Early Life
Bird was born on October 16, 1980 in Syosset, New York. She is the younger of Herschel and Nancy Bird's two children. Her father's family was Jewish and originally from Russia, and their original name was "Boorda". Bird was raised in her mother's Christian religion. In 2006, Bird acquired Israeli citizenship. She still maintains her citizenship in the United States and represents the U.S. in international basketball competitions.
Bird's role model as a young child was her older sister Jen. To stay active, Jen participated in several recreational sports. Sue's favorite was basketball, though she also played soccer, tennis, and track. Sue became a very good player and started playing AAU basketball in the sixth grade. While only 11 years old, she played during halftime of a St. John's basketball game; her play was so impressive that a security guard asked for her autograph.
Read more about this topic: Sue Bird
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“The great problem of American life [is] the riddle of authority: the difficulty of finding a way, within a liberal and individualistic social order, of living in harmonious and consecrated submission to something larger than oneself.... A yearning for self-transcendence and submission to authority [is] as deeply rooted as the lure of individual liberation.”
—Wilfred M. McClay, educator, author. The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, p. 4, University of North Carolina Press (1994)