitch black. Teams would have to pay two sets of players, one for day, one for night, because no one could be expected to play under such different conditions.1 “The disturbed and misanthropic fan,” argued the Sporting News, “will not sleep well after a night game.”2 Most important, though, was that baseball’s leaders just didn’t like the idea. If God had intended baseball to be played under the lights, the Almighty would have let them know. The only good reason not to do it came from outfielder and bon vivant “Turkey Mike” Donlin back in 1909, when the idea was first floated: “Jesus! Think of taking a ballplayer’s nights away from him!”3
In 1935, however, night baseball debuted for reasons that trumped theology, tradition, and even the sanctity of the family dinner: money. The Great Depression had hit the game hard. In 1929, the 16 major league teams drew 4.7 million fans; by 1933, that was down to 2.9 million.4 The owners were hurting.5
Larry MacPhail, president of the Cincinnati Reds, had seen how night baseball had saved the minors.6 With the Reds attracting fewer than 5,000 fans per game, it was time to shake things up. So on the night of May 24, 1935, with the middling Reds playing the even-worse Philadelphia Phillies, President Franklin D. Roosevelt pushed a button to light a million watts—and sparked the biggest change to baseball since pitchers were allowed to throw overhand. That night’s program (which cost 10 cents) marked the moment, with a prominent advertisement on the cover from the company that provided the light (see the photo). The Reds, remember, were desperate for revenue.
That first year, Cincinnati was allowed one night game against each of the other National League teams. In those seven contests, it attracted an average of 18,571 fans.7 MacPhail estimated that one night game alone, which attracted 33,468 fans, brought in almost enough revenue to offset the entire cost of installing the lights.8
By any standard, the experiment was a success; there were no complaints about the quality of light, and the play was sharp. But there was still a sense that it was a little undignified. It was not until June 1938 that a second team installed lights—the Brooklyn Dodgers, also run by MacPhail. It worked there, too—39,000 fans saw Johnny Vander Meer throw a second consecutive no-hitter in Brooklyn’s night debut. The American League flatly banned night play through 1938, but the Philadelphia Athletics and the Cleveland Indians gave it a go the following year; Cleveland drew 55,000 fans its first night. In 1940 the St. Louis Browns joined the queue.9
By 1941, 11 of the 16 teams were playing night games,10 and during the war, the number allowed was increased to serve day-shift workers in defense industries.11 After the war, the remaining holdouts gave in—with one exception. The Cubs had light towers all but ready to go in 1942. Then management donated them to the war effort. It would take another 46 years for the lights to go on at Wrigley Field.12
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