President Donald Trump just honored three legendary athletes. On Thursday, Trump presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom to legendary golfers Annika Sorenstam and Gary Player as well as late Olympian Babe Didrikson Zaharias, according to the Associated Press. The award is one of the nation’s highest civilian honors. The event, which happened one day after Trump supporters breached the U.S. Capitol building to protest the presidential election, was closed to the media.
Sorenstam, 50, won 72 tournaments in her LPGA career. She was named the Associated Press Athlete of the Year for three consecutive years starting in 2003 and is an eight-time winner of the LPGA Tour Player of the Year award. Sorenstam won 10 major championships including the Women’s PGA Championship three times. In her golf career, Sorenstam won 94 tournaments.
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As great of an accomplishment winning the Presidential Medal of Freedom is, there were some sports journalists and other people on social media who wished Sorenstam and Player didn’t accept the award. “Sorenstam and Player don’t just represent themselves,” Christine Brennan of USA Today wrote in an opinion column. “They represent all of golf, a mostly lily-white sport that has struggled for decades, to its continuing detriment, to attract women and people of color – just as Trump, a creature of the game, has denigrated those very same people.”
Player, 85, was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1974. He won a total of nine major championships, including the Masters three times (1961, 1974, 1978). When Player won the U.S. Open in 1965, he became the only only-non American to win all four majors in his career. In his golf career, Player won 160 tournaments with 24 of those coming on the PGA Tour. He won the PGA Tour Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012.
Zaharias died at the age of 45 in 1956 after battling cancer. Along with being a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame, Zaharias excelled in basketball, baseball and track and field. She competed in the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and won a gold medal in the 80-meter hurdles and the javelin throw. She also won a silver medal in the high jump. In her golf career, Zaharias won 10 LPGA major championships and 48 tournaments overall. Her real first name is Mildred but was nicknamed “Babe” after Babe Ruth.
