The text messages that open Brittney Griner’s memoir are a chilling short story. “Hey baby I got stopped by security at customs.” “If you don’t hear from me for like one hour or more get my agent on the phone.” “Wake up plz.” “Baby text me plz I’m freaking out.” “Baby.” “Hello.” “This is it for me.”
The date was 17 February 2022 and Griner, one of the best basketball players in the world, was at a Moscow airport on her way to meet up with UMMC Ekaterinburg, for whom she played in the WNBA off-season. Back at her Arizona home it was 2am and her wife, Relle, was sleeping. Two near-empty vials of medicinal cannabis oil had just been found in Griner’s bag. Her phone and passport were taken, and she was made to sign a document in a language she didn’t understand. After 19 hours at customs, she was led away in handcuffs. “The future,” she writes in Coming Home, “was unimaginable.”
Days later, Russia invaded Ukraine. The detention of an American double Olympic champion on drugs charges was a political plot-point, and Griner’s ordeal was sealed. While her family, friends and fellow athletes lobbied the White House to secure her release, celebrities including Justin Bieber and Jada Pinkett Smith joined their #WeAreBG campaign to keep up the pressure. It took nine months before state officials finally brought Griner home through a prisoner exchange.
In this book she reveals the reality of what she went through during that time and the result is a biography that could legitimately be shelved under horror. The details may be grim but it’s the descent into powerlessness that is so disturbing, as Griner is sucked into a draconian and corrupt penal system where her future freedom depends on no less comforting a figure than Vladimir Putin himself.
It is some feat to create so much suspense in a story when the world already knows the outcome. The tension builds from the very first page, as we’re thrown at pace into the entirely avoidable accident that precipitates events. Griner, rushing for a flight, throws her travel items into a carry-on she hasn’t properly checked. She misses her plane from JFK, catches the next. “If my day had gone as planned,” she muses, later. “If. If. If.”
Instead, in an unusually busy customs hall, the 6ft 9in black athlete is among a group of foreigners pulled out of the line for a bag search, and in a zipped pocket at the back is a forgotten vape cartridge. Its contents aren’t enough to get anyone high, but they are enough to land her a charge of smuggling as well as possession.
We follow Griner’s nightmare journey through various places of imprisonment. Denied bail, she was held ahead of trial at a women’s prison outside Moscow, reliant on the kindness of an English-speaking cellmate, Alena, to help her navigate her way through its rules and routines. The squalor and humiliations mount, from the rusty-brown showers to the strip-searches from guards who refuse to believe she’s a woman. In one filthy basement cell, “the walls were covered in black soot and piss, or whatever bodily fluid I smelled”.
After the shock of her sentencing – Griner received nine years, nearly the maximum penalty – she is transported to a former gulag and the train journey takes over a week. Lying inside a cage, on a metal bunk far too small for her frame, she regrets the loss of one of her few possessions, the sudoku book that she had kept with her since her arrest. Relle had already completed one of the puzzles and signed her name next to it. “When I felt down I turned to that page and rubbed her signature on my cheek.”
Griner’s co-writer, Michelle Burford, a founding editor of O, The Oprah Magazine, weaves the swooping drama of the high-stakes narrative with empathic glimpses of Griner’s upbringing. Growing up black and extremely tall attracted plenty of unwelcome attention, while her parents worried there was something medically wrong with her. When she came out, her father, Ray, who had fought in the Vietnam war before becoming a policeman, yelled at her (“I ain’t raising no gay bitch!”) and she left home. And yet their ongoing love for each other is palpable, and the toughness he instilled in her helped her survive in prison.
We learn, too, about the efforts that Relle, a lawyer, and Griner’s tireless agent, Lindsay Kagawa Colas, were making while she grappled with the prospect of being incarcerated for a decade. “A freedom campaign has a question at its heart,” writes Griner: “‘Who deserves our sympathy?’” It is, perhaps, the book’s most powerful and poignant question. Griner’s story ends not with her return to the WNBA, but with a list of Americans still held hostage around the world, including former marine Paul Whelan and Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich in Russia.
Her book should also shout a warning about the dangerous political waters in which the sports industry defiantly continues to swim. Perhaps it’s unreasonable to expect women’s basketballers to turn down life-changing sums to play in an overseas league run by oligarchs and former spies, especially when their own national league makes them fly economy. But you can question the “bubble” mentality and moral ignorance that accompanies the decision-making of both the athletes and those running international sport.
Griner herself loved the seven years she played in Russia and admits: “I couldn’t see the dirty politics, the corruption, the old-school views of women.” The country’s record on LGBTQ+ rights didn’t seem to factor either, since she herself always felt safe. What is so frightening about sportswashing, from the Qatari World Cup to Saudi Arabia’s LIV Golf and Pro League football, is that it appears irresistible to athletes, administrators and fans alike.
Even since Griner’s arrest, a number of Americans, including current WNBA players Kayla Thornton and Monique Billings, continued to play in the Russian league. Some who find the prospect too uncomfortable have headed to Turkey instead. Griner herself has made a successful return to basketball and will represent the USA in the Olympics later this month. Her professional comeback is all the more extraordinary given the difficulties she has continued to face, from PTSD episodes to security threats that required her and Relle to sell their home. The couple are expecting the birth of their first child this month: expect Griner’s story to be one of the most talked about in Paris.
• Coming Home by Brittney Griner (with Michelle Burford) is published by September (£19.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
