Even though her almost six-year engagement was watched closely by millions, and followed a four-year courtship that made her part of the most prominent lesbian power couple on the planet, Sue Bird was — in the eyes of one heterosexual dude with an online platform — "recruited" by Megan Rapinoe to be a lesbian.
So sayeth former ESPN announcer Dick Dakich, who is now the subject of viral backlash for his homophobic comments in the wake of Bird and Rapinoe announcing their breakup.
"Told you for years Sue Bird is not a lifetime lesbian. She got recruited (as so many poor college athletes do) into that life," he wrote in a post on X Friday to his 173K followers.
And that same day, he recorded a video to clarify that this was something he had predicted, and that, because he is married to a woman who played softball and who agrees with him, he cannot be a misogynist.
But Dakich didn't stop there. On a podcast that the former basketball coach and player hosts on the right-wing sports site owned by Fox News, Outkick, he called the former World Cup winner and Team USA Olympic gold medalist a "predator" who groomed Bird, now managing director for the USA Basketball Women's National Team.
"Knowing that Sue Bird would eventually dump Megan Rapinoe, well, that was very, very easy," Dakich boasted. "First, Megan Rapinoe... is a predator, and Sue Bird, I told you forever was not a lifetime lesbian. Maybe I am wrong, but I knew that was never gonna last because Rapinoe is a predator."
As of press time, neither Bird nor Rapinoe has responded and did not reply to Out's request for comment. But their fans have.
Those responses generated some news coverage that Dakich clearly saw and chose to put into perspective: "Backlash? My assss," he wrote on X.
Not all of the responses produced a backlash, however. Dakich found support among a handful of other white straight men and at least one homophobe for his homophobic opinion: "Good Call. Rapinoe is a predator. These Deviants think they are more enlightened because of their sexual preference."
The conversation, such as it is on X, turned political when Dakich decided to inject former presidential candidate Kamala Harris into it: "Amazing how many lil 'white boys for Harris' have no idea what actually happens in college women’s locker rooms," he wrote in another post.
But as one Indiana truck driver noted in a comment on Dakich's Facebook post, "Lesbians have the highest divorce rate of any couples, and I don't think anyone is surprised by that." That statistic is accurate: Lesbian couples face higher divorce rates compared to gay male and heterosexual couples, with studies suggesting up to 41% of lesbian marriages end within 10 years, as Them reported last October. Rapinoe and Bird had been together nearly 10 years.
Dakich's comments about the couple focused on a familiar anti-LGBTQ+ trope: That being gay isn't an orientation or an identity, it's a "lifestyle."
"So many college girls get recruited into that lifestyle, they stay in that lifestyle," Dakich said in an Instagram video. "And then once they get a little bit older, they realize, 'Hey, that ain't right. That's not for me, and that's not who I truly am."
Readers of Out know this, but it's apparent Dakich missed the research that the American Psychological Association has found that sexual orientation is an innate part of a person's identity, not a "lifestyle choice."
That's also true for straights, according to Case Western Reserve University's LGBT Center: "There is no standard heterosexual lifestyle. Some people might like to think that a 'normal' adult lifestyle is a heterosexual marriage with two children. Less than 7% of all family units in the U.S. consist of a mother, a father and two children living together. The most accurate generalization might be this: lesbian, gay and bisexual people are different from one another in the same ways that heterosexual people are different from one another."
This article originally appeared on Out: Sports announcer calls Megan Rapinoe 'predator' who 'recruited' Sue Bird to be lesbian