Geno: Bird earned her fame
Former UConn, WNBA superstar will play in state for final time on Thursday
Sue Bird was featured in an American Express commercial back in 2003, wearing her Seattle Storm uniform and skipping through a deli crowd as if being introduced at a basketball game, toward a clerk who had called out “Number ten … Number ten!”
This grainy hoot, accessible on YouTube, was a little push toward mainstream fame for Bird, who had helped the UConn women’s basketball team to national championships in 2000 and 2002 before becoming the No. 1 pick in the WNBA draft.
All these years later, Bird is coming down the stretch of her final season, about to retire as one of the most successful players and influential women in basketball history, doing so from a platform that she not only skipped and dribbled and high-fived across, but one she essentially built.
“The WNBA didn’t really have the mechanism to take advantage of kids like her,” UConn coach
Geno Auriemma said. “You see a kid coming out now, kids that are not even a third of the player that Sue was, and it’s like a visiting dignitary from another country, the way they treat these kids during the draft. And then the promotion machine goes into effect trying to build them up, and sometimes it’s warranted, sometimes it’s not. But I remember thinking that the WNBA wasn’t really equipped to take some of their big-name stars and make them household names. That’s had to happen gradually for her.”
Bird, 41, will play her final game in Connecticut on Thursday, when the Storm visit the Sun at Mohegan Sun Arena, and the Greenwich resident has, indeed, become over time among the most prominent faces of the sport.
The entirety of her career success, coinciding with the rise in popularity of women’s basketball and the visibility of the WNBA, has been well documented and appropriately celebrated in recent
years — because brick by brick or trophy by trophy, the soft-spoken kid from the Long Island hamlet of Syosset made so many statements over the years the way statements really should be made.
She won a New York high school state championship at Christ The King. She won two national championships at UConn. She has won four WNBA championships with the Storm, and five EuroLeague championships. She won five Olympic gold medals and four world championships with Team USA.
She’s been celebrated because of all this instead of before it.
“Obviously, the league gave her an opportunity,” Auriemma said. “But she did that by winning. Some people do it by their social media presence. Sue did it on the back of wins and championships. She did it. Every stage she’s been able to perform on, she’s built a legacy that very, very few …
“I mean, who else? D, maybe. Obviously, D.”
Sue and D, a phrase and a pair so synonymous with basketball success — Bird the WNBA’s all-time assists leader, Diana Taurasi the WNBA’s all-time leading scorer. Icons now, both. Teenagers when they chose our little corner of the world to start making names for themselves.
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Auriemma’s career at this point is his having gotten to know 16-year-old kids whose evolution becomes the fascination of a global audience, their thoughts and impact on society eventually transcending basketball.
Bird flew onto the radar of college coaches during her sophomore season at Syosset High, 1995-96. She was about to transfer to Christ The King, the basketball powerhouse in Queens, and had long played on an AAU team, the New York Liberty Belles, that annually featured top King players.
“You knew there was something unique about her,” Auriemma said. “Everything about her was quick. Her feet were quick. Her hands were quick. Her mind, her eyes, her pull-up jump shots. There was just this way that she played basketball — never rushed, never seemed like she was in a hurry, but there was a quickness about her that I had not seen very much of. She was fast and she was quick and she was smart.”
Bird has become so marketable. She is vocal, famous, in front of societal issues alongside her fiancé, Megan Rapinoe, with whom she forms one of sport’s true power couples. Like most people, she’s much different as an adult than she was as a kid. Bird’s first visit to UConn came as part of a Christ The King team trip to a game. Afterward, she sat with Auriemma in his office at Gampel Pavilion.
“She was nervous, obviously,” Auriemma said. “Back then, she was more shy than anything else. But the recruiting thing was going pretty strong for her. Every school in the country wanted to get involved. I kid her to this day, ‘You acted like you were big-timing me, in my office pretending like you could take it or leave it. Meanwhile, I knew you were dying to come to UConn.’ And at the same time, she wasn’t going to say anything about anything. Just typical 16-year-old girl stuff.”
This was a crucial recruiting period for UConn. Auriemma was targeting Bird, Swin Cash, Asjha Jones and Tamika Williams, ultimately landing every one of them — with Bird’s help, unbeknownst to him at the time. Counter to the personality she let Auriemma see, she became a recruiting ringleader, establishing relationships that motivated those players to want to play together in college.
“You couldn’t just pick up a phone 24/7 and text a kid or get them on the phone that easily,” Auriemma said of recruiting, pre-cellphones. “So you made sure that, whenever you did talk to them, you got something accomplished that was better than just, ‘Hey, what’s up.’ But she was always easy to be around. There wasn’t any drama. You didn’t have to go through five people to contact her. It was easy, simple, uncomplicated.”
Bird tore an ACL eight games into her freshman season and UConn, a No. 1 seed, was upset by Iowa State in the NCAA Tournament’s Sweet 16. The Huskies won national championships during Bird’s sophomore season of 2000 and her senior season in 2002.
The latter team, one of the best in college basketball history, started seniors Bird, Cash, Jones, Williams and sophomore Taurasi. Bird celebrated that championship with a team tour of the New York Stock Exchange, where brokers kept telling her they wished she played for the Knicks.
So her early accomplishments didn’t go unnoticed.
But it was a different world then. Players were more anonymous. The league wasn’t what it is today, nor was the sport. Bird would change that, but who knew then what she would make of the next 20 years?
“Her being born at the time she was gave her tremendous opportunities, but can you imagine if she was coming out as a rookie this year or last year and the social media presence?” Auriemma said. “I mean, look at what Paige (Bueckers) is doing. So you can imagine what somebody like Sue would have been able to do, the impact she would have had. At the time, it just wasn’t available.”
Bird was selected by the Storm with the top overall pick in the 2002 draft, two years before Taurasi would go No. 1 to Phoenix. Now they’re on a video game cover together, among the most successful teammates in sports history, winning medals together, growing a sport together.
“You look at the (fame) the women’s soccer team has had since the World Cup was in the U.S.,” Auriemma said. “The women’s (basketball) Olympic team has never been able to benefit from (winning in the U.S.) If they had, can you imagine her with five Gold medals, what that would have entailed? She’d be on the cover of Time Magazine. She would have been everything Simone Biles is, when you think about it. But it wasn’t available then. She would have been the basketball version of Mia Hamm. But for whatever reason it just never materialized like it did for women’s soccer, like any other women’s sports it wasn’t happening for at that time. So for her, it has happened gradually. She’s grown into that role instead of having that role thrown into her face.
People saw Bird succeed, time and again, before they really heard much from her.
“She went from just wanting to have a chance to play, to looking up to all her teammates who were older, to now having the biggest voice,” Auriemma said. “She was never one to use her voice. She’s not that kid yelling and screaming at everybody. But when she talked, everybody listened, and now she has even more to say than ever before and her microphone is a lot bigger and people want to know what Sue Bird is thinking on any topic.”