before the arc of her brilliant career, very few tennis fans were interested in women’s matches. The trophy for the Women’s Singles competition at the French Open is now the “Coupe Suzanne-Lenglen.” She was also inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1978, and many hold her to be one of the best tennis players ever.
“I just throw dignity against the wall and think only of the game.”
- Susanne Lenglen
Babe Didrikson Zaharias: The Greatest
Babe (real name Mildred) Didrikson always strived to be the best at any activity she undertook. Insecure, she figured sports was a great way to build up herself and her self-esteem. She got that right! She excelled at every sport she tried: running, jumping, javelin throwing, swimming, basketball, and baseball to name just a few. In her prime, she was so famous that she was known around the world by her first name.
Babe had a supportive home environment for the sporting life; her mother, Hannah Marie Olson, was a figure skater. Babe’s family was loving, but they had a tough time making a living in the hardscrabble Texas town from whence they hailed. As a youngster in the twenties, Babe worked after school packing figs and sewing potato sacks at nearby factories, but somehow she still found time to play. No matter what the game, Babe was always better than the boys.
In high school, Babe tried out for basketball, baseball, golf, tennis, and volleyball; her superior athletic skills created a lot of jealousy among her peers. A Dallas insurance company offered her a place on their basketball team; Babe worked at the firm, finished high school, and played on the team. In her very first game, she smoked the court and outscored the other team all by herself. Fortunately for her, Employers Casualty also had track, diving, and swim teams. Track held a particular lure for Babe; she set records almost immediately in the shot put, high jump, long jump, and javelin throw. In 1932, Babe represented the Lone Star State as a one-woman team, and out of eight competitions she took awards for six. In 1932, Los Angeles was the site of the Summer Olympics; Babe drew the eyes of the world when she set records for the eighty-meter hurdles and the javelin throw. She would have won the high jump too, but the judges declared her technique of throwing herself headfirst over the bar as unacceptable. There is no doubt she would have taken home even more gold except for the newly instated rule setting a limit of three events per athlete.
For Babe, making a living was more important than the accolades of the world. Unfortunately the options for women in professional sports were extremely limited in the 1930s. She made the decision to become a professional golfer; although she had little experience, she took the Texas Women’s Amateur Championship three years later. In typical Babe Didrikson style, she went on to win seventeen tournaments in a row and also took part in matches against men, including a memorable match against the “crying Greek from Cripple Creek,” George Zaharias, whom she married in 1938. Babe quickly saw the need for equality in women’s golf and helped found the Ladies Professional Golf Association. Babe died at forty-three, after making a stunning comeback: winning the U.S. Open by twelve strokes less than a year after major surgery for intestinal cancer. She is thought by many to have been the greatest female athlete of all time.
“It’s not enough to swing at the ball. You’ve got to loosen your girdle and really let the ball have it.”
— Babe Didrikson Zaharias
Halet Çambel: Her Sword Was Mightier
How many people can say they dissed Hitler? Halet Çambel, an Olympic fencer, was the first Muslim woman ever to compete in the Olympics as well as an archaeologist. She was born in 1916 in Berlin, Germany, the daughter of a former Grand Vizier to the Ottoman sultan. When her family moved back to Istanbul, Turkey, in the mid-1920s, Halet was “shocked by the black-shrouded women who came and visited us at home.” Having survived bouts with typhoid and hepatitis as a child, she decided to focus on exercise to build her strength and health. In an interview, she said, “There were other activities like folk dancing and other dances at school, but I chose fencing.” Halet eventually rose to the level of representing Turkey in the women’s individual foil event at the 1936 Summer Olympics. The 20-year-old had grave reservations about attending the Nazi-run Games, and she and her fellow Turkish athletes drew the line at a social introduction to the Führer; she later said, “Our assigned German official asked us to meet Hitler. We actually would not have come to Germany at all if it were down to us, as we did not approve of Hitler’s regime,” she recalled late in life. “We firmly rejected her offer.”
Upon returning home after the Games, Halet met communist poet and journalist Nail Çakırhan and fell in love. Her family didn’t approve of his Marxist ideas, so they were married in secret; their marriage endured for 70 years until his death in 2008. She studied archaeology in Paris at the Sorbonne in the 1930s before earning a doctorate at Istanbul University in 1944, then became a lecturer in 1947; that same year, she worked as part of a team excavating the 8th century Hittite fortress city of Karatepe in Turkey, which was to become her scholarly life’s work. She spent half of each year there for the next 50 years, working with others to achieve a deeper understanding of Hittite hieroglyphic writing and other aspects of their culture. In 1960, Halet became a professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at Istanbul University and founded its Institute of Prehistory, achieving emeritus status in 1984. She lived to be ninety-seven.
Alice Coachman: Running for Her Life
Boy, could Alice Coachman run and jump! Because of World War II, however, national competitions were as far as an athlete could aspire in the forties, and the young African American athlete held the national titles for the high jump for twelve consecutive years. Her chance to achieve international recognition finally came in the 1948 Olympics; Alice was thought to be past her prime, but she decided to go for it anyway. Her teammates lost every race; finally it was Alice’s turn for the high jump. She took the gold, defeating an opponent who towered above her in height, to become at age twenty-four, the first black woman to win Olympic gold and the first American woman to go for the gold in track and field.
Alice was warmly welcomed back to America with an invitation to the White House, a victory motorcade through her home state of Georgia, and a contract to endorse Coca Cola. Not surprisingly, the racist and sexist America of the forties didn’t fully embrace Alice as it should have. She was, however, lionized in the black community as a favorite daughter and truly was the trailblazer for every black woman athlete to come after her.
Althea Gibson: Never Give Up
From the ghetto to the tennis court, Althea Gibson’s story is pure sheroism. At a time when tennis was not only dominated by whites but by upper-class whites at that, she managed to serve and volley her way to the top.
Born in 1927 to a Southern sharecropper family, Althea struggled as a girl with a restless energy that took years for her to channel into positive accomplishments. The family’s move to Harlem didn’t help. She was bored by school and skipped a lot; teachers and truant officers predicted the worst for Althea, believing that she was a walking attitude problem whose future lay as far as the nearest reform school.
Although things looked dire for Althea, she had a thing or two to show the naysayers. Like many sheroes, Althea had to bottom out before she could get to the top. She dropped out of school and drifted from job to job until, at only fourteen, she found herself a ward of New York City’s Welfare Department. This turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to Althea—a wise welfare worker not only helped her find steady work, but also enrolled her into New York’s police sports program. Althea fell in love with paddle ball, and upon graduating to real tennis, amazed everyone with her natural ability. The New York Cosmopolitan Club, an interracial sports and social organization, sponsored the teen and arranged for her to have a tennis coach, Fred
