The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Bird always embraced her place as role model
It’s rather likely that no women’s basketball player has answered more questions from the media than former UConn All-American Sue Bird.
However, the former NCA A player of year, Olympic and WNBA champion never had an interview quite like her recent sit down with ESPN’s Mechelle Voepel.
Bird’s anguish at the death of her beloved stepfather Dennis Burden could be felt through the computer screen as the always-incontrol Bird recalled that at halftime of her first WNBA game following Burden’s death she hit the point of emotional overload.
“I had to go home,” Bird said. “It was as if all the emotion — everything that I had put to the side for that month — just hit me in one moment. My battery was on empty.”
For the countless number of questions she has answered over the last 20 years, she has managed to keep the questioners and those outside of her inner circle at arm’s length.
One passage in the ESPN story said, ‘Bird typically shows people only what she thinks they need to see.”
Truer words have never been spoken or written. That all changed when Bird announced she was in a relationship with U.S. women’s soccer mainstay Megan Rapinoe, which overshadowed many of the other revelations in Voepel’s exquisitely-crafted profile of Bird.
That one snippet about her reaction to Burden’s death is something I never thought I’d see Bird admit to, at least not to the media. She spoke about wanting to finish her career in Seattle and for the franchise that made her the first of five UConn graduates to be the No. 1 overall pick in the WNBA Draft. Her recollections of UConn coach Geno Auriemma unloading on her when a teammate made a mistake haven’t faded over the years. There was also her rather Diana Taurasi like quote directed at the guys who say they could beat her 1-on-1.
“I actually don’t give as---. I am a better basketball player than you, and that’s the bottom line.”
Was this really Sue Bird, the girl from next door, the fan favorite who Auriemma joked, ‘grew up on the mean streets of Syosset, New York?’
Did I miss anything from the interview?
“I’m gay. Megan’s my girlfriend,” Bird told ESPN. “These aren’t secrets to people who know me. I don’t feel like I’ve not lived my life. I think people have this assumption that if you’re not talking about it, you must be hiding it, like it’s this secret. That was never the case for me.
“So why talk about it now? “It’s happening when it’s happening because that’s what feels right. So
even though I understand there are people who think I should have done it sooner, it wasn’t right for me at the time. I have to be true to that. It’s my journey.”
Bird and Rapinoe sat side by side behind the UConn bench when the Huskies defeated eventual national champion South Carolina in February to win an unprecedented 100th game in a row. The relationship between the two former Olympians is not as surprising as the public manner with which Bird announced the relationship.
Bird is the third prominent former UConn women’s basketball player to announce that she is in a relationship with a woman in the last 14 months.
Stefanie Dolson posted a photo of her with her partner on Instagram in 2016 leading to ESPN writing a story with the headline, “Stefanie Dolson: ‘I just am who I am.’ More recently, Diana Taurasi married former Phoenix Mercury teammate Penny Taylor.
“I don’t really see it as an announcement,’ Dolson said before a WNBA game at Mohegan Sun Arena in 2016. “It was mainly to get out that the WNBA as a league is supportive of who we are as women and that is why our fans are so great because they support us too. That is what I’ve got since the article and everybody has been supportive and just glad I am happy.
“I’ve had a few people say that it is something that our league needs to have people who are comfortable for themselves to say who they are and let the fans know. Not that everybody needs to, not everybody needs to be public, but I am a pretty public person so why not let the fans into who I am.”
Bird mentioned that seeing other prominent women’s basketball players go public with their relationships paved the way for her to let the world know of her relationship with Rapinoe.
Bird could have consented to the story during the winter when she was out of the spotlight. By having it come out two days before Seattle hosts the WNBA All-Star Game and a day before local and national media converge on the city, Bird was willing to do what she has always done — be a role model.
Countless young girls and boys have followed Bird dating back to her UConn days, and she has embraced her place as a role model and figures to do the same in the LGBTQ community.
“This has been something I’ve been on the verge of doing for a long time,” Bird said.
Seeing Bird take this public stance is a perfect illustration of how much she has grown since her UConn days.
My first full season as the primary beat writer for the UConn women’s basketball team was Bird’s sophomore season, nearly 20 years ago. After my first couple of interviews with her, I playfully declared that she had, “Sue Bird disease.” On a team full of outgoing, talkative stars, Bird had already mastered the art of talking without saying anything.
“Sue and ‘controversy’ never mixed,” Swin Cash told ESPN. “She wasn’t going to say certain things in the media.”
With one bold stroke, the player who always tried to say what she thought she was supposed to say during her remarkable run at UConn, gave fans a chance to see the real, unfiltered Sue Bird. It was a portrait of a person who has found happiness not only on the court but in her personal life, a look at a true renaissance woman who happens to be one of the most decorated basketball players of all time hailing from the “mean streets of Syosset, New York.”