Babe: the Life and Legend of Babe Didrikson Zaharias

Sport History Review,1996,27,96-98 O 1996 Human Kinetics Publishers, Inc.

Babe: TheLife and Legend of Babe Didrikson Zaharias By Susan E. Cayleff. Published 1995 by University of Illinois Press, 1995. (327 PP.)

Reviewed by Joan M. Chandler, School of Arts and Humanities, Univeristy of Texas at Dallas

This book reads so well it is hard to put down. A gift for feminists, its very craftsmanship and fairmindedness make it an important contribu- tion to sport history, even for those who disagree with its premises. From the outset Cayleff makes her intentions clear; this is to be a biography with a purpose. "Three lives are being revealed here, then. Babe's as she lived it, hers as she created it and chose to mythologize it, and my interpretation of her sleight of hand" (p. 5). The "interpretation," however, is to be done in feminist terms, which means that the "center of inquiry" becomes not Babe but "the historical context of women's sport, gender, homophobia, and culturally constructed sex-role expectations" (p. 7). Yet, in spite of her in- tellectual preconceptions, Cayleff cannot escape Babe's spell. Fascinated by her subject, Cayleff gives her readers all the evidence they need to con- ceive Babe's life in quite different terms from those of the author. After a long introduction, Cayleff outlines Babe's life chronologically. Deftly weaving social and oral history into a lively narrative, Cayleff brings to life a woman whose incredible athletic talent was honed by hours of grueling practice. She was a charismatic competitor who had to win but who drew the crowd into her triumphs; a manipulator of friend and foe, but of the press above all, a woman who supported her blood relatives, yet "was at all times the center of her universe" (p. 250). It is an enthralling story, made the more compelling by the amount of work Cayleff did to collect and check her material. Wide reading, thorough interviewing, and judicious analysis allow Cayleff to speak with authority, despite the fact that Babe lied various times and on various official documents. For in- stance, Babe gave her year of birth as 1913,1914,1915, and 1919. In her first paragraph, Cayleff makes clear that Babe was born on June 26,1911 (p. 27). Throughout the book, Cayleff painstakingly exposes the hyperbole, the reinventions, the outright distortion of the truths that have hither-to made up Babe's legend. Yet this is not done in a malicious, let's-show-the- feet-of-clay spirit, for Cayleff's theoretical position is one that allows, even forces, her to regard Babe as a victim of circumstance. Cayleff sees Babe as BOOK REVIEWS 97 a consummate athlete born *ina period when American females were not supposed to excel in sport, a closet lesbian when American sporting heroes were expected to be heterosexual, a,conflicted individual living in an era when the media demanded an optimistic face. But Babe, for Cayleff, is not passive; paradoxically, she is "a national treasure, a press hound, a legend, a path-breaking athlete, a hustler, a sometimes cautious sometimes reck- less woman, and the ultimate queen/king trickster holding court" (p. 266). Impressive, however, as Cayleff's case is, we do not have to interpret Didrikson's life in Cayleff's terms. If we replace gender by class as an ana- lytic category, for instance, Babe's life takes on another dimension. Babe wanted, above all, to spend her life winning sporting contests and to be well paid for doing it. When she realized she stood no hope of parlaying her Olympic medals into a career, she deliberately chose to turn herself into a championship golfer, which promised publicity and "a way up in social standing" (p. 114). Cayleff believes that Babe had to become "un- questionably female" (p. 115) to be an acceptable golf champion; in reality, what she had to do was to leave her uncouth, vulgar background behind. It was by no means simply a matter of feminity; as Bertha Bowen, the doyen of Texas women's golf, raged when the USGA in 1935 refused to allow Babe amateur status, "The fact that she was poor and had no clothes did not mean she had to be ruled a professional" (p. 128). Sportswriters, on whom Babe knew her future depended, wrote approvingly only of women who had upper class manners and mores, not the physical roughness and vulgar language tolerated by the working class. The sports acceptable for women during Babe's lifetime were those that did not include physical contact with other players. Conversely, real American men were supposed to enjoy hitting each other; tennis, until John McEnroe's advent, was a sus- piciously "sissy" sport. Cayleff, however, cannot link gender and class, but only gender and sexuality. It is this link that makes Cayleff ambivalent about Babe's marriage. Insisting that it helped to establish Babe's heterosexuality publicly, Cayleff does acknowledge that "their similar backgrounds meant that initially, at least, their world views, aspirations, and some social graces were similar too" (p. 136). Babe's mate pool must have been small, and George obvi- ously meant more to her than respectability. It was he who made her new career possible as he "supported her and her totally dependent family for three years" (p. 144). But as the years passed and Babe learned how to ~~thelowerm&a~s&ppy,~_ and increasingly embarrassing (p. 199). Strains in their marriage became obvious; Cayleff insists that it was maintained only because Babe could not have remained a respected national figure in the 1950s had she been known as a lesbian. Yet Cayleff's argument that such a relationship existed between Babe and Betty Dodd ultimately rests on innuendo and silence. Interviewed in