Legacies: A History Journal for Dallas and North Central Texas, Volume 6, Number 1, Spring, 1994 Page: 34
This periodical is part of the collection entitled: Legacies: a History Journal for Dallas and North Central Texas and was provided to The Portal to Texas History by the Dallas Historical Society.
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Five Dallas Athletes
her track suit in a taxi on the way to the stadium. In
the space of the next three hours, Didrickson placed
in seven of the eight events she entered, and she won
five of the seven. Her one woman show dethroned
the defending champion Chicago Evening American
team which had seventeen to twenty-two athletes
competing.
The AAU national championship also served
as the Olympic trials. Under Olympic rules,
Didrickson was limited to entering three events at
the games. She chose the 80-meter hurdles, the
javelin throw, and the high jump, three of the five
events she had won at the AAU championship. At
the Olympic Games, Didrickson bettered the existing
world records in all three events. Yet she received
only two medals when a judge ruled that she
had illegally dived over the high jump bar. Forced to
make do with her second best height, Didrickson
took home a second place silver medal in the high
jump.
Returning to Dallas two days after winning
the javelin competition, Didrickson displayed the
kind of "aw shucks" demeanor expected of the era's
sport heroes. Only after much questioning would
she admit that the judge who disqualified her world
high jump was the same judge with whom she had
had problems at the AAU championship. And yes,
she had used the same jumping technique to good
effect at the AAU. She refused to express any enmity
toward the judge.
She certainly sparked the city's imagination.
An editorial in the August 11, 1932, Dallas Morning
News read in part:
along comes a youngster in her teens who
is so obviously skilled in sports at which
only men ordinarily excel that by concentrating on a few instead of many, it is
probable she could compete on even terms
with the best men. If that prospect seems
over-optimistic, it is difficult to place Miss
Didrickson in competition. Certainly she is
too good for her own sex. Perhaps she
supplies the proof that the comparatively
recent turn of women to strenuous field
sports is developing a new super-physique
in womanhood, an unexpected outcome of
suffragism which goes in for sports as well
as politics and threatens the old male supremacy
even in the mere routine of making
a living.
Turning to golf soon after the Olympics,
Didrickson won her first tournament in 1934. Among
her other accomplishments to come would be eightytwo
more tournament victories. She quickly outgrew
the stage in Dallas, and the city willingly gave
her up to the nation.
But Babe Didrickson never forgot her day in
Dallas. Years later, as she battled the cancer that
soon would take her life on September 27, 1956,
Didrickson still remembered her Olympic parade
down Main Street: "That was my greatest thrill,"
she said. "I was just a girl and that was really
something."
Sources: The Dallas Morning News, August 12, 1932,
August 22, 1932, September 27 and 28, 1956, October 7,
1956, June 6, 1989, June 23, 1991; Dallas Times Herald,
August 13,1932; Mary Beth Rogers, Sherry A. Smith, and
Janelle D. Scott, We Can Flv (Austin: E. C. Temple, 1983);
Francis Edward Abernathy, ed., Legendary Ladies of
Texas (Dallas: Texas Folklore Society, E. Heart Press,
1981).34
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Dallas County Heritage Society. Legacies: A History Journal for Dallas and North Central Texas, Volume 6, Number 1, Spring, 1994, periodical, 1994; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth35112/m1/36/?q=dallas+business+journal+and+2008: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Dallas Historical Society.