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| Britney Griner playing for the US Olympic team. |
WNBA star Britney Griner’s ongoing detainment by Russian authorities is beginning to make headlines for not making headlines. That is, it’s been long enough since her arrest in February that the lack of information about her status is itself newsworthy. The recent release in a prisoner exchange of American Trevor Reed has helped to bring Griner’s case to the foreground again.
Well, that and statements like this one by the likes of Aron Solomon, chief legal analyst for Esquire Digital, who apparently thinks the following is a useful contribution to the conversation. “What if this was Kyrie Irving? It would be the front page of every paper every single day, Kyrie still in detention. But with Brittney Griner, it hasn’t been.”
With apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning… how is this moronic? Let me count the ways. First off, ongoing situations—the Vietnam War, apartheid in South Africa, the hostage situation at the American Embassy in Iran, COVID-19 statistics—don’t make news every day. After a while, something has to change for the story to be newsworthy. Americans are already tiring of hearing about the situation in Kyiv; the Ukrainian flag is seen less frequently now, and the news agencies are going to be led by their audiences to cover whatever the big new story is. So, if it were Kyrie Irving instead, the same phenomenon would be happening.
There could probably be a better example than Kyrie Irving, of course, if Solomon really wants to make a point. Irving, a flat-earther and anti-vaxxer, is one of the stupidest and apparently most annoying people on the planet. If he were in a Russian prison, it would be about all Curmie could do to avoid saying “they can have him.” Try LeBron James or Stephen Curry if you’d like to pretend to know something about basketball, Ace.
Most importantly, what we’re talking about here is an American citizen in the foreign jail. Why should she get any more attention than Trevor Reed? Be honest, Gentle Reader… had you ever heard of him? I bet his family cares more about his release than about hers. The rest of us should care at least as much, partly because all the evidence suggests that he was innocent, and we don’t know about her.
Certainly the Russian government is not famous for its pursuit of either inclusion or justice in general. Griner, for better or worse, checks all the right boxes to be set up on phony charges: wealthy (estimated net worth about $5,000,000), American, black, openly gay. And it seems a bit extreme, even for Russians, to test vape cartridges for hashish oil. So there’s a real possibility that she is a real victim. But we can’t be sure, or even especially confident, of that.
Not everyone arrested in Russia is innocent, and plenty of other folks have believed, naïvely, that they could outwit the authorities, or that their fame could protect them. It may or may not be significant that whereas mentions of Reed or Paul Whalen, another American detained in Russia, almost inevitably suggest—or even assert outright—the men’s innocence, no such proclamations (at least that Curmie has seen) have been forthcoming about Griner. This could be a strategic move not to irritate the Russians… or it could be that what isn’t said is as important as what is.
One of the secondary issues that was highlighted in the first round of stories about the Griner case was what she was doing there to begin with. (I won’t bother to link one particular article; if you’ve found your way here, Gentle Reader, the chances are pretty good that you can handle the Google machine.) The short version is that she plays for the Russian team UMMC Ekaterinburg during the WNBA off-season. The longer version is that a lot of WNBA players also play in Russia, because the pay is significantly better.
Griner makes an annual base salary of $227,900 (plus bonuses) to play for the Phoenix Mercury, just short of the WNBA maximum salary (there is such a thing!) of $228,094. Add to that an estimated $1 million from Nike, plus a handful of other endorsement deals, and Curmie doubts that she’ll be struggling to scrape together the funds to get the large fries with her #3 special. But she’s making an estimated $1 million to play in Russia, and that’s a lot of money, even if you’re already making a lot.
Of course, after her playing career is over, she’ll continue to rake in a fair amount in endorsement deals, and the chances are that she’ll become a coach or television analyst or something like that. There is—or at least would have been—little doubt that she’ll make more in salary and endorsements (let alone investments) every year for the rest of her life than Curmie and Beloved Spouse combined.
But it’s worth noting that Russia pays several times as much as the WNBA, and Griner’s salary for the Mercury is less than 1/200 of what Stephen Curry gets paid to play for the Golden State Warriors. Yes, you read that correctly. Curmie is going to sidestep the issue of whether that pay differential is legitimate or not. (You can check out the last couple of paragraphs of this seven-year-old piece on the pay difference for men’s and women’s soccer players for an overview of some of the considerations.)
What matters for this essay is that the disparity exists. For all the allegations of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia in the US, Russia is worse on three of the four and as bad on the other. Still, a million bucks is enough for most people, even those who would be most likely to experience bias, to at least contemplate living under an authoritarian regime for a few months, especially since, in Griner’s case, she’d been doing it for several years. Ekaterinburg may not exactly feel like home to her, but it is at least familiar. And the teams themselves seem to take good care of their players.
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