Every Tom, Dick and Bubba in America knows there are three jobs that God created man to do Memorial Day weekend.
1. Mow the lawn
2. Light the charcoal
3. Win the Indy 500
Oops.
Scratch No. 3.
“I think I have a great chance of winning this race,” Danica Patrick tells anybody who will listen.
Hey. Back off, lady. You’re messing with one of the few remaining refuges of male superiority.
If a 23-year-old woman can win the Indianapolis 500, the only great American pastimes remaining for us guys to dominate will be barbecuing and belching.
The race car does not know Patrick is 5-feet-2 and 105 pounds.
A win Sunday would make her the biggest story in the 89-year history of the country’s most-storied motorsports event.
Of course, the old gray lions who love the roar of the Brickyard might not necessarily regard that as progress.
The other day, someone asked Patrick on a media teleconference if genetic differences between the genders could cause a man to be a better race-car driver than a woman.
“Or a female driver to be a better race-car driver than a man?” responded Patrick, stomping on the sexist question as quickly as she hits the accelerator. “Sorry, I had to throw that in there.”
Wrestling with stereotypes can be harder than saving a 1,600-pound race car from a tailspin.
“If anything, the toughest part for a female to do is the actual fact that you’re a female,” Patrick said. “It’s not whether you have better reflexes, worse or anything like that, but just to have a race team that backs you, a team that really believes in you, because it just really hasn’t happened.”
Sure, other women have started their engines at Indy in decades past. The thing is, everyone knew Janet Guthrie, Lyn St. James and Sarah Fisher were just along for the ride.
The beer-breath boys in the grandstands smugly figured those female racers had a better chance of stopping to ask for directions than taking the checkered flag after 500 miles of left-hand turns.
Patrick, however, is too fast and furious behind the wheel for cheap and easy condescension. She has already left the question of “Why aren’t you cooking?” in her dust.
Patrick races a car financially backed by the megabucks of television funnyman David Letterman. But this is no joke. She will start the race No. 4 on the grid, after qualifying at 227 mph.
That’s one fast woman.
As a native son of Indiana, let me say on behalf of Hoosiers everywhere that most red-blooded American men would have an easier time watching a woman being sworn in as president of the United States than seeing a female chug milk as winner of the Indy 500.
One of the last traces of chauvinism are the highway stares that force a guy to slump with shame in his seat when he’s riding shotgun with the wife at the wheel of the family minivan.
It used to be the Indianapolis 500 was the greatest spectacle in racing. Now, it’s Patrick wearing a black leather bikini.
Anybody who saw Patrick reveal what’s underneath her racing suit in the April 2003 issue of FHM magazine knows this is one very cheeky woman.
The photo spread still creates a buzz at the track, which Patrick defended as a needed boost for open-wheel racers, who have found themselves farther in the rearview mirror of NASCAR’s runaway popularity with each passing lap.
There is one major difference between a racing woman and Anna Kournikova, tennis babe. A single unforced error can cost Patrick her life.
On the holiday weekend that marks the unofficial beginning of summer, it’s still OK for a guy to mow the grass and grill burgers wearing the imperial grin that comes naturally to the king of his castle.
Patrick, however, is changing the rules of the road. Forever.
Hand over the keys, bubba.
Staff writer Mark Kiszla can be reached at 303-820-5438 or mkiszla@denverpost.com.
