LINCICOME: Female sports heroes vanishing

By Bernie Lincicome, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Originally published 09:31 p.m., May 16, 2008
Updated 01:03 a.m., May 17, 2008

It must be assumed that the coming Olympics in China will replenish the stock of suddenly spare female sports heroes, though that is usually the business of the Winter Games and figure skaters.

Or maybe sooner than that. Clearly, it is Danica Patrick's job now.

On the same week that auto racer Patrick smiles resolutely from the cover of Sports Illustrated, so departs the best female tennis player and, until just now, the best female golfer.

A coy little game could be played here by not naming either of them, just to see how long this could be carried on, or at what point anyone cares.

But even in doing so, by naming now Annika Sorenstam and Justine Henin, it is easy to imagine sighs - certainly in the marketing departments - that at least it wasn't lovely Natalie Gulbis and gorgeous Maria Sharapova, whose game credentials are nearly as thin as are Patrick's.

Patrick has been sold and resold on her beauty and novelty, getting the rewards before the accomplishment, not the way this usually works, though it did start that way for Tiger Woods, too.

Woods quickly and rightly lived up to his hype as few others ever have, including any number of recent No. 1 draft choices. Pick a sport.

But now having finally won an IndyCar race, Patrick is being considered seriously as a driver, at least by SI. Yes, she can, the cover says, once again the assumption preceding the outcome.

Michelle Wie is another such figure, now faded a bit in her late teens, awarded the center of a world she has never conquered but merely decorated. In these cases, it had at least as much to do with beauty as talent, the Anna Kournikova method of fame.

The coincidence of authentic athletes Sorenstam and Henin leaving is remarkable due to their status in their sports, and were they men - say, Woods and Roger Federer - the noise would still be echoing from their farewells.

Certainly, in the case of Woods, who is missing but has assured us he will return from knee repair, surely in time for the U.S. Open. In the meantime, updates are scattered to an anxious world about his progress. He is chipping and putting but not taking full swings.

As far as I know, the question of why the two women decided to quit was mechanically asked, but I don't recall the answers. And no great anguish was evident, no one begging to please don't do this.

They each will be allowed to go off and have a life, the life they imagine they want, while the sports world they leave behind will reshuffle and go on as usual.

This is true of every early departure, and almost inevitably, the retirement does not last.

I recall, at Michael Jordan's farewell - his first one, the one we took seriously - men my age were weeping and asking him not to go, and not just NBA commissioner David Stern, who was one of them.

When Barry Sanders left football, there was much the same kind of anguish and confusion, it impossible to understand how he could leave so much on the table. Sanders is one of the few to leave it there.

John McEnroe left tennis early, as did Bjorn Borg, only to come back, and to much less sorrow. Certainly, more than for little Henin, a woman of grit and will and fierceness but a bit plain and with European teeth.

Sorenstam, for all her golf titles, is likely to always have the line in her biography that she was one of the first women to compete against men in a tournament. In fact, that bit of history might have thrown Wie off her schedule, the gimmick being more appealing than the work to get there.

How recently they were all there, the inspiring figures of the golden age of women's sports. Marion Jones, Olympic hero. Mia Hamm, who invented women's soccer all by herself. The Williams sisters in tennis, still there but distracted. Lisa Leslie, the first woman to dunk a basketball.

That generation of girls had Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Florence Griffith Joyner and Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert and Sorenstam, too, to look up to - real athletes with real accomplishments. Billie Jean King, Bonnie Blair, Nancy Lopez.

And now the list seems down to one. At Indianapolis. Yes, she can. I read that somewhere.

lincicomeb@RockyMountainNews.com

• May 17, 2008

  11:18 a.m.

  milloy36 writes:

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