That's my answer to the question posted in this Yahoo Golf blog post: "Is Annika Sorenstam the best female athlete ever?"

Annika is the best female golfer of all-time. And may deserve a seat at the table of finalists for "best female athlete" consideration. But ... no.

There are too many other women who've excelled as multi-sport stars. Althea Gibson, for example, was a great tennis champion who, after retiring from professional tennis, got good enough at golf to compete in a handful of LPGA tournaments in the mid-1960s. She was also an excellent basketball player, dabbled in equestrian, and was a whiz at table tennis (don't laugh - great ping-pong players are definitely athletes).

Heptathlon queen Jackie Joyner-Kersee is in the mix. Many of the greatest female volleyball players have backgrounds in basketball or track.

And then there's Cheryl Miller. And Martina Navratilova. And Diana Nyad. And many other obvious single-sport stars I'm overlooking at the moment.

But the reason I quickly say no to Annika being the "best female athlete ever" is that there's an athlete from her own sport with whom she can't really compete.

Ladies and gentlemen, the true greatest female athlete ever, Babe Didrikson Zaharias:

Writing about her in 1939, Time magazine described Babe as a "famed woman athlete, 1932 Olympic Games track & field star, expert basketball player, golfer, javelin thrower, hurdler, high jumper, swimmer, baseball pitcher, football halfback, billiardist, tumbler, boxer, wrestler, fencer, weight lifter, adagio dancer."

They left out tennis and diving, among others. Somehow, Babe even managed to find time to play harmonica on vaudeville and win the sewing championship at the 1931 Texas State Fair!

Later, a newspaper reporter wrote that Zaharias "operates like a woman whose life is a constant campaign to astound people."

The Babe grew up in Texas, the daughter of immigrant Norwegians. She was nicknamed after Babe Ruth because of her baseball talents (she later barnstormed with the famed House of David team).

In basketball, she led her team to the Amateur Athletic Union national championship in 1931 and was an All-American 3 years.

In track and field, Zaharias set 5 world records in one day at an AAU meet in 1932. At that meet, her team won the national team title ... and Babe was the only member of the team!

At the 1932 Olympics, Babe won gold medals in the 80-meter hurdles and javelin, silver in the high jump.

She didn't even take up golf until she was in her 20s, then won the first tournament she entered, the 1935 Texas Women's Invitational.

And later, of course, 10 majors and 41 wins total in the first half-decade of the LPGA's existence. She almost single-handedly kept the LPGA alive in its early years, too, as I wrote about here.

As a side note, the Babe was a quote machine. And she didn't mince words. For example: Her husband, George Zaharias, was a professional wrestler when they met and married. He was a physical specimen - ripped for his time. But as he aged, well, George let himself go a little. OK, a lot. And in those later years, the Babe said of him, "When I married him he was a Greek god. Now he's just a g**damned Greek."