In My Skin: My Life On and Off the Basketball Court

PROLOGUE

I don’t like saying no.

I have a driving desire to make people happy, to the point that I often tire myself out trying to be everything to everyone, saying yes even when I want to say no. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent much of my life dealing with rejection—the vicious taunts I heard as a kid, the disapproval of my sexuality as I got older—so now I find it hard to turn down others, even in the smallest ways. It actually gets me in trouble sometimes, spreading myself thin with friends or making too many public commitments when what I should be doing is catching my breath and carving out some much-needed alone time.

This part of my personality tends to surprise people. They know me only as the six-foot-eight basketball player, the one who doesn’t back down, who plays hard, dunks with authority, and lives openly—the one who likes to challenge how society wants to define her. When I tell someone I’m a people pleaser, I’m often met with a raised eyebrow and a look that says, Really? I never would have guessed it. But it’s true. I want everyone to feel happy and accepted. And I never want to be the cause of someone else’s disappointment, because I know all too well how that particular brand of pain feels.

Of course I mess up plenty, too. What I feel and what I do are sometimes out of sync. I’ve always held things inside, kept most of my true feelings and emotions packed away. From the time I was a kid, I’ve dealt with so much hurt this way: swallowing it whole, stacking it inside me, thinking I was strong enough to ignore it and keep a smile on my face. Meanwhile, when I was busy telling myself it didn’t matter, the hurt would become sadness, then anger, and eventually it would spill over. This seemed natural to me, coping with the ups and downs of life by stuffing everything away until nothing more could fit, then dealing with all of it coming back up at once, a tidal wave of emotion.

If I’ve done one thing especially well in the past few years, it’s break down the walls I had built. And I’ve learned something important about myself in the process, especially during my college years at Baylor University. I’ve learned that my top priority is being true to myself, and making choices that reflect who I am as a person, even if those choices—how I dress, what I talk about, who I surround myself with—make some people uncomfortable.

My desire to live authentically has often been at odds with my need to please. I want to be me, but I also want to make the people around me happy. It’s a tug-of-war that has consumed me over the years, but one I’m finally learning to manage.

This constant quest to find the right balance is also a big reason I’m sharing my story, because I think anyone who has ever struggled to walk a different path, while also trying to fit in, can appreciate the difficulty of that journey and the lessons learned along the way. In telling my story, I’ve come to understand myself on a deeper level, to think about how I can be the best version of myself, not just the version that others want to see.

I still have a lot to learn (big understatement). But learning to be the real me has made everything else seem possible.

IT’S COMPLICATED

The morning of my first WNBA game, I did what I always do when my alarm goes off: I hit the snooze button two or three times. I’m not one of those bounce-out-of-bed types. I’m also not someone who gets nervous before big games. As I was lying in bed, though, slowly waking up, my mind jumped ahead to the afternoon. It was 8 A.M. (give or take a snooze), and in six hours, I would walk to center court and officially tip off my pro career. Let’s get this thing started, people! The past several months had been a whirlwind of media, travel, and drama—lots of drama—and I just wanted to get out on the floor with the Phoenix Mercury, in front of our fans, and hoop.

But first I had to figure out what to wear. That was the one thing I was nervous about, because you’re supposed to look nice when you go to the games, and I didn’t want to start my career with a fine. So I woke up my girlfriend, Cherelle, and said, Hey, I need you to dress me. We decided on a navy blue shirt with white polka dots and a pair of dark Levi’s jeans (the skinny kind). But the key, the thing we obsessed about, was the bow tie. I had a new one I wanted to wear, a pinkish-purple color (or purply pink), so we watched some videos to see how to tie it, because my agent had been doing that for me before events. We fussed with it for a while until we got the hang of it, like ten or fifteen minutes, long enough to make me impatient. Then we realized the tie didn’t really work with my shirt—it was too big for the collar—and I ended up wearing a pink-and-blue one that was already tied.

In other words, I cheated.

You grow up watching players like LeBron James and Kobe Bryant walk into arenas wearing expensive suits, carrying nice bags, and you can see they’re making a statement. It’s like they’re saying, This is the person I am outside the jersey. This is who I am without a basketball in my hand. And this was my chance to make that same kind of statement. I had walked into dozens of arenas wearing generic warm-up suits that said nothing about me, the woman underneath. So I couldn’t wait to walk into US Airways Center showing off my own style. This is me, Brittney Griner.

Becoming a professional basketball player wasn’t just about making money or proving myself. It was about freedom, too. In September of my senior year at Baylor University, I watched the WNBA Draft lottery with friends. We had a little party, just chilling and grilling. And when the Mercury won the top pick, I googled the area code for Phoenix, then called Verizon and said I wanted a new phone number—a 602 number. Everyone kept telling me I was going to be the No. 1 draft pick in 2013, the following spring, and I liked having that extra motivation to make it happen. (I also liked how my new phone number had my jersey number in it. That felt like a sign, when I saw a 42 in there, like everything was falling into place.) Thinking about my future in Phoenix gave me a light at the end of the tunnel, because I knew when I turned pro, I would have more control over the things I said and did. No one could choose those things for me anymore.

It really hit home for me in the locker room before my first game with the Mercury, on Memorial Day against the Chicago Sky. The pieces of my life were steadily clicking into place, and my world felt so much bigger—everything from my new California king-size bed, to our arena, to the contract I had recently signed to play for a club in China after the WNBA season. Even my tattoos seemed bigger. I have a flower on my left shoulder, and a week or so before moving to Phoenix, I got it extended down my arm and added a hummingbird to it. I’d been wearing a sleeve in practice to protect the ink, but when I pulled on my jersey before our game against the Sky, and I looked at that new tat, along with the red stars on my left and right shoulders—the ones I had to cover up when I played at Baylor—I suddenly had this aha moment. Hell yeah, I can show off my tats now! I feel free! I wasn’t constricted anymore or burning up in that long-sleeve T-shirt I wore during my last season in college. I felt as comfortable in my new surroundings as I felt in my skin.

It was hard to believe how much had changed in the two months since I had played a basketball game that really mattered, since I’d stepped onto the court with a lot of people watching and wondering how I would perform. A seventy-seven-foot banner of me was hanging on the side of the Hotel Palomar in downtown Phoenix, just across the street from our arena, and every time I saw it, I was reminded of those giant expectations.

I had spent most of my college career in the spotlight. From the moment I set foot on campus as a Baylor freshman, people said I had the potential to do things no female player had done before, that I had a combination of size (did I mention I’m six foot eight?) and skill never seen in the women’s game. But it wasn’t until my junior season, when we went 40-0 and won the national championship, that I really started to understand what people meant when they said things like Brittney Griner can be as good as she wants to be. I didn’t even start playing basketball until the ninth grade; by the time I left Baylor, I was a two-time national Player of the Year, a three-time All-American, I held the NCAA career record for blocked shots, and I was the second-leading scorer in women’s Division I history. Now here I was in Phoenix, as one of the most highly touted WNBA rookies ever, and a lot of people around the league were predicting we would win the championship in my first season.

No pressure.

As I sat at my locker, my mind drifted back to my last college game, in Oklahoma City, against Louisville in the Sweet Sixteen of the 2013 NCAA tournament. I hadn’t allowed myself to think about that game much at all, and still don’t, because it makes me feel a little sick to my stomach. For me, our loss to Louisville—one of the biggest upsets in women’s tourney history—was about more than just basketball. And I think I lost more than just a game. In a lot of ways, that night represents my entire senior year, which was one big struggle. I was finally coming into my own as an adult, but before I could step forward and be exactly the person I wanted to be in public, before I could say and do the things I wanted to do, on my own terms, I had to go through some serious growing pains with the two main authority figures in my life: my dad, Raymond Griner, and my coach, Kim Mulkey. I love and respect them both, more than they probably know. But if I had to pick just one word to describe my relationship with each of them? Complicated. All caps COMPLICATED.

The court has almost always been a safe place for me, a space where I can rejuvenate myself. It’s where I gained confidence in high school, where I started to overcome the emotional pain and loneliness I felt in middle school, when I dealt with relentless verbal bullying (sometimes by fighting back with my fists). So I was excited to step onto the court in Phoenix, because I knew once my pro career officially started—once I was back into the regular routine of hoops—I could truly begin to rid myself of the bad feelings that still lingered from the final moments of my college career. I was also well aware I had raised the stakes for myself, and now I needed to deliver, both on and off the court. In the two months since the Louisville loss, I had been making all kinds of news. Some of the headlines happened without me doing anything, like when Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban said he would consider drafting me into the NBA. But most of the stories centered around my sexuality, after I casually acknowledged I’m gay.

I’ve always put myself out there, in more ways than one. I knew when I was done playing for Baylor, I was going to be completely open about my sexuality. It’s not like I was hiding it in Waco. I had been out to family and friends for years. But nobody in the media asked me about it at Baylor, probably because that topic was blocked before I even knew about it. When you’re a college athlete, all media requests go through the sports information director’s office, and I think they were especially cautious about me because the school has a policy against homosexuality. So even though I was open about being gay, I couldn’t be open on Baylor’s time, which is why I have a lot of mixed emotions about my four years there. I loved being a member of the Lady Bears, and the fans were great. But playing for a program and on a campus that denies a large part of my identity was a tough situation to navigate. I spent a lot of time wondering if they supported Brittney Griner the person or just Brittney Griner the basketball player.

I guess you could say my relationship with Baylor is like my relationship with Kim and my dad. It’s complicated.

THERE IS AN INTERESTING STORY behind the SI.com video that everyone now sees as my coming out moment. I was in New York City for a few days after the WNBA Draft because the league had scheduled a bunch of media obligations for us—me, Elena Delle Donne, and Skylar Diggins, the top three picks in the draft—and one of our last stops was at the offices of Sports Illustrated, to shoot a digital video. A Mercury PR staffer was with me, along with Stephanie Rudnick, a publicist from Wasserman Media Group, the agency that represents me. They went over the ground rules with SI ahead of time, to make sure everybody was on the same page, and it became clear pretty quickly that SI’s goal was to discuss sexuality. The video anchor, Maggie Gray, said she wanted to ask me about it, but Stephanie told her the topic was off-limits. We had an arrangement with another outlet (it was ESPN) to tell my full story, to talk in depth about issues that are really important to me. It was okay for SI to ask general questions, like everyone else had been doing, but we didn’t want to get into specifics right then and there, because I didn’t think a digital video with Elena and Skylar was the place to tell my story, and it wasn’t fair to them. We were there trying to promote the league, not our personal histories.

Once we were on set, though, I sensed what was coming. I just didn’t know when. I remember thinking, This lady is going to make it about sexuality. Sure enough, she brought it up, asking why it’s supposedly more accepted for female athletes (like WNBA players, she said) to come out than it is for men—a topic that people could spend hours discussing. I was trying to answer as broadly as I could, but it was hard for me because I had made this pact with myself to be 100 percent open once I left Baylor. So I said, Being one that’s out, it’s just being who you are. Don’t worry about what other people are going to say. Don’t hide who you are. I thought I had sidestepped it because I didn’t actually say, Well, Maggie, I’m gay. But that’s when she pounced and asked me a very specific question about how I had handled my sexuality. At that point, I was, like, Agh! I give up! And I answered directly: I’ve always been open about who I am and my sexuality.

I was pissed off when the interview was over. Not because I didn’t feel comfortable talking about my sexuality—obviously I do—but because I wanted to tell my own story and give it the context I thought it deserved, the way Jason Collins got to tell his story when he came out later that month, on the cover of Sports Illustrated. I didn’t get to do any of that in the little digital video. I felt like they just wanted their breaking news story: "Brittney comes out to SI."

When the video went up, everyone made it seem like that was my big Oprah sit-down, my coming-out confession. I was blown away by that reaction. I was following it all on Twitter and thinking, Hello, people! I’m already out! Anyone who didn’t know just wasn’t paying attention. I mean, my Twitter bio had the word equality in it and a photo I did for the NOH8 campaign. I had also recently committed to doing a video for the It Gets Better Project and had posted about it on Facebook. It’s not like I was going to send out a press release letting everyone know I’m gay; it’s my life, and I should get to choose when and how I want to talk about it to the media. In fact, I had already alluded to being gay a couple of days before the SI interview, when I spent time with a USA Today reporter on draft day for a story about bringing change to the WNBA. We had the same ground rules as I did with Sports Illustrated, so when I mentioned coming out to my parents in high school, USA Today didn’t make a big deal of it, because it was part of a larger point about the importance of being authentic. If you go back and look at the article, which ran a day before the SI video, I actually said a lot more to USA Today than I did to SI, but people didn’t jump all over that news and try to say I just came out—which goes to show you it’s all about how the story is framed. And when it comes to dealing with gay athletes, the media still has a long way to go. As athletes, as people, we want to show who we are and how we think and what makes us tick, but far too often we get reduced to a headline. It’s no wonder more athletes don’t come out.

I was still annoyed by the whole thing a few days later, especially when I scrolled through Twitter and Instagram. The trolls were saying all the usual crap, but with a new twist: How can she be a lesbian if she’s a man? and Of course she likes girls—she has a penis! I have a love-hate relationship with social media. On the one hand, it provides a sense of community and support; on the other hand, it gives a megaphone to people spouting cruelty and hatred. Like many things in life, the bad comes with the good. And there was plenty of bad, nasty stuff online after the SI video hit.

But then I started hearing from more and more people who were telling me, Hey, you’re doing a good thing. It really clicked for me when I was back in Waco about a week later. President Obama spoke during a memorial service on the Baylor campus, for victims of the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas. There were EMTs and firefighters all over town that day, coming to pay their respects. And the EMTs from West happened to be right in front of my apartment complex. When I went outside, I was spotted immediately, and they all wanted to take pictures with me. One of the stations seemed to have a number of gays and lesbians on staff, and a man came up to me and started thanking me. He was almost crying. He told me my coming out was going to make things better. He also told me there was a local church that was giving them a hard time for being gay. He said they hadn’t smiled in weeks, and yet here they were, smiling ear to ear while talking to me.

That moment touched me. I thought, Okay, what I’m doing really does matter. I’m helping in some way. By the time I sat down for my big on-camera interview with ESPN a few weeks later and the editors put me on the cover of their magazine, I didn’t care that some people were still tweeting stuff like Brittney Griner just came out to ESPN. I’ll come out over and over again if it’s a positive thing for gay kids who are struggling with the same stuff I struggled with when I was younger. Because every voice matters, and being different is a good thing. Who wants