She grew up playing every sport available to her, earning the nickname "Babe" as a teenager for her prodigious home run hitting. Before the 1932 Olympics, she entered the AAU national track and field championships as a one-woman team representing Employers Casualty Company of Dallas, competed in eight events across a single afternoon, and won five of them outright, tying a sixth. She qualified for the Olympic team that day. After Los Angeles, she was briefly cast as a barnstorming novelty, playing baseball, basketball, and billiards for pay in exhibitions that were part spectacle, part humiliation. She understood the transaction and did it anyway. When she turned to golf in the mid-1930s, she approached the game the same way she had approached every other sport: with daily practice measured in hours, not rounds. By 1946 and 1947, she had won 17 consecutive amateur titles. In 1948 she turned professional and co-founded the LPGA in 1950, giving the tour institutional structure it had not previously had.

In 1953 she was diagnosed with colon cancer and underwent surgery. The golf world expected her career was over. Fourteen months later she won the 1954 U.S. Women's Open by 12 strokes. It was one of the most commanding performances of her career, delivered on the other side of a diagnosis that would kill her two years later. She died in 1956 at 45. The full scope of what she was has never been easy to hold in a single frame: track and field, golf, basketball, baseball, tennis, the AAU championship won alone, the Olympics, the LPGA, the cancer and the return and the 12-stroke margin. She did not fit the categories available to her. She never tried to.