WNBA star Brittney Griner is on her way home to the United States after serving 10 months in various Russian prisons for bringing vape cartridges containing hash oil through a Moscow Airport – an illegal action in that country.
Whether she returns hailed as a hero or condemned as a leveraged trade piece depends on the buttons you hit on your remote control. The hot takery and infotainment that has bubbled up around one American’s stupid mistake and dire consequences is repulsive.
Kudos to Griner’s family, which includes her father – a sheriff and two-tour Vietnam veteran – for keeping her imprisonment at the forefront of minds. Kudos to her wife, Cherelle Griner, for continually humanizing her in every painful 1-on-1 interview opportunity she got. Kudos to NBA players like the Boston Celtics’ Marcus Smart for injecting Griner’s plight into NBA Finals press conferences. Nobody could forget or ignore her circumstances.
But let’s take a reality check on those circumstances. Griner’s detainment and subsequent detention became a political issue because of Russia’s ability to use her to punish the U.S. for Western sanctions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Griner should never have been a pawn, be it for cable news or rising international tensions. She’s one of the most decorated American female basketball players, having won an NCAA championship, WNBA championship, and two Olympic gold medals.
But she left the U.S. – forgoing advisories against travel to Russia – for the potential to earn more than $1 million playing for the Russian Premier League. The figures reported by multiple outlets paid by overseas teams equate to at least four times her $221,000 WNBA salary.
It’s a sad declaration on the state of women’s sports in the United States that the best athletes choose to travel to potentially hostile nations to make generational cash they can’t earn back home. But supply and demand, market value, etc. It’s been the same story for decades.
If we’re not going to pay women anywhere near the salaries of their talented counterparts, let’s at least try to maintain a shred of dignity on our airwaves. How many of these bloated, pancake-faced talking heads knew who Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout was before this case? How many actually give a second thought to whatever they say when the red light goes off and they strut off set?
Griner was carrying less than a gram of a substance prescribed by an American doctor. She took a chance in a dangerous country for a paycheck.
But she was stuck in a freaking gulag and held herself with nothing but decency. If we take any lesson from this, maybe we can mirror that.