V for victory, validation (APRIL 20, 2008)
We’re all missing sports these days. So with the games on hold, we’re offering a daily dose of memorable moments as chronicled through sports history:
This published when Danica Patrick became the first female winner in IndyCar history, capturing the Indy Japan 300 in her 50th career start on April 20, 2008.
It was never fair to mention Anna Kournikova’s name in the same sentence as Danica Patrick’s, but Patrick understood.
Kournikova was all about failed potential and commercial appeal and, even worse for women’s sports, sex appeal. The now-retired Russian tennis player never won a singles title even though she was more than capable, but she drew the attention befitting a champion and didn’t seem to be the slightest bit sheepish about it.
Patrick, who became auto racing’s first female winner in IndyCar history on Sunday in Japan, is none of that, never was. But she also knows that for all the attention she had drawn over the first three-plus years of her pro career, much of it because she was the only woman driver and much of it because she also happens to be beautiful, there was a downside no one ever talked about much.
Sure, it’s great to get the attention and the endorsements, but no one but Patrick has had to take a turn at high speeds with men who resented it. And no one but Patrick had to read the kind of garbage that fellow driver Ed Carpenter spewed a couple of years ago when asked about her potential to compete in NASCAR.
“I think Danica’s pretty aggressive in our cars,” Carpenter replied. “I mean, you know, especially if you catch her at the right time of the month, she might be trading plenty of paint out there.”
At the time Patrick laughed it off because she knew that was the only way to survive. Being one of the guys is what you strive for when you’re in their world, even when it’s nearly impossible.
Besides, she had been through much worse coming up as a lonely 16-year-old, competing alone in England amid a kind of sexism that made Carpenter’s taunt seem like little boy stuff. The point is, it may have rattled her, but it didn’t break her.
“I was lonely but never for a second did I want to quit,” she said of her early years overseas in an interview with the Tribune last year. “I just wanted to get on top so badly, I wanted to be a race car driver so badly, that everything I had to go through was just part of the process.”
And when the well-deserved praise, as well as the insults, paid off with reams of publicity that drivers with twice her experience could never hope to receive, she knew that was part of it as well.
“People who say negative things,” she said, managing a laugh, “I just look at it as free publicity for me.”
Her father, T.J., is a former driver himself. For a time, he couldn’t find a team to so much as test his talented daughter, and more than once he had to break it to her that they simply did not have the money for her to race. They took names and remembered all.
On Sunday, in between the hugs and the “I love yous,” he told his daughter, “This is the best day of my life.”
Dan Wheldon finished fourth Sunday, perhaps fittingly, after pitting along with Tony Kanaan on the 196th lap, allowing Patrick to move from fourth place to second.
Last June it was Wheldon who refused to back off when Patrick tried to pass him on the 87th lap of a race in West Allis, Wis. Afterward, Patrick let him know how she felt.
“If you don’t think I’m going to remember this, you’re crazy,” she told Wheldon.
And Wheldon’s reaction? “She’s messing with the wrong person if she wants to get feisty,” he said. “I’m a lot tougher than she is on the track.”
Not on Sunday he wasn’t.
Except perhaps for that moment when Patrick finally let her guard down and let the tears flow.
“That was a little girly of me,” she said later.
A girly champion.