Babe Didrikson made a promise to herself as a child. She determined to become the best woman athlete in the world.
As a lanky tomboy, she played all kinds of sports with her brothers in Beaumont, Texas. At the age of sixteen she became an outstanding high school basketball star. At eighteen, she won a track meet single-handed, and then went on to win two gold medals in the 1932 Olympics. By the time she was twenty she had captured 635 championships in 636 competitions, outclassed all opposition in twenty different forms of sport and was called "the world's greatest all-around woman athlete."
As she matured, the lanky tomboy from Texas developed into a slender woman with a wiry, athletic body. She learned amazingly quickly, and there was no sport that she tackled that she did not excel in.
Her formula for success was simple. She knew that becoming a champion meant work...work...work... She always advised prospective athletes that there was no shortcut to successful playing in any sport.
The sport that aroused her interest shortly after her Olympic triumph was golf. Four years after she first learned how to hold a club, Babe was acclaimed the world's greatest woman golfer. While she was practicing for an important tournament, she was often on the course at dawn, and worked until dark. She relished the competition of tournaments; playing merely for pleasure held no excitement for her. Babe set many records in golf, among them that of becoming the first American woman to take the British Amateur Cup.
One of Babe's most heroic accomplishments was was her recovery and return to championship golf after surgery for cancer. She was determined to show other cancer victims that the disease could be conquered. In this battle she won the sympathy and admiration of people all over the world.
—from the book
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