Megan Rapinoe's Girlfriend Has Some Things to Say

Megan Rapinoe isn't just leading the US women's soccer team to victories in the World Cup, she also happens to be publicly sparring with the president of the United States. Now, in a wildly entertaining op-ed in the Players' Tribune, Rapinoe's partner, WNBA player Sue Bird, weighs in on all of the above. So what's it like when the president goes after your girlfriend? "Well ... it's WEIRD," writes Bird. "And I'd say I actually had a pretty standard reaction to it: which was to freak out a little." The problem, she writes, is that President Trump's tweets led to a deluge of anti-Rapinoe posts from his supporters and even negative coverage of the soccer star on Fox News. "It's like an out-of-body experience, really—that's how I'd describe it," writes Bird. "That's how it was for me."

But not, apparently, for Rapinoe herself. "You just cannot shake that girl," writes Bird. "She's going to do her thing, at her own damn speed, to her own damn rhythm, and she's going to apologize to exactly NO ONE for it." Rapinoe being "unfazed" in the spotlight was the only normal thing about this whole controversy for Bird. She goes on at length about her girlfriend's character and about a liberating concept called "Megan Goggles" (seeing the world through Rapinoe's perspective and acting without fear). But she also makes a point to talk about something she thinks might get lost in all the controversy: the soccer. This is "about a world-class athlete, operating at the absolute peak of her powers, on the absolute biggest stage that there is," writes Bird. "It's about an athlete f---ing killing it. It's about Megan coming through." Read the piece in full here. (More Megan Rapinoe stories.)