Sue Bird announced in June that her 19th season in the WNBA would be her last. The 13-time WNBA All-Star and four-time champion finished her final season last month.
Bird won two NCAA Championships with the University of Connecticut before turning pro. She also won five Olympic gold medals in every summer games from 2004 to 2020.
The WNBA icon spent her entire career in Seattle and has settled down there with her fiancée Megan Rapinoe, who has earned plenty of accolades on the soccer field.
Bird joined Kenny Mayne on the Audacy Original Podcast “Hey Mayne” and talked about the pay disparity between men’s and women’s sports, the recent increase in WNBA coverage, and much more.
“It is trending absolutely in the right direction,” Bird said (8:25 in player above). “Even during the WNBA Finals, I actually didn’t watch any of it, I got some glimpses of those games but I didn’t really tune in, but just scrolling through social media or catching things here and there you can already tell. There’s now a ‘WNBA Countdown’ show on ESPN. So they’re dedicating 30 minutes to the storylines. You can see it. The people who are covering it on Twitter. You can just see there’s a huge uptick in what’s being followed.”
Bird’s Seattle Storm lost to the Las Vegas Aces in the semifinals. The Aces went on to defeat the Connecticut Sun to win the WNBA Championship.
While Bird enjoys seeing the recent coverage of the WNBA, she wishes it had started earlier.
“What’s frustrating, I think, as a female athlete is just all the drama and the great games and the storylines, they’ve always been there. They’ve always been there,” she said. “It’s not like all of a sudden there’s all this amazing play and game-winning shots and when I see storylines, it could be like two sisters playing each other. These things have always been there, they just never, ever got talked about. So it is nice that it’s starting to change.”
The WNBA was broadcast more on ESPN, ESPN2, and ABC this season. The league averaged 379,000 viewers per regular-season game, which is the highest viewership in 14 years. The WNBA All-Star Game averaged 734,000 viewers as well, up 53 percent from last year.
The league is drawing more viewers and attention, but the pay isn’t following. That’s not just in the WNBA, but across all sports.
“The other side of that is the money. I would argue the Women’s National Soccer Team deserves way more than the men because they’re better and they always win,” Mayne said. “But WNBA, no offense, you don’t have LeBron, you don’t have Steph Curry. So it’s going to draw more attention, more money’s thrown at it, and when they divvy up the pool there’s just going to be less for the women. Right now that’s just how it is.”
The United States Women’s National Soccer Team filed an equal pay lawsuit in 2019 that was settled earlier this year.
“My one counter to that would be – because you brought up soccer – it’s like they are better. They do get more attention. They do win more. And yet they’re still having to fight,” Bird said. “I hate that they have to fight, but I love that about that storyline because that really proves how women’s sports have been held back or how we’ve had to fight for just the bare minimum even if we do ‘deserve it’ the way the women’s soccer team has proven.”
Bird holds the USWNT close to her heart as her fiancée, Megan Rapinoe, prepares for the World Cup.
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