Sue Bird retiring after this Storm season — as greatest pro athlete Seattle’s ever had
Sue Bird spoke to explain her decision to retire from the Storm and professional basketball.
She could have bleated.
She is the GOAT of Seattle sports.
“I am very proud of having played my whole career in Seattle,” Bird, 41, said while explaining her decision in an emotional, 30-minute press conference Wednesday.
“I just have enjoyed all of my time here,” Bird said. “I just feel so connected to the team, to the city, to the fan base, to all the people that have come through. And that’s really what it’s about. I think as you go through a career you realize it’s really about the people.
“So I’m just really lucky that I played for a first-class organization, alongside some of the world’s best. And I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
Seattle’s greatest of all time
The GOAT term gets thrown around too much in sports. The latest All-Star in a single season or even best performance of a given day in any sport often gets premature Greatest of All Time coronation.
Sue Bird is the greatest professional athlete in Seattle sports history. Not arguably. Is. Period.
I covered Ken Griffey Jr. He was a transcendent talent, with a megastar smile and personality to match. He put the Mariners on baseball’s and America’s sports scene after his Major League debut in 1989. He spent the ‘90s as the best pro athlete Seattle had ever seen.
Marshawn Lynch was the unique, hugely popular soul of the Seahawks teams I covered that won the region’s first Super Bowl championship in early 2014, then came 1 yard (and one more Lynch should-have carry) from winning a second title in a row.
Russell Wilson was the quarterback on those teams, the best QB in Seahawks history. Steve Largent was the NFL’s preeminent wide receiver for the first Seahawks teams of the 1970s and ‘80 on his way into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
I’ve covered Fred Couples. Born in Seattle 62 years ago, he was once the world’s No. 1 professional golfer. Couples won 64 pro tournaments, including the 1982 Masters.
The late Dennis Johnson won Seattle 1979 NBA championship, leading the SuperSonics and becoming the Finals most valuable player that year. He went on to play 11 more years (10 of which were for Phoenix and Boston) and was inducted in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.
Gary Payton was the relentlessly intense catalyst for the Sonics’ return to the NBA Finals in the 1990s, on his way into the Hall of Fame.
Griffey had individual brilliance and effervescence. Largent was a Hall-of-Fame talent. Lynch and Payton had soul.
None of them — nobody in Seattle — has had all that and won as many championships as Bird, since the Storm made her the first-overall choice of the 2002 WNBA draft.
She has won 21 championships. Twenty-one, in the pros, college and Olympic Games. Bill Russell won 14 — 11 for the Celtics, two at the University of San Francisco and the 1956 Olympic basketball gold medal.
Think about that: Bird has won seven more titles than Bill Russell.
That’s why they play the games. To win. The money, the fame, those are the perks. They come most if you win, and to win you must elevate your team to win with you.
Bird had the once-in-a-generation talent of Griffey. But unlike Junior, or Largent, she elevated her teams to win championships.
All of her teams. From a teen to her 40s and her fourth WNBA title for the Storm in 2020.
In 2018, she shot the lights out in that championship series she won for Seattle — while wearing a mask to protect a broken nose.
Minutes after the Storm won that third title, her teammates were bleating at her while she gave a postgame television interview on the court.
She’s the only WNBA player to win a league championship in three different decades.
At Christ the King High School in Queens, New York, Bird won the state championship and national prep title as the New York state player of the year in 1998.
At Connecticut, she won two national championships and was the 2002 national player of the year. Her college record at UConn: 114-4.
For the U.S. Olympic Team, she was the point guard who won five gold medals. Bird and her U.S. teammate Diana Taurasi are the only basketball players, men or women, to win five Olympic golds.
Bird’s brilliance extends into Russia. Russia! That’s where she first and finally got paid more relative to what she was worth in basketball — 10 times more than in her early WNBA pay, Bird has said.
“I’m a millionaire because of it,” she once told CBS’ 60 Minutes.
She won there, too: five Russian League and five EuroLeague titles.
Skilled as well as accomplished
It’s not as if Bird isn’t immensely, individually talented, as Griffey was.
She’s averaged double figures in scoring in every one of her seasons, except for this one in which she’s at 7.8 points through 10 of 14 games played. She’s the all-time WNBA assists leader, and has been since 2017. The only Storm and WNBA season she hasn’t averaged at least five assists per game was 2014, the year after she took a season off because of knee surgery.
Bird had eight assists in a game after her 40th birthday. The only other NBA and WNBA players to do that: John Stockton, Karl Malone, Steve Nash and Michael Jordan.
On top of that — all that — Bird is renowned around Seattle, across the Pacific Northwest and basketball for her kindness. She’s always had time for people. Later in her career, she’s spoken out more forcefully advocating for LGBTQ rights, social justice and the Black Lives Matter movement.
She has acknowledged becoming a larger public persona after coming out as gay in 2017.
She and U.S. national soccer team star Megan Rapinoe, fiancees, are Seattle’s premier sports couple.
Why Bird’s retiring now
So why now, four months before her 42nd birthday, after hinting for the last year that she may retire? Why is she now saying she is retiring, in the middle of her 18th season leading the Storm?
“I’ve known, deep down, for a while now,” she said. “So then it was, OK, when do you want to say it?”
“I’ve been doing this since I was...,” Bird said, then rolling her eyes and head and pointing skyward, “...five or six years old.
“It’s really all I know.”
She wiped her face. Her voice caught.
“So of course I’m sad,” she said. “It’s a little bit like a mourning, knowing I’m going to miss it. But I have no regrets. I feel wonderful about my career. People I’ve met. The things we’ve all accomplished. ...
“And I am excited for the next chapter. I get to start this new life.
“But, yeah, I know my personality. This is why I’ve been saying for a lot of years I’m not going to announce my retirement while I play, because I know I would get like this.
“I’m sentimental. I don’t like change.”
The entire Pacific Northwest — all of basketball — is going to like this change even less than she will.
This story was originally published June 17, 2022 at 5:15 AM with the headline "Sue Bird retiring after this Storm season — as greatest pro athlete Seattle’s ever had."
