Lot # 242: Babe Didrickson Sunday Carry Bag

Category: Miscellaneous

Starting Bid: $45.00

Bids: 5 (Bid History)

Time Left: Auction closed
Lot / Auction Closed




This lot is closed. Bidding is not allowed.

Item was in Auction "Summer Golf Auction 2019",
which ran from 7/3/2019 12:00 PM to
7/20/2019 8:00 PM



This lightweight carry bag bears the name of the Legendary Babe Didrickson.   I suspect that it was a gift or prize at a Babe Didrickson golf charity event.  It has never been used.

No athlete excelled at more sports and games than Didrikson. She was an all-American basketball player, a two-time Olympic track and field gold medalist (won 2 gold medals and 1 silver medal at the 1932 Summer Olympics) and a golf champion who won 82 tournaments, including 10 majors and an astonishing 14 events in a row. One of the 13 founding members of the LPGA, Didrikson became the first woman to play against men in a PGA Tour event and the first American to win the British Women’s Amateur Championship. She was also an outstanding baseball, softball, tennis and billiards player, diver and bowler.  All of this before she died from cancer at age 45.

From a June 25, 2011 article in the NY times:

"Perhaps Didrikson’s most spectacular athletic achievement occurred at the amateur track and field championships in Evanston, Ill., on July 16, 1932. She was the lone representative of Employers Casualty Insurance Company of Dallas, competing against company teams of 12, 15, even 22 women. When Didrikson was introduced, she ran onto the field by herself, her arms waving wildly. The crowd gasped at the audacity of this “one-woman track team” (a phrase Didrikson coined).

"Over the course of three hours on a sweltering track, she sprinted from event to event, with barely enough time to catch her breath. She finished first in five events: broad jump, shot-put, javelin, 80-meter hurdles and the baseball throw. She tied for first in a sixth event, the high jump. In qualifying for three Olympic events, she amassed a total of 30 team points for Employers Casualty. The second-place team, the Illinois Women’s Athletic Club, scored 22 points — with 22 athletes.

"Within five months of her Olympic success, Didrikson, needing a job during the Depression, performed vaudeville on Chicago’s Palace Theater stage, then played baseball riding a donkey around the basepaths with the barnstorming House of David team in small towns and villages across the country.

"It was not until Didrikson took up golf that she began to transform her image and personality. She embraced golf in part to try to conform, somewhat, to America’s expectations of how a female athlete should look and act in the 1930s. She bought a new wardrobe and applied lipstick. Some writers still ridiculed her looks. (“I know I’m not pretty, but I try to be graceful,” she said.) And in December 1938, she married George Zaharias, a professional wrestler. He helped sell her makeover to the news media and to the public.

"Golf was the toughest game for Didrikson, but she mastered it by practicing for 10 hours a day until her hands were bloodied and blistered. From 1946 to 1947, she won 14 consecutive tournaments, including the British Women’s Amateur Championship in Gullane, Scotland....

"Didrikson received a diagnosis of rectal cancer in April 1953. Doctors told reporters she would never play professional golf again. She tried to give her clubs to a friend, but soon she vowed publicly that she would come back to play tournament golf and win.

"Fifteen months after a colostomy, she won the United States Women’s Open at Salem Country Club in Peabody, Mass., by an amazing 12 strokes. Afterward, she shared her victory with her doctors and the thousands of cancer patients who had written to her and rooted for her.

"Didrikson became a tireless crusader against cancer. She spoke openly about her illness in an era when public figures preferred to keep theirs a secret.

"Twenty-six months after her triumph at Salem Country Club, she was dead. On the morning she died in a Galveston, Tex., hospital, President Dwight D. Eisenhower began his news conference in Washington with this salute: “She was a woman who, in her athletic career, certainly won the admiration of every person in the United States, all sports people all over the world, and in her gallant fight against cancer, she put up one of the kind of fights that inspire us all.”

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