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Seahawks QB Russell Wilson made a simple but powerful gender equality statement after a big win

Seahawks QB Russell Wilson made a simple but powerful gender equality statement after a big win

This article originally appeared on 10.13.20


It's not every day that you see an NFL player sporting a jersey of a professional female athlete. In fact, if most of us wrack our brains, we probably can't think of any day that we've seen that.

So when Russell Wilson, longtime quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks (recently traded to the Denver Broncos), walked out of the locker room after last night's last-minute win against the Minnesota Vikings, people took notice of his shirt—a yellow and green jersey with the name and number of Sue Bird, the Seattle Storm WNBA superstar player. The Storm just took home their fourth WNBA National Championship title.

But that wasn't all he did.


In the post-game press conference, a reporter asked him how he felt on the last drive in which he led the team on a 94-yard drive in the final two minutes of the game, ultimately completing a pass to the end zone on 4th and 10 to win the game. "What's going through your head?" the reporter asked.

Wilson smiled, chuckled, and said, "I feel like Sue Bird in the clutch, you know?"

It was a simple sentence, but a meaningful one.

Paola Boivin, who was a sports writer for the Arizona Republic for 20 years and the first female journalist ever inducted into the Arizona Sports Hall of Fame, shared what the moment meant to her on Twitter.

"Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson just said, 'I feel like Sue Bird in the clutch.' In my era following sports growing up, I never remember a male athlete saying something like this. It seems simplistic, but this is powerful."

In many fields, including professional sports, girls and women had to have male role models prior to doors being opened for women to excel on the public stage. Then, once women went through those doors and made a name for themselves, women had female role models to look up to. But it's been rare to see it go the other way—to see boys or men express personal admiration for a female excelling in her field. And especially in a professional sport like football, which is pretty much entirely male, to have a star like Russell Wilson point to a female athlete as an example of the excellence he aspired to is, indeed, noteworthy at this stage of the game.

Someday, it won't be. Excellence knows no gender, and it's only outdated thinking and outdated ideas of manhood and masculinity that keep people locked in boxes of who our role models can be and how our fandom can be expressed. Russell Wilson is clearly a fan of Sue Bird, as is any Seattle resident who pays any attention to sports whatsoever. But he also clearly sees her as an athletic role model, and it's just awesome to see him express that so openly.

Wilson's sister plays basketball at Stanford, and he has been an outspoken supporter of women's sports in general. Here's a video of him from February sharing his and his wife Ciara's support on National Girls and Women in Sports Day.

Love to see it. The more we all support one another, the better the chances that all of us will excel. Thanks for setting the example, Russell Wilson.

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Those that were born to be teachers find teachable moments everywhere and one woman found herself in one of those moments. Though this one was likely just a bit more personal than she probably would've liked.

Emily Elizabeth posted a TikTok video about how she found herself in a predicament in front of her classroom full of 10 and 11-year-old kids. The teacher explained that she was noticing a lot of commotion and whispering among the little girls in her class while she was wearing white pants. After reminding the girls to stay on task, the whispering continued, prompting Emily to be more direct.

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The boy climbed up to the top of the slide and called down to his mother, who didn’t even look up from her phone. “I hear, ‘Hey mom, watch. Watch, Mom,’” Mirante recalled. “And at the top of her lungs, shrieking like a Velociraptor, this mother screams, ‘One second!”

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If you're looking for some aging inspiration, look no further, because Dorothy Hoffner is about to blow your mind.

At 104, Hoffner just became the oldest person to parachute out of an airplane in a tandem skydive. That's right, skydive. At 104 years old—or to be exact, 104 years and 289 days old—beating the previous world record set by a 103-year-old in Sweden in May of 2022.

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The way she rolls right out of that plane cool as a cucumber! Hoffner told the Tribune that on her first skydive, at age 100, she had to be pushed out of the plane. But this time, knowing what she was in for, she took charge with calm confidence.

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