I was at your event in Brooklyn and Jason Sudeikis was there. I\u2019ve seen his support as a particular boon for the league and everyone was taking pictures with him. How has the support from male celebrities looked for you internally?<\/p>\n
Bird: If I\u2019m being honest, that is not new. First of all, let me give credit, Jason is a very passionate New York Liberty fan. He goes to the games when he\u2019s in LA as well, because he\u2019s kind of bicoastal. Jason is definitely ride or die. But honestly, for me personally, men have been a fan of women\u2019s basketball, have been a fan of myself for forever. Who stops me on the street more than anybody else?<\/p>\n
Rapinoe: It\u2019s the wildest, in-the-wild thing I\u2019ve ever seen. Crossing the street or walking in any city in the whole country and it\u2019s like, \u201cHi Sue!\u201d Adorable.<\/p>\n
Bird: So it\u2019s really not that surprising. I think that\u2019s what\u2019s so interesting about this time. There are certainly some things about what\u2019s happening in the world of women\u2019s sports that are new, don\u2019t get me wrong. But then there\u2019s some things that are getting highlighted and it\u2019s like, you just weren\u2019t looking at it before.<\/p>\n
I guess the question then becomes, why did it take so long to have these conversations?<\/p>\n
Bird: How much time do you have?<\/p>\n
Rapinoe: Um\u2026I think it\u2019s sexism. Broadly.<\/p>\n
Bird: It\u2019s the isms. The ways in which it\u2019s just been held back. It has always been this way. I was in college, it was my junior year, I hit a game-winning shot. The year is 2000 and there\u2019s no social media. You\u2019re only going to see this so many ways, but it was on the ESPN top 10. Immediately the next day, and then following week, I was getting all kinds of calls from celebrities to the basketball office. I wouldn\u2019t drop names, I don\u2019t want to be that person, but it was, like, NBA players were calling to congratulate me, like, \u201cOh, let\u2019s exchange information.\u201d Actors were calling. Like, \u201cI\u2019m a big fan.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s always been there. That\u2019s how suppressed and held back this sport, and women\u2019s sports in general, has been. The same goes for soccer. Tons of people have been going to your games for years and years and years. There\u2019s a variety of things that finally ripped the blinders off people to women\u2019s sports, and now they’re seeing all of it when it was already there.<\/p>\n
Rapinoe: I also think the mechanism for information delivery changed dramatically. So, prior, if you weren\u2019t watching ESPN and it didn\u2019t make the top 10, or the producer didn\u2019t choose to talk about women\u2019s sports, women\u2019s sports weren\u2019t talked about. Your Final Fours were sold out, the community\u2019s been there. But from a broad cultural perspective, it wasn\u2019t spoken about. It was suppressed, it was held back. Women\u2019s sports social media just really blew the top off of who was getting access to what was actually happening. Before Caitlin Clark, before some of these bigger things\u2014those moments were already happening.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I was at your event in Brooklyn and Jason Sudeikis was there. I\u2019ve seen his support as a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":474926,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[402,66039,2294,403,99,434],"class_list":{"0":"post-474925","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wnba","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-megan-rapinoe","10":"tag-podcasts","11":"tag-soccer","12":"tag-sports","13":"tag-wnba"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474925","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=474925"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474925\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/474926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=474925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=474925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=474925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}