Ahead of the WNBA’s bubble, Kyrie Irving committed $1.5 million to the KAI Empowerment Initiative for the WNBA players who decided to sit out the season for “personal, professional, health, and/or safety-related reasons.” The goal: to ensure those players would still have an income during this strange time.
The KAI Empowerment Initiative also provided WNBA players “access to a comprehensive financial literacy program provided by UBS.”
But going the extra mile for WNBA players isn’t something out of the ordinary for Irving.
“He’s been so kind. He’s hooked me up with Nike shoes, and he did the ‘Keep Sue Fresh’ collab thing,” Sue Bird said on All the Smoke after detailing the origin of her friends with Irving. “He just goes out of his way in that way and it’s just been really special. Of course, I love watching him do his thing on the court. Hopefully, we see him back soon.”
The two developed a mutual respect for one another before they met back in 2016, and that’s only grown further as Bird has gotten to know Irving as a player and a person.
“So the first time I got to really meet Kyrie and hang out was at the Olympics in 2016. It was just cool because he’s a huge fan of basketball. He watches YouTube videos of all different kinds of players and he’s constantly trying to learn. I just really enjoyed talking to him, ’cause he doesn’t look at things [the same way], he wants to look at things differently ’cause he then implements that into his game.
“He’s not just gonna go do a workout that someone has always done…. He’’s just going to do it a little differently, and you can see that creativity in his game. So just talking to him, hearing how he looks at things basketball-wise was a lot of fun.”
Bird added:
“It was cool [the first time we met] because I’m much older than he is and he came up to me and was like. ‘Oh my god Sue, I’ve been dying to meet you.’ In the back of my head, I’m like, ‘I’ve been dying to meet you, too.’ It was just cool to have that mutual respect. Getting to know him, not just in basketball terms, but off the court stuff, too. It was fun.”