The Return

Vice President Harris joined Brittney Griner (top)

 and several members of the Phoenix Mercury

in the locker room before the game

(Mario Tama/Getty Images)

To be sure, I don't care all that much about a basketball game, or a basketball league, or a basketball player.

But there's something more important about the Brittney Griner thing than simply one shitty thing that one shitty government did to one individual American. That's not trivial, but it's not all that unusual either.

The thing is that the US government went out of its way, stepped up big, and helped a woman of color who was being fucked over for no better reason than "We've got the power - we do whatever we want - so fuck you."

My government did good things for a woman of color. That's not something that lands on the front page very often here in USAmerica Inc.

Brittney Griner’s improbable WNBA return was accompanied by a sense of triumph

LOS ANGELES — Brittney Griner crouched slightly at the half-court line, leaped and extended a long arm over her lean 6-foot-9 frame to easily bat the ball backward to her teammate. It was one of several movements — the tip-off to start the game — that Griner has performed hundreds of times over the past decade as the dominant center for the Phoenix Mercury.

But doing it again, and this soon — in a fired-up arena with the vice president in attendance — would have been nearly impossible to picture less than a year ago, when Griner was shackled in a Russian court, being sentenced to nine years in prison.

By the scoreboard alone, Griner’s return Friday to professional basketball, as Phoenix took on the Los Angeles Sparks to open the 2023 WNBA season, was a rout. The Sparks claimed a 94-71 victory, and Griner had 18 points, six rebounds and four blocks in 25 minutes. But her return cemented one of the most unlikely comeback stories in sports history — and one of the most unusual.

Griner, a top star in her league, faced a dark future in a penal colony as a pawn in international relations after customs officials in Russia, where she played for a professional team during the WNBA offseason, found vape cartridges with cannabis oil in her luggage. She ultimately spent 294 days in Russian custody before being returned to the United States in December in a controversial prisoner swap for convicted arms trafficker Viktor Bout. Friday’s season opener was her first WNBA game since Game 4 of the WNBA Finals on Oct. 17, 2021.

Following the game, Griner, 32, said that her incarceration caused her to “appreciate everything a little bit more” — which included a warm welcome in an opposing team’s arena and a surprise visit to the locker room by Vice President Harris. But the sentimentality had its limits.

“Not good enough,” Griner said to sum up the game. “We didn’t get the dub.”

The night at times felt like a celebration accompanied by a basketball game. Before tip-off, Griner’s every movement was followed by a gaggle of video and still photographers. Fans waved cutout photos of her face, and the announcer led the arena in a chant of, “Welcome home BG!” Griner motioned to her heart as she received a standing ovation. The vice president walked on the court and waved, and several celebrities, including former Lakers all-star Pau Gasol, Hall of Famer Magic Johnson and tennis champion Billie Jean King, sat courtside.

Griner stood with her teammates during the national anthem, a departure from her stance pre-incarceration, when she refused to take the court during the anthem. Her protest, which started amid national uproar over police brutality and racism in 2020, attracted conservative ire when she then required rescue from the American government. Griner explained after the game that the anthem “just means a little bit more to me now,” saying of her incarceration: “I was literally in a cage and could not stand the way I wanted to.”

Griner said that she still supports her teammates who choose not to stand for the anthem, adding that making such decisions for yourself “actually makes you more American."

Mercury Coach Vanessa Nygaard echoed that sentiment before the game, calling Friday a “day of joy" that made her proud of her country. “We brought home this woman, this Black gay woman, from a Russian jail,” Nygaard said. "And America did that because they valued her. ... It makes me very proud to be an American. And even though there are people for who that doesn’t make them proud, for me, I see [Griner], and I see hope.”

Griner was stopped at a Moscow-area airport on Feb. 17, 2022 — a week before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — but her detention was not reported in the press for weeks afterward. For most of 2022, the American public — and Griner’s family and teammates — only received sporadic glimpses of her plight via images of her in chains or behind jail cell bars. An eight-time all-star who helped lead the Mercury to a championship in 2014, Griner sometimes seemed forgotten — which Nygaard tried to combat last year by starting every news conference with a new tally of how many days she had been incarcerated in Russia.

Nygaard said that Griner’s freedom was a result of the persistence of those within the league. “When one of their sisters was in this predicament, this terrible situation, they used their voice and they amplified it,” Nygaard said. “I think it was the voices of the WNBA and the fans of the WNBA that finally got the Biden administration until they said, ‘You know what, let’s make this happen.’ ”

In December, President Biden authorized the swap of Griner for Bout, a Russian national serving a 25-year sentence in American prison for arms trafficking. In remarks announcing Griner’s return, Biden said that Griner “didn’t ask for special treatment,” and that her only request was that his administration not “forget about me and the other American detainees.” Griner has since attempted to put a focus on those detainees still in Russia by posting messages to her social media encouraging “everyone that played a part in bringing me home to continue their efforts to bring all Americans home.”

Griner’s saga has shed light on the compensation of the world’s best female basketball players, whose relatively paltry pay — WNBA salaries top out at just over $200,000 — has forced even the greatest of them to moonlight overseas, as Griner was when she was detained. And even with all of the pomp for Friday’s game, which was broadcast on ESPN and attracted national sports reporters, the empty upper decks of the Crypto.com Arena did not escape the attention of players and the Mercury coach. “Honestly, c’mon L.A. — we didn’t sell out the arena for B.G.?” Nygaard said. “It was great, it was loud, but how was it not a sellout?”

Griner expressed hope that the media focus on her will bring new fans to the WNBA. “Hopefully everybody tuning in to see me now will see somebody else,” she said.

Griner scored 11 of her points in the first half but appeared to tire in the second half, and after the game discussed improving her stamina to the point in which she could play 40 minutes if necessary. These are the sorts of problems — basketball problems — that, Griner acknowledged after the game, she sometimes thought she would never experience again.

“Me personally, I look at it as the worst case scenario so I don’t get hopes up,” Griner said of her perspective while incarcerated. She then added with a wink: “I’ll elaborate on that a little bit more, just make sure you get a copy of the book.”