This Life I’ve Led: My Autobiography by Babe Didrikson Zaharias as told to Harry Paxton Originally published in the United States in 1955 by A.S. Barnes and Company (New York). Published on the same day in the Dominion of Canada by The Copp Clark Company Ltd (Toronto). Illustrations/photos used in the original editions of this work are not included herein. This Life I Have Led: My Autobiography by Babe Didrikson Zaharias is in the public domain in the United States of America and other nations. Within the US, this work may be freely copied and distributed, as no individual or corporation holds a copyright on the body of the work. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 55-10217 In memory of my mother and father, and to my husband, George, without whom there never would have been a life to lead. Preface You might suppose offhand that Babe Didrikson Zaharias is too well-known to require any introduction. Actually this isn’t the case. To be sure, even people who never look at the sports pages can identify her as a superwoman athlete. And everybody is sympathetically aware of her valiant struggle against cancer. But only a comparative few have been in a position to know that she is also something out of the ordinary as a person. Hundreds of newspaper reporters, among others, have made this pleasant discovery at different places around the country during the past two decades. The Babe would come to their town for some tournament or personal appearance. They would be assigned to interview her. They would go out expecting, as often as not, to meet a hard- shelled muscle woman. They would find instead one of the most exuberantly warm and openhearted human beings ever to turn up on the sports beat. Yet their stories about the Babe, being necessarily limited in scope and space, seldom have conveyed the full flavor and dimensions of her personality. A news reporter must, as a rule, concentrate on some one angle. He sifts out the most striking and pertinent “quotes,” In the Babe’s case, this sort of highlighting is inadequate to give the picture. The truth is that Babe Didrikson Zaharias is more than just a sports figure. And her life has been much more than just a sports story. This writer has done many biographical pieces about prominent athletes, and helped a number of others to tell their own stories. Always the effort is to get beneath the surface and bring ones subject to life. Most of the time it is an effort, calling for intensive digging not only with the man himself, but also with people close to him. Some great athletes are too shy and introverted to talk much about themselves. Some are too inarticulate. A few just don’t have much to say; they are pretty commonplace individuals when considered apart from their sports specialties. There are others who do respond freely and fully to searching questions. A handful, such as Leo Durocher, can be real spellbinders. But the writer never has worked with anyone in sports who “gave” so unreservedly as the Babe. At each slight prod she would be off and running, volunteering her every thought and emotion about the topic up for discussion. When preparation of this autobiography began, Babe said, “If Tm going to tell the story of my life, the thing for me to do is relive it.” And she didFor instance, when you come to the chapter relating how she was sent to Chicago as a onegirl track team to try and win the national women’s championship singlehanded, you will read this passage: “It came time to announce my ‘team.* I spurted out there all alone, waving my arms, and you never heard such a roar. It brought out goose bumps all over me. I can feel them now, just thinking about it.” Well, Babe was sitting in her Florida home when she said these words, and wearing her usual around-the-house attire of shorts and blouse. She paused for a moment and looked down at herself. Sure enough, she had been “reliving” that moment so completely that her bare arms and legs were covered with gooseflesh. There was no subject on which the Babe said, “I’d rather not get into that,” or, “Let’s leave that out/’ She never stopped to calculate her words so as to put the best possible construction on potentially controversial matters. On aU phases of her life, the details flowed out with the characteristic spontaneity of this woman who doesn’t try to fool anybody including herself, In line with this, a short explanation is in order on how this book came into being. For years people had been telling Babe Zaharias, “You should write your memoirs. YouVe had such an unusual life.” And she had kept answering, “I’ll never have the time for it.” She probably never would have had the time to do a thoroughgoing job if it had been necessary for her to put the whole thing in manuscript form herself. What made this book possible was that modern improvement on the old-fashioned ghost writer the tape recorder. Most public figures with interesting and significant lives to talk about do need some specialized assistance in preparing their stories for publication. Unfortunately, the subject’s words and thoughts often are diluted considerably in transmission through a collaborator. This is particularly regrettable when the subject is a person of genuine individuality, such as Babe Didrikson Zaharias. So when her good friend and business agent, Fred Corcoran, flashed the word last winter, “Babe’s ready to tell her story now/’ it was promptly decided that she should tell it in the presence of a tape recorder. As she re-created her life stage by stage reminiscing out loud for hours at a time, day after day the machine was there to capture precisely all her words and opinions and attitudes. Nothing was left to the fallible memory and notebook of the collaborator. In assembling it all on paper, he worked with pure ore. So this is the Babe’s own story, told in her own natural, informal and vivid style of expressing herself. It is as revealing as utter candor can make it, although she indulges in no hand-wringing self -analysis. That wouldn’t be the Babe. She isn’t the type for repressions and neuroses. She doesn’t lock up her troubles inside herself. Her problems always are out in the open. She doesn’t brood about them. She acts on them. If there is anything you don’t understand about the Babe when you have finished this book, it won’t be because she tried to hold things back. She doesn’t draw many conclusions about herself, but the various facets of her character are implicit in her personal testimony. For example, take the big question: What made her such a phenomenal athlete? Was she born that way? You will see from the evidence that although she was a “natural” with great innate ability, it by no means followed automatically that she should become the champ. Read about how she kept drilling for her first important golf tournament until there was “tape all over my hands, and blood all over the tape/* They say in sports that “the best athlete is the hungry athlete.” You will find that this applies to the Babe in the sense that she knew financial insecurity as a child. However, she had security in the broader sense that the child psychologists talk about she grew up in an exceptionally close-knit and affectionate household. This is clear from Babe’s fond reminiscences about her Norwegian-born Momma and Poppa, and her sk brothers and sisters. It has been reflected throughout her life in her cheerful, friendly outlook on the world and everybody in it. You will realize also that some of her remarks which sound boastful when taken out of context actually are plain statements of the truth as she sees it. Frank Graham, the distinguished New York sports columnist, has remarked that in this respect Babe reminds him of baseball’s Roger Hornsby a quite different personality in other ways. Each has an outspoken honesty that is uninhibited either by vainglory or false modesty. Each lays it right on the line, without striving for any calculated effect. The Babe doesn’t pretend to be anything more than what she is. Nor does she pretend to be anything less. When she speaks of her skills, she does so without preening herself or getting belligerently insistent. She is relaxed about it. Her tone is matter-of-fact. Most of the work on this book was done during a period in the spring of 1955 when the Babe was taking what she regarded as a rest. She had been feeling a bit fatigued, and had decided to take several weeks off from the golf tournament circuit. This would be a good time for the autobiography, she thought, and also for the Zahariases to move into their brand-new Tampa home, on which final touches still were being made. When she wasn’t pouring her life story into the tape recorder, she was busy superintending and often working with assorted electricians and other installation men. Some rest curel At that, it was a comparative breathing spell for this hyperactive gal who always has lived and worked at a furious morning-to-night pace. In the course of spending many days with the Zahariases, the collaborator could see for himself the validity of many of the things the Babe was bringing out in her memoirs, There was the easy oneness that existed between the Babe and her husband George.