BOB LIPPER: Equality now includes bad behavior

Bob Lipper Richmond-Times Dispatch
Published: July 25, 2008

It was the long-ago British actress Dame Edith Evans who asked, “When a woman behaves like a man, why doesn’t she behave like a nice man?”
She would’ve gone Lady Macbeth batty if she scanned the sports pages these days.
Women want to be treated equal to men, so it’s no upset that they also randomly act as rottenly as men. This probably isn’t a right detailed among the clauses and whereases in the fine print of Title IX, but you’d be hard-pressed to tell from all the petulance, substance-abuser lobbying, arrogance and scuffling going on the past week.
Sound like any NASCAR hot-shot, baseball ace, AAU baller or Indiana Pacer you know?
Nope, sounds like Danica Patrick, Marion Jones, Michelle Wie and those wild and crazy hoopsters from the WNBA.
Start with Patrick, the hot-mama Indy Car driver and only leadfoot on the circuit whose media-guide profile is accompanied by a bikini snapshot. This suggests that (a) the IRL is desperate for attention and (b) Patrick is desperate for hype. What it doesn’t reveal is that (c) Patrick seems as intent on dropping bombs of another variety as she is on being a bombshell.
Last Saturday, frosted with fellow female racer Milka Duno during a practice run, Patrick strode to Duno’s pit box and vented with expletive-undeleted fury. Duno responded by twice throwing a towel at Patrick, who continued to gripe about Duno being slow on the track. Duno later said she’d been offended by Patrick’s demeanor and language. It’s safe to say they won’t be double-dating any time soon.
Here’s the skinny on Patrick: She’s pretty good and way too feisty. She had a run-in with Dan Wheldon at Milwaukee last year — she shoved him; he didn’t shove back — and another with Ryan Briscoe in May at Indy. Enough already. This habit of acting like a royal-pain drama queen — with or without exposed belly button — is wearing thin.
Jones, you might recall, not long ago was the queen of American track. Now she’s in federal prison in Fort Worth, serving a six-month sentence for lying about her use of banned substances — and still seeking an edge.
To that end, she’s asked President Bush to commute her sentence and pardon her — a twofer that’d be as counterfeit as all those medals she “won” in Sydney two Olympics ago. As Doug Logan, the new chief of USA Track and Field, wrote in an open letter to Bush, liberating Jones “would send a horrible message to young people who idolized her, reinforcing the notion that you can cheat and be entitled to get away with it.”
Speaking of entitlement, that’s Wie’s game as much as golf — the sport that’s made her a commodity and the sport in which she’s won absolutely nothing since the Hawaiian State Open of 2002.
Several days after being disqualified at an LPGA event for not signing her scorecard, Wie and her handlers/parents announced she’d tee it up at a secondary PGA tournament — her eighth invite to the men’s circuit — next week in Nevada. Yeah, she’s only 18, still a kid. But her flubs (she’s been DQ’d before) and dubious career choices are getting as old as her winless streak.
Finally, there was the Tuesday night dustup between the WNBA Los Angeles Sparks and Detroit Shock that culminated with bodies tumbling and women throwing hands — and beefy 6-10 Shock assistant Rick Mahorn pushing Sparks center Lisa Leslie to the floor.
“I would never push a woman,” Mahorn insisted to reporters.
You wonder nowadays if women might take that as an insult.
Bob Lipper is a staff writer for the Richmond-Times Dispatch.