In My Skin

by Brittney Griner

  “Big Girl, close the door,” she would say, which is how I knew we were about to have Kim’s version of a heart-to-heart conversation. I’d say, “All right, Coach,” and gently shut the door. Then I’d wait to hear what version of “girl problems” she would drop on me. One time, she gave me a dead-serious look and asked, “Is it ‘ex’ problems?” I covered my mouth so she wouldn’t see me swallowing a smile.

  The first time she ever asked me that question, maybe early in my sophomore year, she sounded like she was speaking a foreign language and was worried about using the wrong words. But by senior year, she was an old pro at it, probably because she had asked me so many times. At one point early in my senior season, Kim called me into her office for a chat because she could tell I was struggling. Almost as soon as the Phoenix Mercury had landed the No. 1 pick in the WNBA Draft lottery, which took place at the end of September, my mind had been working overtime. There was always the chance that Phoenix could have traded the rights to that pick, but nobody really thought that would happen. So once I knew where my new life would unfold, the idea of leaving Baylor became much more real. It wasn’t just some vague notion anymore, lingering out there on the horizon. I had a place: Phoenix. I had a team: the Mercury. I knew exactly how far I would be from Houston, from home: 1,175 miles. I was going to be moving away from everyone and everything I knew, from the friends who had embraced me and let me be myself. And now my insides were in knots every time I thought about it.

  “Is something going on with you and your girlfriend?” Kim was sitting at her desk, looking at me, and I was trying not to roll my eyes.

  “Actually, Coach, I don’t have a girlfriend right now,” I told her. “And it’s not girlfriend problems.” That was the truth. I had broken up with my girl in Atlanta, and I hadn’t started dating Cherelle. I tried to explain that I had a lot on my mind, but I didn’t really open up to Kim because I didn’t think she “got” me the way my friends did. And, yes, maybe she would have understood me better if I had shared more with her, but there was always a little bit of a disconnect with us, because I never really knew if Kim fully accepted me for who I am.

  Like I said, there isn’t one specific moment I can point to and say, “That’s where it all went wrong.” But there was one common thread: I didn’t like when Kim would show one face in public and a different face behind closed doors. She would call me into her office to tell me I had done something wrong—like when someone saw me kissing my girlfriend at the movies—but then she would shift the burden away from herself, trying to imply she was just the messenger and this wasn’t how she personally felt. Those conversations caused me a lot of confusion, a lot of pain. Just once, I wanted her to stop worrying about what everyone else thought and stand by my side. Instead, she would express the “appropriate” level of concern when someone complained about something I had done, and then she would tell me, “Big Girl, I’m not saying I agree with them. I’m just reminding you to keep your business behind closed doors.”

  I’m sure Kim thought she was being fair. And I’m sure there are some players who would shrug it all off, because they understand the nature of the business, that coaches are always trying to please everyone—or at least it seemed that way with Kim. Trust me, I understand the pressure to please, the impulse to show different faces to different people. But when we’re talking about something as fundamentally important as my identity, I’m not going to let other people tell me how I should act. I did a lot for the Baylor program and helped raise visibility for the whole school. The idea that my sexuality might somehow hurt recruiting is ridiculous. I know Kim was in a tricky spot because of Baylor’s policy on homosexuality—not that she ever admitted that to me—but don’t tell me you’re okay with the fact that I’m gay, and then once I get on campus you tell me to keep the gay part hidden away. I don’t think Kim is homophobic, but I do think she was hypocritical when it came to me. She worried too much about what other people might think, and not enough about what I myself actually did think.

  This theme repeated itself throughout my senior year, from one issue to the next. Our first big disagreement was about my course load. I had made up my mind to finish my degree gradually (I was a general studies major), chipping away at my credit requirements in the year or two after I left school. This is how a lot of men’s basketball players and football players complete their degrees, because they’ve spent so much time focused on their sports during the year that they’re always a few credits shy. That’s where I found myself at the start of my senior year, a few credits behind pace to graduate, and I wasn’t the kind of student who could just load up on classes and plow through it all. Graduating on time was not my main priority at that point, although earning my degree was important to me, mostly because it was so important to my mom, and I never want to let her down. But Kim had her own plan for how I would earn my degree. She wanted to overload my class schedule so I’d graduate on time, which would help keep her graduation rate really high (more than 90 percent). I had a meeting with her, and she made it clear to me that this was nonnegotiable.

  “It’s going to be too much,” I told her. She shook her head and said I had to do it. But I know myself: when I have too much on my plate, I get stressed. Some people like a jam-packed schedule. Their attitude is, the busier, the better. Not me. I have trouble eating and I become irritable. A few weeks into my senior year, I went to my academic adviser and dropped a class. Kim was furious. I was breaking her graduation streak. At least, that’s why I thought she was upset, and I told her as much. She said I was wrong, that she wanted me to have the security of a degree, and that was the only thing motivating her. She also said if I didn’t graduate, she wouldn’t retire my jersey. But all that meant to me was that she didn’t really understand what makes me tick. I don’t care about awards. I don’t need hardware to motivate me. I care about hooping, and I care about winning.

  When I was growing up, my future didn’t even include college, never mind a college degree. So the fact that I’m so close to getting mine is a direct result of basketball. And I will get that degree, because it would be foolish if I didn’t. But school and education aren’t the same thing, and sitting inside a classroom has never been my favorite way to learn. When something interests me, I will spend hours immersed in the subject. At Baylor, I had a few professors whose teaching style struck a chord with me, because instead of just standing in front of the students and lecturing, or flipping through a PowerPoint presentation, they engaged us in a way that made the subject come to life, and everybody joined the conversation, like we were all part of a team. One of my history professors would put us into groups, and we learned about daily life in ancient Greece or medieval times by playing these games she created. We would act out the wars and battles; we bartered and loaned money. You might pull a card that said, “The Plague,” and everybody in your town would die. It was interactive and fun, and I learned a lot more in that class than I did when some professor was just standing up and droning on the whole time.

  As a kid, I was obsessed with the Animal Planet channel. I would sit there watching and learning about different species and subspecies, then I’d tell my parents all about it at the dinner table. I would just talk, talk, talk, telling them stories about different animals. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more interested in black history and movies about the civil rights movement. My interests are all over the place. At one point during my first summer in Phoenix, I downloaded a bunch of books about Marilyn Monroe. I’m fascinated by her story, because she seemed to have had it all, and yet she was always searching for something else. In public, she was portrayed as the ideal woman, but it was a different story in private. She was so vulnerable.

  Anyway, the point is, I was not the ideal student at Baylor. I had so much other stuff going on that I didn’t always have the focus I needed for my classwork. I know I could have been more dedicated at times, but I felt like Kim thought I could just flip a switch my senior year and turn into Wonder Stud
ent—and that just wasn’t going to happen.

  Unfortunately, our battle over how many credits I should take wasn’t our only clash of wills. Winning the 2012 national championship was amazing, but it also put a spotlight on the program that was even brighter than we expected, raising the stakes for Kim, for me, for all of us. And the more attention we got, the more Kim and I butted heads over another topic: my tattoos. It was clear from all the comments she made that she thinks tattoos send the wrong message, and she doesn’t understand why anybody would ever get one. When I got my two star tats freshman year, front and center on each shoulder, I threw her for a loop because now her star player, the one grabbing all the headlines, seemed to be making some kind of statement Kim didn’t understand. (The statement was this: “I love the way these stars look!”) So she made me wear a T-shirt under my jersey and said she was doing me a favor, protecting me from the judgment of millions. She also warned me that if I kept getting tats, I would probably lose out on endorsement money.

  In my eyes, this was a form of censorship and an old-fashioned way of looking at the world. My senior year, we would sit in Kim’s office (yes, I spent a lot of time in there) and go around in circles about the whole tattoo issue. She said she knew I was angry with her for making me hide my tats. But that wasn’t exactly true: I was upset because it seemed like all she cared about was the image of the program as seen through the eyes of a very specific segment of the population. I was upset because she believed people would label me a bad person simply because of my tattoos. I was upset because, once again, Kim was allowing other people—or, in this case, the fear of what they might say—to decide how she responded to me.

  I’m not overlooking the pressure Kim felt when it came to maintaining the image of her program. I’m just saying I think she worried about the wrong things sometimes. It’s not like we were all causing trouble off the court, bringing shame to the university, like the way some men’s teams cause headaches for their schools. We were good members of the Baylor community, not a bunch of bad seeds. At one point that season, Brooklyn Pope, a starting forward for us, produced a music video of herself rapping, which was her passion outside of basketball. Apparently a parent of a recruit saw the video posted online and wrote a long note to Kim about how disappointed he was that she allowed Brooklyn to use those lyrics, to send a message that the parent didn’t agree with. So Kim got on all of us about the video and told Brooklyn to take it down. We tried to stick up for Brooklyn, to reason with Kim. We said, “Brooklyn is a rapper, Coach, so of course her songs aren’t going to sound like the country music you listen to, like Trace Adkins. But it’s basically all the same. Brooklyn using the word ‘ass’ is no different than Trace singing about ‘honky tonk badonkadonk’ and staring at a woman’s butt!”

  As usual, Kim reminded us to keep it behind closed doors, the same way she wanted me to cover up my tattoos. I told her I didn’t want to be one of those athletes who worry so much about managing their public images that you never really know who they are on the inside. I know who I am, and if you get to know me, you know what’s in my heart. So if people I don’t know want to take one quick look at me, at my tattoos, and assume I’m a bad person—well, I don’t care if they do. Why should I waste mental energy worrying about the negative opinions of people I’ve never met? I care a lot more about the people who know me. I care about the fans who don’t know me personally but who respond to me positively. I also told Kim I didn’t want to work with any company that didn’t understand why I have tattoos. Endorsement deals are nice, but not at the expense of your personal truth.

  I was walking along the hallway in the basketball offices one day when I noticed a photo, a framed action shot, of a former player who had a Mickey Mouse tattoo on her shoulder. There it was, in all its glory, out in the open during a game. The player in that photo had much darker skin than I do, so her tat didn’t pop like mine do. But ink is ink, and I asked Kim straight up: “You’ve had other players with tattoos, so why is it such a big deal with me?”

  “Big Girl, you’re the face of the program,” she said. “All these little girls look up to you, and I don’t want their parents to think anything bad about you.” In my mind, her answer translated two ways: first, that I should feel some sense of shame about my tattoos, and second, she didn’t want anybody to have a bad opinion of the program because of how I look.

  My senior year, I got a flower tattoo on my left shoulder. I also came up with a twisted solution to the whole tattoo issue, one that would satisfy both Kim and me. I wanted to wear a long-sleeve shirt under my jersey, because I was always getting scratched during games. But I was also going overboard to prove a point, like a little kid refusing to talk for hours after her parents ask her to be quiet for a few minutes. I knew Kim wouldn’t want me to wear the long sleeves, because nobody else on the team wore them, and she was anal about us all having the same look. She couldn’t really argue with me about the scratches, so she relented on the long-sleeve tee, with one condition: I had to agree not to get any more tattoos until I was done playing for Baylor. We also had to clear the uniform change with the NCAA, because you need a medical reason to wear long sleeves, so we said I was trying to keep my joints warm. (Can’t play with cold joints, right?)

  And, yes, I kept my promise to Kim. I didn’t get another tattoo until I left Baylor.

  HELLO AND GOODBYE

  My dad and I had stitched together our relationship, kind of anyway, after I moved out, and then back home, during my senior year of high school. He came to all my games at Baylor. I did my part, too: I would usually answer his calls, and I’d tell him how many miles I put on the car. It was an uneasy peace, punctuated by lots of silly arguments. He was still in the habit of lecturing me, and although I usually just tuned him out, all his preaching was growing more tiresome. If, for example, a professional athlete did something particularly stupid or got into trouble with the law, my cell phone would buzz, and my dad was on the other end of the line, telling me all the ways in which I was at risk of suffering a downfall. If I had been at Baylor when Michael Vick was arrested for his role in dogfighting, that’s exactly the kind of thing my dad would have gone off the rails about, warning me to watch my back. “Don’t trust your so-called friends,” he would say. “Everyone is out to get you, including the people you think you can count on. Keep your eye on them, on everyone. You can’t trust your friends.”

  These calls weren’t conversations. He wasn’t checking in to ask how my day was going. He was talking at me, filling me with the pessimism and paranoia that constantly bubbled inside him. I received hundreds of these calls and texts during my career at Baylor, each one like a stone placed on top of the other, until this growing stack had become a wobbly leaning tower threatening to crash down on us. And the final piece, the one that made the whole thing topple, was a text he sent during my senior year.

  When I was a kid, I never felt like I had anyone I could really confide in, someone who would listen carefully to me, someone who would understand my pain and anxiety, helping me to unburden my soul. I love my family so much, but who would fill that role for me? My dad? He was often the main reason I was upset. My mom? She hates confrontation; she wants everyone to get along. If I had tried to talk with her about my frustrations—especially how I felt suffocated by my dad’s distrust of everyone—I would have put her in a no-win situation. Pier and I were too busy getting on each other’s nerves, and DeCarlo and SheKera were so much older, they weren’t plugged in to what I was doing, what I was feeling, day in and day out. I know DeCarlo would have understood a lot of it, because we had some talks in the backyard or in his truck and he would tell me to keep my chin up. But I was always so happy to see him, I didn’t want to spend our time together talking about things that made me sad.

  I know now how damaging it was for me to hold everything inside, because if you swallow all your resentments, they just simmer and fester until you explode. And that’s exactly what happened with me during my final yea
r at Baylor: I blew my top, and the red-hot lava spilled all over my dad.

  BY THE TIME I WAS a senior, the only control my father had over my life was the car, my trusty Dodge Magnum. He wasn’t paying for college, he wasn’t paying for my cell phone (Pier took care of that), and he wasn’t giving me spending money because I had a small stipend with my scholarship. So everything came back to the car, and he started paying even closer attention to the miles I was putting on it. This obsession of his irked me more than usual because I wasn’t driving all that much. I was probably using the car about the same amount as any typical Baylor student with wheels. One day in November, not long after the regular season had started, he sent me a text that was part lecture, part interrogation about the odometer on the car. There was nothing all that significant about what he said or how he said it—he was just being his usual Raymond Griner self—except this text happened to be the last stone placed on top of the tall, shaky pile. I stared at my phone as the anger rose inside me. I was twenty-two years old, and I wanted him to start treating me like an adult, instead of like a small child with no understanding of how the world works. I know my dad loves me. I know he would do almost anything for me (with emotional strings attached). But what I wanted most for him to do was nothing. I wanted him to release his grip on the reins of my life and allow me to make the mistakes we all make, so I could learn and grow without having to hear him say, “I told you so.”

  I realized right then and there, looking at my phone with growing outrage, that I needed to give him back the car. Those four wheels were the last strings connecting me to him, making me his puppet. And he was tugging those strings for all they were worth. I tried to call him because I felt this sudden urge to tell him off, to unload all the hurt that had been building inside me for so many years. But he didn’t answer. So I wrote him a text message, and then another, and another, and another, text after text after text, a stormy sea of green bubbles on my iPhone, maybe fifty texts in all—so many that it hurt my thumb to scroll through them. I probably sent him at least a thousand words, typed out on my phone, many too ugly to share here, because I cuss a lot when I’m angry. I went all the way back to my childhood, telling him how his strict rules, practically house arrest, had made me feel. I spit out the pain he had caused me in high school by not accepting me for who I am and trying to make me feel like there is something wrong with being gay. I skewered him for all the negative sermons he had dumped on me at Baylor and for never calling just to ask how I was doing. As I sat there furiously typing away, I felt like I had to purge myself of this awful bug that had been eating away at me for far too long.