Sue Bird Is One of Basketball’s Greatest Players. Why Doesn’t Everyone Know Her

In a perfect world, Sue Bird’s extraordinary achievements on and off the basketball court would have already been celebrated on the big screen. Bird is the WNBA’s all-time winningest player; she also has five Olympic gold medals (one of only two basketball players ever to win that many) and four WNBA titles. Still, she’s not a household name. Director Sarah Dowland (The Innocence Files) and producers Jay Ellis (Insecure) and Aaron Bergman of Black BarMitzvah hope their new documentary, Sue Bird: In the Clutch, helps change that.

“In looking at her total record, she really stands apart as one of the greatest basketball point guards in history,” says Dowland. “And it just seems unconscionable to me that this woman could retire from the game without really being celebrated and acknowledged and absolutely known to as many people as possible.”

Ellis and Bergman agreed, and reached out to Bird about the possibility of filming a documentary ahead of her final seasons as a pro.

“I’ve known her name as long as I have known basketball, pretty much,” says Ellis. “I played college basketball at a much, much lower level than Sue. I’m pretty sure her college team at UConn would’ve beat us by like 40, but she had just won a championship in what they call the Wubble, which was the WNBA season during COVID [in the summer of 2020]. And so we reached out.”

Though notoriously humble and private, Bird was intrigued about the opportunity to continue broadening conversations about women’s basketball and women’s sports at large.

“Sometimes as a professional female athlete, you don’t always get the look, for lack of a better word,” says Bird. She eventually agreed to do the film for two main reasons: because Ellis and Bergman saw something in her, and because “I viewed it as a way to tell my story, but also as a vehicle to continue to open up doors, change narratives.”

Production took place during the height of the pandemic, from late 2020 through 2022. Dowland, Ellis, and Bergman initially estimated they’d film for a year, to fully capture Bird’s final season playing for the Seattle Storm. And then she decided not to retire, which ultimately made the movie better.

“It didn’t start out as one thing and turn into another, but because I came back for another year, [filming] ended up being longer than you could have imagined,” Bird explains. “In the first year, it was more like a follow doc, vérité. In that way, you’re just a subject, kind of in it no matter what. But then the longer it went, it [expanded] to a story of my career—and yes, the story of my retirement, what I’m going to do next, and all the things that I’ve accomplished. Once it turned into that, it felt right. I just kind of tried to show up as myself and let the story be told by Sarah and everybody else involved.”

The film, which premieres at Sundance this weekend, features moving interviews and testimonials about Bird’s legacy and…