Zenyatta (left) and Rachel Alexandra (center)

It’s probable that most sports fans will complete their 2009 without having paid attention to the best rivalry of the season. It’s over, although it’s not settled. It was intense, but neither competitor faced one another. Many of the events were designed for males yet dominated by two girls.

I’m referring to Horse of the Year candidates, Zenyatta and Rachel Alexandra.

From Z to A: A Tale of the Tape (Click to enlarge)

Go ahead and scoff at this assertion (I already hear some of you scoffing. Honestly, it happened faster than I thought it was going to), but all season long, these two fillies have been absolutely astounding by the standards of the sport in which they compete. Detractors of horse racing really won’t be swayed no matter what the argument, but for those of you who believe in the sport’s merit, it’s simply undeniable how legendary these two horses have been.

What makes this rivalry special is the dominance both horses shared while going about such dominance quite differently. Zenyatta, the pleasant plodder who was rarely flashy, but won by virtue of calculation. Alexandra who avoided stress and strain by simply running ahead of it. These two girls went a combined 22-0 this year, most races of which were against a stable full of boys and both with a steady shot at becoming the first female to win Horse of the Year honors since Azeri seven years ago.

From the AP:

It’s a debate sure to simmer until January, when the Eclipse Awards—the Oscars of horse racing—are presented in Beverly Hills. Members of the National Turf Writers Association, the Daily Racing Form and racing secretaries at the major tracks decide the year’s champion horses.

Even before Zenyatta’s come-from-behind win Saturday, Hall of Fame trainer Bob Baffert suggested the horses should share the top honor.

“If they don’t reward her with Horse of the Year, it would be a travesty, or at least co-Horses of the Year,” said Baffert, who trained sixth-place Classic finisher Richard’s Kid. “It was the only time in horse racing that I didn’t mind getting beat in a big race.”

Chip Woolley Jr., trainer of Kentucky Derby winner Mine That Bird, said before the Classic that Rachel Alexandra had already clinched Horse of the Year.

“The one thing everybody keeps forgetting, she beat the fillies with authority,” he said of Rachel Alexandra. “She didn’t win by a neck or a length or two lengths. She beat ‘em by 20 and in a big gallop. When you look at that and you put everything together, I think she’s a very deserving champion.”

Belmont Stakes winner Summer Bird was beaten by Rachel Alexandra in the Haskell Invitational and by Zenyatta in the Classic. His trainer, Tim Ice, was critical of Rachel’s absence Saturday at Santa Anita.

“Each sport has their championship game,” he said. “If you don’t compete in the championship game, then you shouldn’t be a champion. This is the highlight of the year as far as all the great horses coming together. This should name Horse of the Year.

“I wish they would have brought her (Rachel) here so we could have proved to the racing world what Zenyatta’s really about,” said Zenyatta’s jockey, Mike Smith. “I’m not going to go out and say I’m going to beat her, but I would have given anything to run against her.”

Both horses had their fickle moments this season. Zenyatta was in Kentucky on Derby weekend but scratched because of a muddy track. Alexandra was begged to compete in the Breeders’ Cup. Organizers even offered an extra $1 million to the purse if she showed, but her owners didn’t like the synthetic track.

Oh, what could have been. Oh, but what was anyway.

Horse racing just isn’t very popular in America, at least not compared to many other professional sports. Because of that, this rivalry-from-afar will largely go unnoticed. And with Zenyatta set to retire following her stunning Breeders’ Cup race finale, there will be no chance for a second act between these two.

But my god, it was fun while it lasted.

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Top photo collage courtesy of Yahoo! Sports via Getty Images

This post does not suggest that women don’t have a place in professional sports. It does ask what exactly that place is, especially given sports’ current climate.

What is this climate I speak of? Well, the six women pictured above are considered among the best in their particular sports and most people can’t name half of them. Can you? I bet you can’t. And that’s the climate of women’s sport; a climate in which fans may have accepted female athletes, but haven’t come close to accepting the leagues and organizations in which they play.

Let’s see if we can’t figure out some of the reasons.

We’ll spend little time discussing those female athletes that have proven marketable. We all know players Gabrielle Reece, Mia Hamm and the highest earning female athlete, Serena Williams have been able to mix elements of skill, personality and physical beauty into a packaged persona that more defies each of their sports rather than defines it. It’s important to note that most of these athletes are marketed as individuals. Few female athletes on team sports have endorsement deals.

Recently NBA commissioner David Stern announced that his league failed to turn an overall profit in 2009 and that the WNBA was far more profitable. But considering Stern’s funhouse definition of “profitable” is breaking even, his claim lacks accuracy. The WNBA, in its 13 years, has gone down in yearly attendance five more times than it has gone up. Since 1997, the average attendance of a game has fallen 19.6 percent and teams like the Phoenix LifeLock Mercury and Indiana Fever are selling off pounds of their corporate flesh in order to gain sponsorship and stay afloat. The league isn’t growing. And in sports terms, if you’re standing still, you’re going backwards.

The leading mixed martial arts promotion, UFC, started as a messy $2 million business in 2001, five years after the WNBA. Doggedly fighting for recognition by the same mainstream media who also ignored the WNBA, UFC has become a $1 billion force, despite hustling in the same economic environment as lady hoops. How? Because the UFC marketed their legitimate fighting organization the only way they could: bu spotlighting the fact that they have he entertainment value of fake wrestling like WWE … except that it’s real. So when sponsors and fans alike asked, “why should I watch you when I already watch boxing and pro wrestling?” UFC was able to illustrate the niche they had carved out.

Women’s sports, including the WNBA, haven’t come close to articulating (or even identifying) their niche.

When an individual player gets singled out in ads, it’s because that athlete is special. Women’s athletic promotions have followed this same logic, but it’s backfired in many ways.  At some point, marketing whiz-bangs owe it to their clients to admit that some marketable female athletes are not as athletically talented as their male counterparts.

I know, I know. Boo on me. There’s a neon pink elephant in the room that no one was gonna mention, but I went and ruined it. Well tough, I’m tired of the room smelling like the zoo, okay? Campaigns like “They’re Better Than You Think” or Nike’s “It’s a Skills Thing” campaign are certainly pro-female athletes, but don’t address what about female athletics are failing to draw audiences and therefore serve the same ends as an anti-female athletics ad. Again, there is a differene between marketing women and marketing women’s sports. Nike is right, it is a skills thing. But that works against most female sports, because if a women’s skills allowed her to play with the men, she would. They know that. We know that. Nike knows that. Even your grandma knows that and she’s half senile. So when sports fans think about any specific women’s league, most think that it is of lesser quality than the male version of that sport. And if enough people think that for long enough, your league is doomed to go the way of Olympic softball, or the WUSA.

This isn’t like baseball’s Negro Leagues in the early 20th Century, where great players were not allowed to play against the established best. When athletes like Michelle Wie or Danica Patrick compete with the top male athletes in their profession, the media gives them an (over)abundance of positive attention. It’s unfair to say they aren’t given a chance.

In 1995, Nike launched the “Let Me Play” campaign in which pre-teen girls in non-athletic surroundings look into the camera and say things like, “If you let me play, I’ll be 60 percent less likely to get breast cancer” or “if you let me play I’ll have more self-confidence.” And this is where mixed marketing messages are ruining women’s sports. Does anyone cheer for Tom Brady so that his confidence is raised? Ben Roethlisberger maybe, but not Brady. Sports fans don’t want to be doing athletes a favor. Who’s entertaining who here? Sports are about competition; who’s better, faster, stronger. Ask yourself, why would you spend your time focusing on a collection of pretty good athletes when the best ones are elsewhere?

If the answers are out there, no advertising corporation has found them yet.

And because most of the largest female sports organizations have settled on positioning themselves as me-too sideshows, advertisers have answered the me-too, with a “no thanks.” Just last week, the president of the LPGA resigned following the association’s top players petitioning for her removal after having done such a horrendous job.

Since 2007, seven events have disappeared from the tour’s schedule, and only 10 title contracts are signed for the 2010 tour. The tour has also lost the backing of major sponsors, and the status of at least three other events for next year remains unclear.

[Carolyn] Bivens, 56, drew criticism from the players because she was unwilling to negotiate with sponsors to lower their costs of putting on tournaments. As a result, many sponsors dropped out of the tour, and players thought the economy was not solely to blame.

And the poor marketing doesn’t end with individuals or sponsors. Even penny-wise decisions are slowly revealing themselves to be pound-foolish over time. Last week, WTA’s former chairman and CEO Larry Scott, stepped down in order to become the commissioner of the NCAA’s Pac-10 conference. In his place is former WTA president, Stacey Allaster. Allaster is generally considered a strong choice based on her past accomplishments. She got the WTA a 40 percent increase in prize money since 2006 partly by expanding the group’s global television imprint. Without downplaying those achievements, or her successful quest to grant equal prize money for men and women in Wimbledon and Roland Garros, these facts don’t paint the whole picture. How did she make these things happen? She increased the amount of events that the top players would have to participate in each year, an effective change that some of those top players have complained about on more than one occasion. I’ll leave it to you to judge whether it’s positive or negative to earn more sponsorship dollars by riding your stars into the ground.

What about all the other female sports? Women’s MMA has two superstars who will fight next month. And who will the winner of that fight face next? No clue, because there are no other strong contenders with much experience. What about the newly formed Women’s Professional Soccer league? Well, hopefully attaching themselves to the MLS (similar to how the WNBA hitches its wagon to the NBA), will stave off the same fate as the $100 million now-defunct WUSA. Or not. And heck, if cheerleading isn’t the most popular high school and college activity for women, it sure is killing the highest percentage of ‘em. But if it’s not considered a sport, what are all those young ladies dying for for?

If women can compete with the best, wonderful. A lot of people will root just as hard (or harder) for those women. But where are they? The Williams sisters? Sure. Who else? Danica Patrick? Maybe eventually. Annika Sorenstam? She’s retired. Rachel Alexandra? She’s a horse, doesn’t count. In the end, every popular sport showcases what fans perceive to be “the best.” And with the exception of sex appeal, none of the major female sports has offered the average fan any reason to tune in. And none of the female leagues need to be told what happens when your fan-driven livelihood ceases to have fans.

Rachel Alexandra was so far ahead in the Kentucky Oaks finale that by the time I squared my camera and snapped a picture, she was gone and all that was left were the losers she dusted. (Pictured: The dusted losers)

It should have been clear that something special was going to happen during the 135th Kentucky Derby weekend the minute Scott Padgett, a Kentucky University alum and member of the NBA from 1999-2007, stepped in front of me and shot me a goofy smile (of course it was awkward. Have you seen Padgett? No other smile had a chance of flyin’ off that mug). I should have known it, but I didn’t.

Derby weekend must be seen to be believed. Churchill Downs in the first week of May is like a Jay Gatsby party in which every woman in attendance is under the impression she’s Daisy Buchanan. There are no orchestras playing jazz (unless you count Taylor Swift, in which case it’s just as Fitzgerald imagined it) and the high-society types are more imagined than imaginary.

What you need to remember is that Derby weekend is only about the 23 horse races to everyone outside of Kentucky. Once inside Louisville, it’s about hats and mint juleps. Seeing horses race plays like the Art Garfunkel to the Churchill Downs’ boozing and schmoozing Paul Simon. As someone whose fingers were inked with the racing forms 20 minutes after arrival, I was unaware how fleeting the elite’s interest in horse racing was. Over the nine hours I watched fillies run in Friday’s Kentucky Oaks races, this passivity was something that revealed itself to me as harshly as an desperate flasher. It took longer to understand why women spend a day moving wide hat brims out of their eyes than it did to fully appreciate the nuances of betting on horses.

Here are the basics of race day: (my apologies to races aficionados. Go to the bathroom, make a sandwich and when you come back, I‘ll be done with this part…providing you skip ahead to the next paragraph) There are 12 female races during the Oaks and 11 races during the Derby. There are anywhere between eight to 13 horses in each race accept for each day’s main event, in which there are a maximum of 20. Unlike the U.K., America sets its lines based upon the betting patterns of the masses. So if June Day is a 3-1 favorite on Wednesday, but no one bets on her by race time Friday, the odds that she’ll win don’t remain 3-1, they decrease significantly. American odds, the line on Wednesday is just a starting point, but the amount of bets that each horse gets right up until the start of each race, greatly determine the odds.  Cool, huh? Before each race, you can bet early or you can bet late. Technically you can bet whenever you want, but unless you want to be reading about horse betting for another six hours, let’s go with the simplest explanation. If you bet on Senor Fuego 40 minutes before she’s set to race, you’ll be basing your wager on professional line-setters and the analysis inside and your gut (if there’s two things I learned not to trust on Derby weekend, it’s my gut and men dressed in pink). The early odds are based on the horse’s, trainer’s and jockey’s history and has nothing to do with the people’s wagers. Then again, if you bet on Senor Fuego at 8-1 odds 40 minutes before the race, by the time the bets windows close, the masses could have made her a 5-2 favorite or a 30-1 underdog and you’ll be trapped in your bet. Then again, if you wait until after the odds have been muddied with the gut-feeling wagers of the over-tanned wannabe West Egg socialites. The choice is up to you.

Back from the bathroom, I see. You didn’t happen to bring me a mint julep, did you? Something about equines makes me hanker for drinks that taste like mouthwash and whiskey.

When you’re in the wager lines waiting to throw your money away forever, you’ll see all sorts of race fans. Churchill Downs is an old boys club to be sure. Men with money bring their wives who are living off of it to an event that they dare not miss but aren’t all that interested in. Twentysomethings and the elderly alike arrive in costume. The ridiculousness lies not in the antiquated get-ups, but in the un-ironic sincerity with which people wore these goony costumes. Tradition is fine and I’m all for it, but why this one? At the races, showing up in low-cut prom dresses with large hats or suits that make its wearers look like plantation owners is not only acceptable, it’s expected. But taken out of context, if any of the people at the races lost their way and wound up in another state in their getup, they would immediately be checked into the nearest looney bin. Perhaps it’s best not to get into that and just appreciate a skinny woman in a bright canary dress spilling her mimosa on her shoes because she’s too preoccupied fiddling with the feathers on her gigantic top hat that she’s clearly not comfortable wearing. The Kentucky Derby: where classy race enthusiasts happen.  Sorry, I’m so bitter. Mint juleps do that to me. Seriously, those things are awful.

On Friday, I bet the winning horse 3-of-7 times, came out of the day down $80 (I did win a hot dog from my girlfriend, which emotionally counted as about $25) and got to see the Oaks favorite Rachel Alexandra beat the field by 20 1/4-lengths, an Oaks record. Rachel Alexandra was so fast, most people believe she could have won the Derby had she been entered into it. (Editor’s note: Calvin Borel, the jockey who rode Rachel Alexandra to victory on Friday, also rode the 50-1 Mine That Bird to a shocking Derby victory one day later. Two days after that the cheapskates that owned Rachel Alexandra sold her to a wealthier stable who plan to enter her in the Preakness Stakes later this month. Borel chose the female horse to ride in the Preakness instead of the Derby Winner. Rachel Alexandra is only the third filly to run in the Preakness and Borel is only the third jockey to switch off the Derby winner before the Preakness).

The win was breathtaking and brilliant, even for a novice like myself. Imagine your first basketball experience being witness to a LeBron James triple-double? What if all you knew of baseball was a Randy Johnson no-hitter? I don’t doubt that Rachel Alexandra’s ass-whuppin’ was on the same level. Either way, it bore a new race fan in me.

Afterwards, I heard Adrian Brody was at the race, along with various brats from MTV shows. When did I hear this? Less than 60 seconds after Rachel Alexandra’s run. The info was purloined from a text message on a young woman’s iPhone. As the information spread around the section of the grandstands, the conversation ceased being about that magnificent filly and had totally shifted to Kim Kardashian’s Barnstable party and where in the grandstands Michael Jordan might have been. Imagine seeing that LeBron James triple-double and then commenting on how good the stadium’s cotton candy is. Or discussing traffic whle Randy Johnsons’ teammates are still dog-piling on top of him in celebration. Nothing else mattered because in Louisville, it’s about the spectators, not what they’re are spectating.

And the only thing more shameful than the fans’ attention to the event was how hard I tried to evesdrop the last conversation long enough to find out where Jordan was hiding.

You hafta admit, it would have been awesome to rub elbows with Mike.

Rachel Alexandra isn’t the best filly, she’s the best racehorse. And perhaps, she’s the most important step in gender equality since…well, since ever. This horse is special for more than her performance at Pimlico. She’s proof that, at least sometimes, competition doesn’t always break down gender lines.

NASCAR and golf are two sports that have flirted with breaking the gender barrier the most, though none of the females have ever achieved as much as their hype suggests (see: Wie, Michelle), but those sports are far closer to it than say, boxing.

But what about fighting? The idea of pitting a woman against a man immediately seems offensive and cruel. Men are never supposed to hit women. They’re the fairer sex, delicate flowers. And for any self-respecting man, winning a test of strength and endurance is expected and if didn’t happen, it was the man’s shame, not the woman’s triumph.

But what if there were ways to change that? Currently, the mixed martial arts world has two bankable names without contracts. They’re so good that their only competition is each other.  This is bankable once or twice, but not every month.

Both Cristiane “Cyborg” Santos and Gina Carano have established themselves as the Rachel Alexandra’s of their sport, but whereas Rachel has the ability to test her skills against the best, the same would be unthinkable in MMA.

There’s nothing that can be done about our social queasiness about watching a woman get hit by a man. Most of us are programmed to feel any such fight is unfair and barbaric. But what if we started quantifying mixed-gender fights differently than regular fights? Regular fights categorize fighters by their weight, not their power or agility.

Clearly a 210-pound heavyweight would never fight a 135-pound woman. Even a 135-pound man carries an advantage over a 135-pound woman, because the pounds are packed differently between the two body types. Force isn’t simply a matter of muscle, but of how those muscles are used.

So what if the sport looked at how much power each fighter exerts? Look at all the tests Ivan Drago went through. You don’t think some of those tests could be adapted to figure out how many pounds of force Carano’s muay-tai kicks accumulates? UPDATE: Not only is it possible, it’s happened (sorta). We can deduce that Carano vs. Drago would not be a fair fight. Carano can strike with anywhere between 450-800 lbs. of force. Drago seems to be able to punch in the neighborhood of 1,850 lbs…if he were real.

Isn’t it possible to have genuine stars-in-waiting like Santos and Carano fight better competition without turning it into a circus? If Santos can kick with the force of 350 lbs. and punch with the force of 170 lbs., isn’t it possible to match her up with a man exhibiting the same numbers? Yeah, yeah. Mixed martial arts is not just kicks and jabs, but arm-bars and ground ‘n’ pound and sleeper locks and so-on, but isn’t that all quantifiable? And if it is, can’t these organizations use those quantifications to showcase their talent?

Scrapping bottoms of various barrels ain’t working so far and without the ability to parade their commodities in front of fans (I didn’t mean that the way it might have sounded), they have only a faint gasp of hope for other female fighters to develop into real challengers.

Right now a filly is the fastest race horse in the world and it only happened because she was given a chance she was close to not having. Is it unthinkable to give these same chances to human females?