WNBA player Sue Bird suggested people don’t tune in to watch women’s basketball games like they do for the national soccer team because most basketball players are “cute and white and straight.”
“It’s 70%-80% black women, a lot of gay women. We’re tall; we’re big. And I think there’s just maybe this intimidation factor with that. People are quick to talk about it, judge it, put it down. And soccer, you just don’t see that just based on how they look,” Bird, a point guard for Seattle Storm, said.
Bird’s comments were made in response to soccer star Megan Rapinoe, who claimed last week that the female soccer league draws more viewers because her teammates are the “white girls next door.”
“Where’s that same energy for the best women’s basketball players on the planet?? Where’s that energy for the women’s sports that — instead of scanning cute and white and straight — scan tall and black and queer?” Rapinoe argued in a column for The Players Tribune.
Bird agreed with Rapinoe’s characterization and told CNN that “soccer players generally are cute, little white girls. And I think basketball players, we’re all shapes and sizes.”
“The problem is not the marketing, per se,” Bird told CNN. “The problem is how society and how the outside world is willing to accept the cute girl next door, but not willing to accept, or embrace, or not judge these basketball players who are tall, black, gay.”
Bird and Rapinoe are both vocal liberals who endorsed the Black Lives Matter movement earlier this summer.
Both women praised failed quarterback Colin Kaepernick and blasted the professional sports industry for trying to “silence” him.
“Do black lives matter to you when they’re not throwing touchdowns, grabbing rebounds, serving aces? If that was uncomfortable to hear, good,” Bird said during her ESPY Awards speech. “I used to shy away from moments like this because it’s convenient to be quiet. To be thought of as safe and polite. Colin Kaepernick never shied away. He knew that discomfort was essential to liberation and that fighting the oppression against Black people is bigger than sports.”
