Sue Bird shouldn’t be actually into astrology, however she is aware of she is a Libra.
As some extent guard, Bird embodied the very essence of Libra vitality each time she stepped on the court docket—having to stability the completely different kinds of play of every certainly one of her teammates, studying every of their most popular communication strategies, or bringing the staff collectively once they began to fracture or fall out of sync. Libras, the ultimate diplomats, are sometimes involved with stability and equity. Over the course of Bird’s 19-year profession within the WNBA, the league went from a fledgling afterthought on this planet of sports activities to being on the verge of mainstream viewership. Her single-minded deal with being the Seattle Storm’s unwavering, dependable chief was a thread that tied these two disparate phases of the league’s existence collectively.
Bird fairly famously shied away from ruffling any feathers or pushing any buttons all through a lot of her profession, preferring to place her head down and let her play communicate for itself. (Libras are additionally famously conflict-averse.) But the factor about Libras that many individuals don’t see coming is how dedicated they’re to justice. And so, within the face of injustices that turned more and more laborious to show away from—office situations, racism, sexist double requirements, LGBTQ+ discrimination—Bird started to talk up.
“Yeah,” Bird says once I inform her a few of this on a Zoom name. “I’m a proud Libra.”
She is in a room I acknowledge from the photographs of the New York City condo she owns along with her fiancé, former soccer star Megan Rapinoe, that have been featured in Elle Decor magazine. The condo was the primary home the 2 bought collectively and was a part of the couple’s imaginative and prescient for retirement, a place within the metropolis—which “feels like the place [they] fell in love,” Rapinoe instructed Elle Decor, and close to Bird’s hometown on Long Island.
I’m chatting with Bird throughout March Madness, when the ladies’s event is receiving extra hype than the lads’s and viewership numbers for the ladies’s video games are breaking data. The complete world appears to be speaking about University of Iowa’s Caitlin Clark, who’s projected to be the primary choose within the upcoming WNBA draft. I point out seeing a longtime sports activities journalist, a person who has principally coated males’s sports activities, say that Clark might be a refreshing addition to the W as a result of the league lacks any actual villains—gamers who lean into an on-court persona that followers like to hate or root in opposition to. Bird, who performed the precise reverse of that function throughout her profession, names Diana Taurasi, Liz Cambage, and Sophie Cunningham as well-known examples of this archetype.
“God, how many times you turn on the TV and they just totally botch it,” she says. “They just leave out details or they name only two names that they know because they may have seen them on Twitter that day. We’re not understanding the history and the nuance. That’s how I see these business ventures in my retirement—as being able to bring nuance to the table.”
Bird’s legacy as the most effective level guards to ever play the sport was already cemented. But as she neared retirement, she determined there was extra that she needed to be remembered for. A brand new documentary, Sue Bird: In the Clutch, tells the story of Bird’s profession, from her childhood as a star athlete to the work horse she turned whereas enjoying below coach Geno Auriemma on the University of Connecticut to serving to the Storm win the franchise’s first WNBA championship. She retired from basketball in 2022 after practically twenty years, 5 Olympic gold medals, and 4 WNBA Championships.
“‘Who am I if I’m not a basketball player’ is the looming question at the start of this film,” she says. “They say athletes die two deaths, the actual death that we all eventually have but then also the death of when they stop playing, because it is a little bit like the death of an identity.”
In answering this query, the documentary makes an attempt to provide followers extra access to the notoriously guarded Bird, who tends to draw back from public—and even non-public—shows of emotional vulnerability, although there have been extra glimpses of them since she came out publicly in 2017. Interviews with childhood pals, relations, and former teammates affirm that Bird was somebody who most popular to channel all her emotions into basketball (she is a Capricorn moon, so this, too, is sensible). As I watched, I hoped to be taught one thing new about who Bird is as a person, however that may be a story that the movie is barely partially keen to inform.
“Honestly, there’s probably like two, three, four more layers of vulnerability that we could have gotten to,” Bird concedes. But Bird’s pals and family members assist fill within the image of who Sue Bird is when she’s not enjoying basketball and the insights we get into these relationships reveal one thing deeper.
Bird’s longtime friendship with former UConn teammate Diana Taurasi is frequent data at this level. In some ways, it’s an opposites appeal to type of scenario. Where Bird doesn’t wish to make waves, Taurasi is barely too-willing to provide somebody a chunk of her thoughts. Bird, at an unassuming 5’8”, is thought for quietly dominating video games, whereas Taurasi’s trash discuss is famous.
“I think Sue wants to be a little more like Diana and Diana wishes she were a little more like Sue,” Auriemma, who coached each girls, speculates within the movie.
Bird likes that Taurasi doesn’t sugarcoat issues: “Give it to me straight,” she says throughout a confessional interview, 5 completely different rings on her fingers as a result of this movie is lesbian tradition. “Don’t blow smoke up my ass.”
There’s an identical dynamic between Bird and Rapinoe, the previous U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team member identified for her directness and willingness to lean into laborious conversations no matter who it would upset. Clearly, there’s something about these sorts of people who Bird is drawn to, one thing she will get by surrounding herself with people who find themselves louder, brasher than she is. In the movie, a number of individuals speak about how Bird is completely happy to take a backseat to larger personalities. And being somebody who can stability out the louder voices in a bunch is an enormous a part of what allowed Bird to have success on the court docket.
But in her private life, she’s needed to work to ascertain her personal voice, slightly than counting on the individuals round her to suck up all of the air within the room. “That’s something that [Megan and I] always talk about in our couples therapy,” she says, “just this idea of taking up space. Megan takes up a lot of space, while I naturally don’t. I’m trying to figure out that balance within our relationship but there’s a reason I’m drawn to somebody who takes up space. I admire that, or maybe wish I was more like that.”
That Bird brings up {couples} remedy is an enormous deal, an indication that she actually is studying to open up and let the world in just a little bit. Another recent instance of this shift is her look alongside Rapinoe on the “Pablo Torre Finds Out” podcast in February. Bird and Rapinoe make a number of informal jokes about their intercourse life, with Bird mentioning “dry humping”—one thing that appeared exceptional only a few years in the past.
“I never thought of it as like, ‘do I feel this pressure to like, be respectable?’ But now that you’re saying it—100 percent,” says Bird. “Of course we have sex, we’re engaged… But I guess there is this fear that has always existed around gay sex is that it’s inappropriate for kids [to hear about] so normalizing that is super important. But more than anything, for myself, it’s just about being authentic in that way.”
Authenticity additionally means placing her money the place her mouth is. Bird acknowledged that if she was going to complain about lack of media protection of ladies’s sports activities, she ought to step in and assist present that. But there isn’t actually a blueprint for the type of transition that Bird is attempting to make, with maybe the closest analogue being somebody like Billie Jean King. But Bird is undeterred, and hopes that she will present a path for athletes who come after her to observe.
In 2021, she co-founded the media manufacturing firm Togethxr, which prioritizes illustration, alongside USWNT member Alex Morgan, Olympic snowboarder Chloe Kim, and Olympic swimmer Simone Manuel, and in 2022, she launched the manufacturing firm, A Touch More alongside Rapinoe. Bird has labored laborious to be the place she is at this time, in a place that enables her to deliver her complete self to the desk, to exemplify the fullness of the Libra archetype that she is so proud to embody—pursuing stability, pursuing justice, and doing all of it from a place that strives to elevate everyone as she climbs.
“It’s really important for those who have intimate knowledge to start covering our sport and to start telling the stories of our sport,” says Bird. “I think players have that. And that’s where I’m really excited to have some impact now in telling those stories and making sure they’re told in the right way.”
Frankie de la Cretaz is the co-author of Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of The National Women’s Football League. Their work has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, and extra.
