Sue Bird was featured in an American Express commercial in 2003, wearing her Seattle Storm uniform and leaping through a crowd of butchers as if introduced to a basketball game, toward an employee who shouted “Number ten…Number ten!”
This gritty boo, accessible on YouTube, was a small push to mainstream fame for Bird, who 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 nearing the end of her final season, set to retire as one of the most successful players and influential women in basketball history, making her the starting from a platform that she not only jumped, dribbled and clapped. , but the one she basically 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 who aren’t even a third of the player that Sue was, and it’s like a visiting dignitary from another country, the way they’re treating those kids during the draft. And and then the promotion machine kicks in 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 stars and make them into familiar names. It must have been gradual for her.
Bird, 41, will play her last game in Connecticut on Thursday, when the Storm visit the Sun at Mohegan Sun Arena, and she has, indeed, become among the sport’s most high-profile faces over time.
The entirety of her career success, which coincides 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 has made so many statements over the years that 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 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 was celebrated because of all this instead of before this.
“Obviously the league gave him an opportunity,” Auriemma said. “But she did it by winning. Some people do it through their social media presence. Sue did it on the back of wins and championships. She did it. On every stage she was able to perform on, she built a legacy that very, very few…
“I mean, who else?” D, maybe. Of course, D.
Sue and D, a phrase and a pair so synonymous with success in basketball – Bird, the WNBA’s all-time assists leader, Diana Taurasi, the WNBA’s all-time leading scorer. Icons now, both. The teenagers when they chose our little corner of the world to start making a name for themselves.
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Auriemma’s career at this point is that he has come to know 16-year-old children whose evolution becomes the fascination of a global audience, their thoughts and their impact on the company ultimately transcending basketball.
Bird flew on the college coaching radar in his second season at Syosset High, 1995-96. She was about to transfer to Queens basketball powerhouse Christ The King and had long played on an AAU team, the New York Liberty Belles, which featured King’s best players every year. .
“You knew there was something unique about her,” Auriemma said. “Everything about her was fast. Her feet were fast. Her hands were fast. Her mind, her eyes, her pull jumps. It was just how she played basketball – never rushed, never seemed rushed, but there was a quickness to her that I hadn’t seen much in. She was quick and she was quick and she was smart.
Bird has become so marketable. She is vocal, famous, facing societal issues alongside her fiancée, Megan Rapinoe, with whom she forms one of the true power couples in sport. Like most people, she is very different as an adult than she was as a child. Bird’s first visit to UConn was as part of a one-game Christ The King team trip. Then she sat down with Auriemma in her office in the Gampel Pavilion.
“She was nervous, obviously,” Auriemma said. “At the time, she was more shy than anything. But recruiting was going strong enough for her. All the schools in the country wanted to get involved. I joke her to this day, ‘You acted like you were cheating on me, in my office pretending 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 targeted Bird, Swin Cash, Asjha Jones and Tamika Williams, eventually landing all of them – with Bird’s help, unbeknownst to him at the time. Unlike the personality she let Auriemma see, she became a leader in recruiting, building 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 reach them on the phone that easily,” Auriemma said of recruiting, before cellphones. “So you made sure that, every time you talked to them, you accomplished something better than just, ‘Hey, what’s up.’ But she was always easy to be around. There was no 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 his freshman season and UConn, a No. 1 seed, was upset by Iowa State in the NCAA Tournament Sweet 16. The Huskies won national championships in Bird’s sophomore season in 2000 and his 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 visit to the New York Stock Exchange, where brokers kept telling her they wanted her to play for the Knicks.
Thus, his first achievements did not go unnoticed.
But it was a different world then. Players were more anonymous. The league wasn’t what it is today, neither was the sport. Bird would change that, but who knew then what she would do with the next 20 years?
“Her birth the moment she was born gave her huge opportunities, but can you imagine if she came out as a rookie this year or last year and social media presence?” said Auriemme. “I mean, look what Paige [Bueckers] do. So you can imagine what someone like Sue could have done, the impact she would have had. At the time, it was simply not available. »
Bird was selected by the Storm with the first pick in the 2002 draft, two years before Taurasi became No. 1 in Phoenix. Now they’re on a video game cover together, among the most successful teammates in sports history, winning medals together, building a sport together.
“You look at the [fame] the women’s soccer team has had since the World Cup was held in the United States,” Auriemma said. ” The women [basketball] The Olympic team has never been able to benefit from [winning in the U.S.] If they had, can you imagine it with five gold medals, what would that have entailed? She would be on the cover of Time Magazine. She would have been everything Simone Biles is, when you think about it. But it was not available at the time. She would have been the basketball version of Mia Hamm. But for some reason that never materialized like with women’s football, like with all other women’s sports, that wasn’t happening back then. So for her, it happened gradually. She grew up in that role instead of having that role thrown in her face. You are 21 years old. Now be the face of the sport.”
People have seen Bird succeed, time and time again, before they’ve really heard of her.
“She went from just wanting a chance to play, to admiring all of 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 who yells and yells at everyone. But when she spoke, everyone listened, and now she has even more to say than ever. and her microphone is much bigger and people want to know what Sue Bird thinks on any subject.
[email protected]; @ManthonyHearst