NCAA, WNBA star Sue Bird proves Hollywood wrong on women’s sports

Sue Bird is still not used to being described as a former basketball player.

It’s not that the longtime Seattle Storm point guard, who called a wrap on her WNBA career in 2022 after more than two decades in the league, was worried about finding something to fill her time. Instead, she says, “the scariest part” of retiring was the question it raised: “Who am I without this?”

In a sense, the new documentary “Sue Bird: In the Clutch” is her answer. Or at least an answer. The film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and is available on VOD Friday in advance of its Netflix debut, follows Bird during her final WNBA seasons while looking back on her time as a student athlete, her international career and her achievements off the court. In other words, a portrait of someone who was never “just” a basketball player.

“As I started to really research her life, the WNBA, her history, I really felt like this is a coming-of-age story. [The] coming-of-age of Sue as a player, of Sue as a person, of the WNBA, but also of our culture and how we treat women and women’s sports,” said the film’s director, Sarah Dowland, who marveled at the fact that Bird — a two-time NCAA, four-time WNBA and five-time Olympic champion, among other accolades — “wasn’t a bigger household name.”

For Bird, with only one post-retirement season under her belt, basketball continues to loom large. Over a mid-morning coffee earlier this month, she acknowledged that the 2023 WNBA playoffs reminded her of what she’d stepped away from.

“I went to a couple of games and I realized I miss it,” Bird says over the thrum of a Beverly Hills hotel restaurant. “I’m always going to miss that part of it. That was why you played: the chance to win, the energy of it with your team and the fans, the whole thing. I’ll probably just miss that forever.”

What she doesn’t miss is the work and the time and the sacrifice it takes for professional basketball players to make it to that stage. Though the popularity of women’s basketball has been surging in recent years — exemplified by excitement around the women’s NCAA tournament, fueled in part by the record-breaking run of Iowa senior Caitlin Clark and impactful freshmen like USC’s JuJu Watkins — the life of a WNBA player is not as glamorous as that of their NBA counterparts. It often involves playing year-round, in many cases in overseas leagues where athletes can earn supplemental income during the WNBA offseason. During the first half of her career, Bird herself split her time between the Storm and teams in Russia.

“Sue Bird: In The Clutch” director Sarah Dowland couldn’t believe the former Seattle Storm point guard “wasn’t a bigger household name.”

(Courtesy of Sundance Institute)

In fact, though Bird can recall receiving questions about how much longer she intended to play and what her post-WNBA plans were as soon as she turned 30, it wasn’t until she stopped playing overseas that she started considering her future pursuits. (“I don’t know what it is about women athletes … but it was something about the number 30,” says Bird, who played in the WNBA until she was 41, in a way that reveals she knows exactly why women athletes get that treatment.)

“That’s really when I first started thinking about what’s next,” she says of those first free offseasons. “And I started to try different things. I tried some commentating. I worked in the front office with the Denver Nuggets. I got into some other business things. I just started to feel things out.”

Even before retiring, she co-founded Togethxr (pronounced “together”), a media and commerce company launched in 2021, with fellow Olympians soccer star Alex Morgan, snowboarding phenom Chloe Kim and groundbreaking swimmer Simone Manuel.

“It was really Alex Morgan’s baby,” says Bird. “She calls, explains the whole thing and where I landed was, ‘I complain about lack of coverage [of women’s sports] so why not put my money where my mouth is?’ ”

Togethxr is a platform that champions women, women’s sports and women’s perspectives through original content production, merchandise and brand partnerships. Among its projects so far is “Surf Girls Hawai’i,” a documentary series for Prime Video produced with Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine.

It’s an ideal project for Bird, who remains as passionate as ever about women’s sports — and learned firsthand the systemic challenges that women athletes face attracting media coverage, marketing resources and advertising revenues. She notes, though, that acknowledging and embracing its identity as a league composed predominantly of Black women as well as a large percentage of LGBTQ+ players has only helped the WBNA grow its fan base in recent years.

Indeed, Bird can casually cite statistics to support her cause and underscore the difference an effort like Togethxr makes. Like the fact that, since the platform’s founding, the share of all sports coverage devoted to women’s sports has increased from 4% to 16%. Or the studies that show fandom in male sports is often generational — people inherit their favorite sports and teams from their parents — while for women’s sports, which tend to be newer, it’s driven by the stories that enable fans to feel a connection with the athletes.

This understanding of the power of storytelling was one of the reasons Bird, who admits she is “a little more on the private side,” agreed to open up her life to a documentary crew.

Sue Bird on joining Alex Morgan, Chloe Kim and Simone Manuel to launch Togethxr: “I complain about lack of coverage [of women’s sports] so why not put my money where my mouth is?”

(Nicol Biesek / For The Times)

“Women’s sports, in general, don’t get the platform to tell their own stories very often,” says actor Jay Ellis, who was an executive producer on “In the Clutch” under his Black Bar Mitzvah banner with Aaron Bergman. “Sue, I think, has really stepped up to this responsibility of understanding that her story means so much not only to basketball, but to young women and to [the] LGBTQ [community] and to reproductive rights and civil rights.”

Ellis continues, “She’s really stepped into this vocal advocate [role] knowing that she’s got to be out there talking about it because in her doing it, it creates space for other women to be able to tell their stories.”

Even the story of getting “In the Clutch” financed and sold for distribution mirrored what women’s athletes have long had to endure from the media.

“A lot of people said no” when they were pitching the film, says Ellis. “We were often told that nobody cared about women’s sports or nobody cared about women’s basketball and nobody cared about the WNBA. And it was crazy, because at the same time, you have Sue on the cover of major magazines.”

Deepening her commitment to storytelling, in 2022 Bird launched a production company, A Touch More, with fiancée and retired soccer star Megan Rapinoe under the Togethxr umbrella. The company shares a name with the live video series the pair did on Instagram during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The way Megan says it, she wants to build a media empire and this is a part of that,” says Bird. “A Touch More, that’ll focus largely on production, scripted and unscripted, trying to shed light on the stories you don’t normally get to see.”

Although the focus of A Touch More will not be limited to sports and athletes, Bird says they’ll start with “sports-adjacent” stories “because it’s what we know.”

“There’s always more stories to be told that have nothing to do with the actual game itself and we want to tap into those,” says Bird. “Because, honestly, they deserve to be told, they’ll change people’s lives and it’ll help the sport grow.”

Bird’s own viewing habits are eclectic. She rattles off titles like Netflix’s French comedy “Call My Agent!,” Prime Video drama “Expats” and Apple TV+ thriller “Defending Jacob” as shows she’s watched recently. And she’s of course taken a look at “Under Pressure,” the documentary series about the 2023 U.S. women’s World Cup team (though she has yet to start the last episode).

Among the onscreen stories Bird cites for their effect on her growing up are two documentaries about women’s college basketball teams: the first about Stanford’s 1990 championship run and another following the University of Tennessee’s 1997 season. They offered Bird a glimpse at a future involving basketball before there was a road map to go pro.

“There’s always more stories to be told that have nothing to do with the actual game itself and we want to tap into those,” says Sue Bird about her new production company.

(Nicol Biesek / For The Times)

And if you’re thinking that film and TV production is a far cry from being a point guard — the player who essentially runs the offense on a basketball team — think again.

“You’re out on the court, you’ve got yourself and four other people, and you’re trying to make things fit [in a way] that’s going to allow us to have the best product at the end — that’s going to allow us to score a basket,” Bird explains.

And though not all of it is familiar quite yet — like the lid on discussing certain projects she has in the works — Bird is warming to this next chapter. For instance, there’s “Sue’s Places,” a series she hosts on ESPN+ where she digs into the history of college basketball.

“I love [the episodes] because they tell a story, you’re probably gonna get a fun fact you didn’t know, but they’re also kind of ridiculous and gimmicky and shticky,” says Bird. “I really enjoy being in front of the camera for that.”

There’s also the upcoming documentary “Power of the Dream,” on which Bird is an executive producer alongside WNBA star and players’ association president Nneka Ogwumike, actor Tracee Ellis Ross and director Dawn Porter. Slated to hit Prime Video in June, the film follows how WNBA players took on then-Atlanta Dream co-owner and Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler to help the Rev. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, win the Senate race in 2021.

“My dad actually said this after Warnock got elected,” says Bird. “‘You think gold medals are cool? … This is the biggest achievement of your career.’”

Given Bird’s track record, that’s high praise. And her career — well, her second one — is just getting started.