74 Time July 19/July 26, 2021TOKYO
OLYMPICS
On Point
For America
LEADING BY EXAMPLE, SUE BIRD
CHASES A HISTORIC FIFTH GOLD
BY SEAN GREGORY
PHOTOGRAPH BY PAOLA KUDACKI FOR TIME
AT 40, BIRD—STILL
ONE OF THE WNBA’S
BEST PASSERS AND
SHOOTERS—SHOWS
FEW SIGNS OF SLOWING
or Sue Bird’S firST olympicS, in
2004 in Athens, the team stayed on
the Queen Mary 2 cruise ship. Early
WNBA stars like Dawn Staley, Sheryl
Swoopes and Lisa Leslie led the squad, and a few
of the younger players, including Bird, were quite
fond of a nightclub on the ship, G32. “They par-
tied every single night,” says Staley. “It should
have been called the ‘Sue Bird Nightclub.’ ”
Once the quarterfinals hit, Staley told the
players to cool it. “It would have been the easiest
thing to say, ‘Oh, old lady, you don’t know what
you’re talking about,’ ” says Staley. Instead, Bird
took the request as a leadership lesson: speak up
when it matters. After the U.S. won the gold, the
players started chanting “G32” on the podium.
The whole team partied hard that night.
Seventeen years later, Bird, 40, has assumed
the role of wizened veteran, both on and off the
court. Now the WNBA’s all-time assists leader,
Bird will bring her extraordinary floor vision to
the Tokyo Olympics, where she and teammate
Diana Taurasi hope to become the first basket-
ball players to win five Olympic gold medals.
Former teammate Staley is now their coach.
The (likely) last Olympics of Bird’s storied
career comes as the larger world has finally
begun to appreciate her greatness. Days afterF
the Seattle Storm clinched its fourth title
last October, for example, Seattle Seahawks
quarterback Russell Wilson wore a Bird jersey
before a prime-time game. “I feel like Sue Bird
in the clutch,” he said after leading his team to a
comeback victory. He wasn’t the only one paying
tribute. In 2020, Bird led the WNBA in jersey
sales for the first time in her career.Bird, who grew up on New York’s Long Is-
land and won two NCAA titles at the University
of Connecticut, loves to geek out on her craft, but
she knows as well as anyone that women’s bas-
ketball and the WNBA have always had to fight
for more than wins: acceptance from fans predis-
posed to dismiss women’s sports, better pay and
benefits, and equity for the league’s many players
of color and those who identify as LGBTQ. “We
never got the chance to shut up and dribble,” Bird
says of the WNBA. “So that’s when we kind of de-
veloped this backbone about us.”
Their commitment to social change deepened
last summer amid a national reckoning about
race and as part of a broader wave of athlete
advocacy. Despite warnings that fans would be
turned off by the activism, ratings for ESPN’s
first five games of the current WNBA season
were up 74% over the 2020 season average.
The Olympics have consistently raised the
profile of women’s basketball in the U.S., and
Bird’s record-breaking quest in Tokyo should
help build even more momentum.
Bird considers herself naturally shy. She cred-
its her fiancée, soccer icon Megan Rapinoe, with
helping amplify her voice. (The pair first hit it off
at the 2016 Rio Olympics.) Though Bird never
hid her sexuality from family and friends, Rapi-
noe persuaded her, in 2017, to publicly reveal
that she was gay. “What Megan helped me un-
derstand was that, yes, what I was already doing
was great, living authentically,” says Bird. “But it
was important to say it, because the more people
that come out, that’s where you get to the point
where nobody has to come out. Where you can
just live. And it’s not a story.”
The experience helped Bird get comfortable
shining her spotlight off the court. In 2020, Bird
was a vocal ally for the league’s players—80%
of whom are people of color—but she also led
by listening. “The biggest thing that she did
was, she just took a backseat and learned a lot of
stuff about African Americans and what we go
through and our history and things she wasn’t
necessarily educated in,” says Jewell Loyd, Bird’s
Storm teammate, who will make her Olympic
debut in Tokyo. “A lot of people don’t want to al-
ways do that. But she did.”
After Kelly Loeffler, then a U.S. Senator and