Kissimmee, Fla ? Her response – correction: her non-response – is both shocking and disappointing.

Here’s the exchange between Annika Sorenstam and me Wednesday during her pre-tournament news conference for the LPGA Ginn Open:

“Annika, some derogatory comments were made about the Rutgers women’s basketball team the other day; obviously, you’ve heard about them . . .”

Before I can finish, Annika stops me cold with her response.

“No, I haven’t.”

You haven’t?

“No,” she says, shaking her head.

Uncomfortable pause.

All I can think of to say at this point is, “Never mind.”

All she can think of to say is, “Sorry.”

Yeah, I’m sorry, too.

Sorry because herein lies the colossal problem facing female athletes in their ongoing battle against sexism in the sports arena: Nobody cares enough to speak up or stand up for them.

What does it tell you when Annika Sorenstam, perhaps the most famous female athlete in the world, knows nothing about one of the most infamous cases of verbal sexism ever uttered against female athletes? You’d think when shock jock Don Imus called the Rutgers women’s basketball team a bunch of “nappy-headed hos” last week, the women’s sports movement and women in general would be united in disgust and outrage.

Instead, all we hear is Sorenstam obliviously talking about her new $4,000-a-day golf academy.

The Imus story has been all over the news, but only because of the racist portion of his remarks and because most of the Rutgers players are black. Black activists such as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson rightfully have screamed “racism” and called for Imus’ firing.

But where’s the outcry from women? Isn’t the sexist part of Imus’ quote (hos) much more offensive than the racist portion of it (nappy-headed)? Isn’t denigrating the content of a woman’s character more hideous and hateful than disparaging the texture of her hair? Isn’t depicting a team of young, smart, decent, hard-

working, overachieving college women as a bunch of prostitutes much more deplorable than making light of their Geri curls?

As the father of two daughters, what most offended me about Imus was his blatant belittlement of female athletes. When you listen to his off-the-cuff comments, it’s almost as if he is saying female athletes are so insignificant that the only mention they deserve on his show is a five-second sound bite in which he basically calls them a bunch of tramps.

And the thing is, Imus simply is the latest and most abhorrent case of male talk-show hosts objectifying and minimizing female athletes.

National sports radio host Jim Rome mocks the WNBA every time he talks about it.

When I lived in Jacksonville, an acid-tongued radio host named Rick Ballou used to brag gleefully that the only circumstance in which he would watch women’s sports is if the athletes were wearing “thong bikinis.”

When is enough enough? What does it say about our country when one of the most popular genres of music (hip-hop) and one of the most prominent forms of media (talk radio) make a habit of denigrating women? It makes you wonder whether we really have evolved since the days of the caveman.

The evolutionary tree: 1. Neanderthal man; 2. Cro-Magnon man; 3. Sports radio man.