The Automatic Champion

Babe Didrickson Zaharias was a phenomenal athlete. This Texan ran, jumped, rode horses, and played basketball and baseballwith tremendous flair.

In the Olympic tryouts in 1932, she won five first places in track and field events. In the games of that year in Los Angeles, she won a gold medal in the womens 80 meter hurdles, a gold medal in the javelin throw, and a silver medal in the high jump.

After the Olympics, Zaharias turned to golf. Although she started from scratch, she won the National Womens Amateur and the British Womens Amateur.

The press hailed her as a natural athlete. They often referred to as an automatic champion.

But the real story behind Zaharias fairy-tale success was her painstaking diligence. Her success came from studied repetition. In every sport she undertook, she was methodical, deliberate, and persistent. She was neither natural nor automatic.

When, for example, she played golf for the first time, she did not automatically master the game. Instead she studied the game carefully, covering all its complex skill sets, under the tutelage of the finest golf teacher she could find.