Kick Out the Sports!
by Bob Cook

Bob Cook's weekly ruminations on sports run Friday ahead of Memorial Day weekend. The column will resume its regular Monday schedule on June 6.

It's a measure of how far Indy-car racing has come that while Janet Guthrie was treated like an intruder in 1977 as the first woman to race in the Indianapolis 500, Danica Patrick is being treated like the queen bee as the only woman in this year's race.

Maybe it's really more a measure of how Indy-car racing has declined. Patrick's task Sunday is not to merely win the race, but to save American open-wheel racing from being continually lapped in popularity by NASCAR. A race whose well-lubricated fans sit on their cars to shout "Show us your tits!" at women wearing checkered-flag bikini tops now has its future resting on someone with tits getting shown the checkered flag in her well-lubricated car.

With a gender twist, the Indy Racing League is trying to follow a model that worked for the PGA with Tiger Woods, and NASCAR with Jeff Gordon, in using a top performer who doesn't fit its usual demographic profile as a springboard to greater attention from casual fans. (You may say, isn't Gordon a white guy in a circuit thick with them? But when the California-born and Indiana-bred Gordon entered NASCAR in the early 1990s, a racer who didn't grow up in the South was outside the series' demographic profile.)

If the IRL needed proof that such a model could work for it, they got it in the coverage that followed the opening day of qualifying for the Indy 500. The lead story of Pole Day was that a wobble in the first lap of a four-lap run kept Patrick from qualifying first, but didn't stop her from qualifying fourth, the inside of the second row, a record for a woman at Indy. That 2004 IRL series champion Tony Kanaan won the actual pole position was an afterthought. It's like how golf commentators talk breathlessly about where Woods finished, and end with the fact that, oh by the way, some other bad-pants-wearing guy is in first. If you care.

How Indy-car racing got into this desperate position is an oft-told, well-worn tale. Tony George, the president of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, in 1995 broke the Indy 500 away from Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART), then the sport's ruling body, in a power struggle with the team owners who ran the circuit. George vowed to use the Indy 500 as a centerpiece for an all-oval-course series — no right turns allowed — featuring American drivers. While not ever given as an official reason for the split, George had to have been stung that Gordon, who cut his racing teeth 15 miles up US 136 in Pittsboro, Ind., turned to NASCAR because he couldn't get a CART ride in the early 1990s.

George's plan to kill the open-wheel village in order to save it got him tagged as Indy-car racing's Lt. Calley when it appeared he had recklessly erased all life at Indy. The likes of the Andrettis and Unsers, allied with CART, stayed away from Indy, and backmarkers like Buddy Lazier suddenly became champions. Meanwhile, NASCAR's popularity surged.

Over the past 10 years, George has slowly built up the IRL, thanks to CART diehards like team owner Roger Penske defecting to the IRL, and thanks to NASCAR money. He's done it through his own Brickyard 400 NASCAR event, co-ownership of a Chicago-area track with the France family (which runs NASCAR) and a deal at France-owned tracks in which fans who want to see a NASCAR race also have to pay for tickets to an Indy-car race.

In the process, George tried to buy the assets of CART out of bankruptcy in 2004 and, more than likely, kill the series. Though George's attempt failed, and the series is still running as Champ Car, George emerged with the upper hand.

However, George is not about to unfurl a "Mission Accomplished" banner across the Indianapolis Motor Speedway's 13-story pagoda. The IRL-CART battle left the winner with an audience the size of Planet X after Duck Dodgers and Marvin the Martian got through fighting over it. And it turned out the all-American-ness of Indy-car racing on ovals was tossed aside as the dominant racers turned out to be Brazilians, driving on road courses and overseas tracks as well as American ovals.

Hence, the need for an easily marketable novelty.

To call Patrick a novelty isn't completely fair. While a rookie at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Patrick, 23, has a strong racing pedigree. She left her native Roscoe, Ill., for England at age 16 to compete in low-level Formula racing series. She spent two years in the Toyota Atlantic Indy-car feeder series (owned by CART), finishing third in the 2004 standings thanks to top-five finishes in 10 out of 12 races.

"The car does not know the difference" between a male and a female, as 15-time Indy 500 racer Lyn St. James, one of Patrick's idols, used to say to deflect any questions about either gender's innate ability to drive. (Patrick broke St. James' record for highest starting spot achieved by a woman.)

But that's not to say the car doesn't make a difference. Unlike Patrick's female predecessors at Indy — Guthrie, St. James and Sarah Fisher — Patrick is on a well-financed team, Rahal-Letterman, her bosses during her Toyota Atlantic series days as well. The team, owned by 1986 Indianapolis 500 winner Bobby Rahal and David Letterman, won last year's race with Buddy Rice, now out of the running because of a partially torn spinal ligament suffered May 13 during a crash at an Indy 500 practice.

A well-oiled marketing machine helps, too. Unlike her female predecessors at Indy, Patrick is willing and able to sell herself as a fast girl in every sense of the word. In March 2003, Patrick posed for FHM in revealing, classic car-intensive shots that looked like she had been discovered in "The Girls of Hot Rod" video. "Show us your tits," indeed. Her website describes the 5-foot-1, 100-pound Patrick as "attractive," includes a few cheesecake shots and lets on her favorite outfit is "guys [sic] briefs and a long-sleeve T-shirt." Does that get your motor running, boys? (Alas, perverts, Patrick is engaged.)

But her appeal is not just as a pinup. Yes, the men do know, but the little girls understand. At the opening day of Indy 500 qualifications — once a sold-out, Second Greatest Spectacle in Racing in its own right — many of the few thousand in attendance were sign-carrying Patrick fans.

"I was actually walking back from pit lane during the day yesterday, and there was a group of about 15 little kids that looked like they were skipping school and screaming for me to come over," Patrick said during a May 19 press briefing at the speedway, as reproduced on the Indy Racing League's website. "As soon as I walked across, they screamed even louder.

"I just think it's really flattering, and I think it's what the sport needs."

You, and everybody else in Indy-car racing.

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.