Babe Didrikson Zaharias

At the 1932 national AAU track and field championships in Evanston, Didrikson was the only athlete entered for the Employers Casualty Company team of Dallas. She competed in eight events, won five, tied for first in the high jump and placed fourth in the discus, scoring 30 points; the runner-up team scored 22.

At the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics she won the javelin with a world-record throw on her first attempt and the 80-metre hurdles in a world-record 11.7 seconds. In the high jump she cleared the same height as Jean Shiley, but officials ruled her head-first technique illegal in the jump-off, and she received the silver medal.

Turning to golf, she won the 1947 British Ladies Amateur, the first American to take that title, and then turned professional. In 1948-49 she helped found the Ladies Professional Golf Association, led its money list from 1949 to 1951, served as its president from 1952 to 1955 and won the U.S. Women's Open three times.

Fellow professionals interviewed by golf historian Rhonda Glenn described her on the 1950s tour. Barbara Romack recalled that in 1951, after being outdriven on the first holes, Didrikson told her it 'might be better if you didn't outdrive me'; Betsy Rawls said she had never seen anyone take losing less gracefully. Friends told Sports Illustrated in 1975 that she would lend a club in a practice round and take it back once it started working for them.

These recollections, from rivals and friends alike, are consistent with a strong drive to beat other players specifically, a drive that some of those players resented. Competitiveness

Her sister recalled her in Dallas hitting golf balls after dark, with tape over her torn hands, refusing to stop. Gene Sarazen, who toured with her in 1935, told Sports Illustrated that she learned by watching him from a few feet away and then practising for hours, and that he knew of only one golfer, Ben Hogan, who practised more. Her 1956 New York Times obituary also reported practice sessions of up to 1,000 balls a day.

This practice record offers one example of mastery orientation: for years she kept drilling the skills of a sport that was new to her, well beyond what her exhibition schedule required. Mastery Orientation

In 1935, soon after she won the Texas women's championship, the U.S. Golf Association ruled her ineligible to compete as an amateur, which shut her out of almost every women's tournament. She played paid exhibitions, including a 1935 tour with Gene Sarazen, then in 1940 gave up professional golf and waited out the required three years. Her amateur status was restored in January 1943.

The eight years between the ban and her later amateur titles sit alongside other evidence of persistence in her record: she kept pursuing tournament golf through a long institutional setback rather than leaving the sport. Persistence