Welcome to "Tuesday Morning"—always containing words of encouragement for Christians everywhere.

 

Periodically I like to write an essay celebrating the achievements of an outstanding athlete. This week is one of those times.  Her name was Mildred Ella "Babe" Didrikson (1911-1956). Name a sport that is adaptable to women athletes, and the "Babe" tried it. Apparently tennis was not high on her list; if it had been, she would have been a champion. But other sports—track and field, basketball, baseball, softball, swimming, figure skating, billiards, and golf? She did them all. She competed in the 1932 Olympics and came away with medals in three individual events. She played golf as an amateur and later a professional. She helped found the Ladies Professional Golf Association. If you like sports, you will really like her story. It's a story for people who strive for excellence.

 

The theme of this week's "TM" is "Hit the Ball." It is attached below. Continue reading whenever you are ready to be inspired by the life of a champion.

 

Tom Barnard

A Senior Encourager

 

P.S. October is Pastor Appreciation Month. How will your congregation honor your ministerial staff?

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Hit the Ball!

Tom Barnard

 

ome of my best friends are golfers. Weather permitting; they schedule their time to play golf multiple times each week. None of them has seriously asked me to join them. If I were them, I wouldn’t invite me either. I don’t play the game. I tried it once—45 years ago. It was a disaster. However, I have learned a few principles about playing golf. Principle One: Hit the ball. If you can’t hit the ball, try another sport. (More on that subject below).

 

One of my favorite sports heroes was Babe Didrikson Zaharias. Babe was one of the world’s greatest female athletes. Born on June 26, 1911, her given name was Mildred Ella Didriksen. (She later changed the spelling of her last name to Didrikson). She was the sixth of seven children born to her parents in the oil city of Port Arthur, Texas.  Her father, Ole, and her mother, Hannah, were immigrants from Norway.

 

She claimed to have acquired the nickname “Babe” (for Babe Ruth) after hitting five home runs in a “boys” pick-up baseball game as a child. The nickname stuck. A little-known fact about this athlete is that she was an excellent seamstress, making many of the clothes she wore when she played golf. She won the sewing championship at the State Fair of Texas in 1931. She did not attend college.

 

Following her graduation from high school, Babe was employed by Employers Casualty Company of Dallas and played on the company’s semiprofessional women’s basketball team. Between 1930 and 1932 she led the team to two finals and a national championship. Because of her exceptional athletic skills her company decided to expand its women’s sports programs beyond basketball, offering their employees the opportunity to participate in amateur track and field events.

 

In 1932 Babe entered the AAU championships as a one-woman team, placing in seven events—the shot-put, javelin, and baseball throws; 80-meter hurdles; long jump; high jump; and discus throw. She singlehandedly earned 30 points, eight more than the entire second-place team—and in the process, she broke four world records. She qualified for the 1932 summer Olympics, where she again broke world records in three events—the javelin throw, high hurdles, and high jump. However, because she used an unorthodox style in the high jump, her gold-medal jump was reduced to a silver-medal.

 

In addition to her exceptional skills in track and field and basketball, Babe also excelled in softball, swimming, figure skating, billiards, golf, and even football.

 

Babe made a living by conducting exhibition tours and accepting endorsements for money, and as a result she was declared ineligible for amateur events for about ten years. In 1943 she regained her amateur standing in golf and went on to win seventeen consecutive tournaments, including the British Women’s Championship in 1947. She turned professional later that year, and in 1948 she helped found the Ladies Professional Golf Association and was the LPGA’s leading money winner from 1949 to 1951. In 1950 she was voted the Woman Athlete of the Half-Century by the Associated Press.

 

In 1953 a colostomy revealed that Didrikson had cancer. She still was determined to play golf, winning five tournaments in 1954. She died at John Sealy Hospital on September 27, 1956, at the age of forty-five. A year before her death she and her husband George Zaharias established the Babe Zaharias Trophy to honor outstanding female athletes. One of her most famous golfing quotes is this one:

 

“That little white ball won’t move until you hit it, and there’s nothing you can do after it is gone.”

 

In sports, and in life, being a spectator won’t win championships. To be successful in anything, a person must step up to the ball and swing away—and hit it. All the principles of success will not move you forward, until you do. Principles are fine, but performance is the thing by which success is measured.