Elliott Kalb / Special to FOXSports.com
Michelle Wie is going to win a lot of golf tournaments. She is going to win majors. And she might even win on the PGA Tour against men. It's just a matter of time, with her next shot at the men coming in this week's John Deere Classic.
Just like major-league pitchers don't need a 100-mile-per-hour fastball to win games, PGA tournaments are not always won teeing off with the driver.
And when Wie finally does win, she should acknowledge the women who came before her.
1. Golf
First of all, it's a technicality that a female hasn't made the cut in a men's golf tournament since Babe Didrickson Zaharias in 1945. Se Ri Pak, one of the greatest and most influential of the current LPGA golfers, made the cut when she shot a 2-over 74 in a Korean Tour event. But no woman has made the cut in a PGA Tour event since Didrickson Zaharias finished 33rd in the '45 Phoenix Open and 42nd in the '45 Tucson Open. There is no doubt in my mind that had Babe taken up golf earlier in life, she would have won several PGA tour events.
Annika Sorenstam, of course, was a sponsor exemption for the 2003 Bank of America Colonial and missed the cut. Suzy Whaley qualified for the 2003 Greater Hartford Open and missed the cut. And Wie has missed the cut in her four attempts vs. the men.
2. Tennis
In 1973, a 55-year-old former tennis champion named Bobby Riggs made news by challenging any of the top female tennis players on the tour. The one that accepted the challenge was 30-year-old (and top-ranked) Margaret Court.
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| Bobby Riggs is seen here in the Battle of the Sexes Challenge Match against Billie Jean-King held at the Astrodome, in Houston, Texas, in September of 1973. (Getty Images/Staff / Getty Images) |
How good was Court? In 1970, she won the women's singles titles at all four Grand Slam tournaments — Wimbledon, U.S. Open, Australian and French. In 1973, she won three of the four and was still the top-ranked woman tennis player. Anyone could understand Riggs' motives. Far from just being a male chauvinist, he was a hustler who needed the action. He was a former athlete who needed the competition. There was no similar Champions Tour for Riggs. He was again in the spotlight, 34 years after winning Wimbledon in '39. For Court, the money was enough of an incentive.
Riggs defeated Court on Mother's Day, using a short game featuring an assortment of drop shots and lobs. It was the female Court that played a losing power game. The match would serve to set up a later (more famous) match between 29-year-old Billie Jean King and Riggs. Prior to that Astrodome match, it was Riggs that was the heavy favorite. Jimmy the Greek established Riggs as an 8-5 favorite. Tennis greats like Jack Kramer and Pancho Segura and Fred Perry all went on record saying that King didn't have a chance. Even the rising star of women's tennis — 18-year-old Chris Evert — picked Riggs.
King went on to defeat Riggs in straight sets, in a match that answered the question about a top woman defeating a former male champion in tennis.
3. Bowling
What do you do if you're in the PWBA (the Professional Women's Bowling Association) and the league folds? If you're Liz Johnson, you petition the men's Professional Bowling Association to allow women to join, which it did in 2004. She found that she could compete quite nicely against the men. She and Cathy Dorin-Lizzi have made PBA tournaments through weekly qualifying. So did Kelly Kulick, who last month became the first woman professional bowler to earn a PBA Tour exemption. That means she'll be able to compete in every PBA event of the 2006-07 season.
4. Hockey
No female hockey player has accomplished as much against men as Canadian Manon Rheaume. She grew up skating at 3 years old, and playing hockey at five against older brothers. At 19, she began breaking down barriers, playing for a major men's junior hockey team. On Sept. 23, 1992, she got into a preseason game for the NHL's Tampa Bay Lightening, playing goalie. She signed a professional hockey contract, the first woman to do so, and she also played for a few years in the International Hockey League.
5. Football
Katie Hnida kicked a few extra points for a college football team. That's like astronaut Neil Armstrong landing on the moon (you remember the quote: "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.") Katie made one small kick for women, and one giant leap for female athletes. She became the second woman ever to dress for an NCAA Div. I-A football game, joining Kathy Klobe (Louisville, 1995), when she suited up for Colorado in a game against Kansas on Sept. 18, 1999.
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| Katie Hnida was the first woman to dress for a college football bowl game. (Brian Bahr / Getty Images) |
(And she also became the first woman to ever dress for a bowl game on Dec. 31, 1999, in CU's appearance in the Insight.com Bowl against Boston College, though she never did play in a game for the Buffaloes; she attended CU for two years.)
After she left Colorado, she walked on and made the University of New Mexico's football team. It was there that she opened the 2003 season with a bang when she made history once again by becoming the first woman to score in a Division I game against Texas State on Aug. 30, 2003. She entered the game with 5:05 left in the fourth quarter following touchdown pass and split the uprights with room to spare to give UNM a 65-8 advantage (and she connected on another extra point after that in the same game).
But in a grim postscript to her time in Colorado, after she left the Buffaloes, she told Sports Illustrated that she was not only verbally abused and molested by teammates, she was raped by one of them. No charges were ever filed.
6. Baseball
Last year, Babe Didrickson's amazing life was the subject of a fascinating exhibit at the PGA Museum in Far Hills, N.J. And while the highlight of the exhibit, of course, was her golf career, it also had a uniform from the House of David, the baseball team the Babe pitched for in 1934. The House of David played against the top Negro League teams of the day, including the Homestead Grays and Kansas City Monarchs. Babe (who, unlike her male teammates, wasn't required to have a beard) pitched the first two innings of many of those games. Think about it. The Babe most likely faced the great slugger Josh Gibson and was a mound opponent of Satchel Paige, one of the few athletes in history whose legend can match hers.
7. Basketball
In 1979, Ann Meyers signed a contract with the Indiana Pacers. She was a four-time All-American at UCLA and became the first woman to be given an NBA contract and tryout. She worked out with the Pacers through training camp. Was it a publicity stunt for the Pacers? It probably was, but Meyers was still a fantastic basketball player; and getting as far as she did was astounding.
8. Auto racing
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| Before Danica Patrick, Janet Guthrie was racing against men. (Getty Images/Staff / Getty Images) |
Danica Patrick is a nice story for the modern day, but she's hardly the first woman driver to compete against the men. Did you ever hear of Shirley Muldowney? She competed on equal footing with men for years and has more Top Fuel wins than all but a handful of men in drag-racing history. Cars are weighted with drivers, so there's no weight advantage. Women can achieve true parity in drag racing.
In May 1977, Janet Guthrie became the first woman to qualify for the Indianapolis 500. Guthrie broke down perceptions about women competing at the highest levels with men. Guthrie finished ninth in the '78 Indy 500 — the highest finish for a woman before Patrick's fourth-place finish last year. And Lyn St. James also had seven Indianapolis 500 starts from 1992-2000 and was named 1992 Indianapolis 500 Rookie of the Year, the first woman to ever win that honor.
9. Horse racing
In June 1993, Julie Krone became the first woman to ride a winner in a Triple Crown race. She rode Colonial Affair to a victory in the Belmont Stakes. She was also the first woman to win a Breeders Cup race. Krone was inducted into the Racing Hall of Fame in 2000. She won more than 3,500 races in her career, but none was more significant than the 1993 Belmont.
10. Equestrian
Equestrian events were first included in the Olympics at the 1900 Games in Paris. Show jumping was introduced as an individual sport in 1900 and as a team event in '12. Dressage and the three-day event premiered in '12. This is the only sport in which there is no gender distinction. Men and women compete against each other in every event. The first female to win a medal was Lis Hartel of Denmark, who won silver in individual dressage in Helsinki in '52 and again in '56 despite having suffered polio years earlier as a kid.
The first women to win medals in the three-day event, the most physically demanding of the disciplines, were American Karen Stives and Britain's Virginia (Holgate) Leng, in 1984.
