UNCASVILLE — Sue Bird was fitted for her orange Hall of Fame jacket, and the ring that signifies the highest peak of a long basketball hike.
On Friday night, she stepped into a ball room at Mohegan Sun to receive them.
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“You can choose who is going to give you your jacket and your ring and I chose my young nieces,” Bird said. “They’re 10 and 12. In that moment, I’ll just try to take it in with them, understanding that when I was their age there was none of this for women’s basketball players. Olympians were able to get into the Hall of Fame, but as far as having a professional league, things to dream for, they didn’t exist. And those two little nuggets, they get to dream about it.”
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Bird, who joins Maya Moore, two UConn greats entering the Naismith Hall of Fame in Springfield on Saturday night, helped to open, widen and level out the pathways to this mountaintop. There are championship rings and trophies along the roadside, parades and retired jerseys and, most recently in Seattle, a statue. Across the long arc of her career, the WNBA was struggling to exist when she entered in 2002, yet today its franchises are going for more than $300 million, with billionaires fighting over them.
To think Sue Bird and her contemporaries did all that. In fifth grade, Bird wrote in her elementary yearbook that she wanted to be a soccer player, a doctor or a lawyer.
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“(That person) wouldn’t even believe it,” she said. “There wasn’t a pathway. There wasn’t a professional league, which is what allows kids to really dream and dream big. As that little girl got older, she understood she could go to college, scholarship, what does that look like? After that, there was just the Olympics. That little girl would be proud to have been the beneficiary of a lot of trailblazers before her, but also know that she will be one of the trailblazers as well.”
She has been working on her speech, has come up with a theme she wouldn’t divulge on Friday. Bird has been giving a lot of speeches these last couple of years and was looking for something new. She will be presented at Springfield’s Symphony Hall by Geno Auriemma and Swin Cash, her coach and her roommate at UConn, both of whom have preceded her into the Hall of Fame.
“Coach Auriemma was somebody who helped me find myself as a player, as a person,” Bird said. “Helped build the foundation of who I became. He’s really difficult to play for, in all the right ways. He challenges you, he sees things in you and he helps you find them in yourself.”
Moore walked away from basketball at age 29, responding to a different calling, her social justice and prison reform concerns. With the same tenacity with which she won basketball games and championships, she worked to free her future husband, Jonathan Irons, who had been wrongly convicted of a crime. Now 36, she is a wife and mother, not in the limelight as much as Bird, but when something calls her back, you can bet the fire will be there.
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“Man, what’s the next phase for me?” Moore said. “I’m just really enjoying discovering who this next phase of Maya is.”
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Bird, 44, is just discovering her second act, too, in various behind-the-scenes basketball roles. She continued to play, to push her body on both sides of the ocean until she had nothing more to give. She had thoughts in her mid-30s that she’d done it all in basketball, multiple times, and didn’t need more. Then the Seattle Storm got favorable flips of the draft lottery ping-pong ball and got Breanna Stewart and Jewell Lloyd.
“All of a sudden, my need for more had nothing to do with me, it had everything to do with them, and with the franchise,” Bird said. “Being able to leave a legacy and pay it forward. By putting that first, I was getting more than I ever could have imagined just from winning a championship. They kept me young, those two, they gave me this new life in my basketball game.”
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Bird, whether she knew it or not, would have been a lead-pipe cinch for the Hall of Fame even if she stopped playing at 35 or 36. But after tacking on a third and fourth WNBA championship and playing past 40, setting records in games and assists and opening up yet another pathway — proving with her college teammate and podcast partner Diana Taurasi that female athletes could stretch their careers that long — Bird has become an icon.
“When you’re going through it, all you’re thinking about are all the things that could go wrong,” Bird said. “You’re so in the process, you never really see yourself the way others see you. Then when you retire and start to look back and really understand the winning, they impact in a totally different way.”
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Since retiring in 2022, Bird has had her number retired in Seattle, and returned when the statue was unveiled. Now, the ultimate. UConn retires the jerseys of its Hall of Famers, so with Bird’s No. 10 and Moore’s No. 12 soon to join Cash’s No. 32 and Rebecca Lobo’s No. 50, and Taurasi (3) and many more to follow, the Huskies may one day run out of numbers.
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However, those who come now will be riding in and upward on routes and walking through doors Bird and her contemporaries grated, paved and broke open. That’s a legacy that won’t be matched.
“Our generation, people a little bit older, a little bit younger than me, we just had to hold it down,” Bird said. “People were telling us that we didn’t have value, our league was going to fold, and we just showed up and kept playing. Now, there are pathways, multiple pathways, all sorts of pathways to get to where I’m sitting now, and I feel really good about that.”
