The real reason we forgot about Brittney Griner

In late April, American political prisoner Trevor Reed was released from Russia in a prisoner swap. Yet it is now two months since the American basketball superstar Brittney Griner was taken into custody at Moscow Sheremetyevo airport for allegedly having hashish oil in her possession.

There are three key assertions as to why the Brittney Griner situation isn’t getting the attention that it should be and would be if it was a different athlete.

The first is that Griner is really not a high-profile athlete.

This is patently untrue. Griner was absolutely the highest-profile American athlete Russia could take into custody as they geared up to invade Ukraine.

The only other high-profile athletes transiting through at that time were the very few American players in Russia’s top hockey league, the KHL. None are superstars in their sport, as Griner is.

The second argument is she is LGBTQ.

That’s a harsh position to have to take in 2022, yet it’s clear that Griner doesn’t fit the mold of what many Americans see as an all-American athlete. That one’s sexual or gender orientation should drive the level of sympathy the American public has for one of their own is a shame but here we evidently are.

The third and most commonly cited reason for Griner getting less attention than another athlete would in a similar situation is that she’s Black.

This argument holds little weight with me. Yes, it makes sense that in comparison to a white high-profile athlete, that some people are, sadly, simply going to care less about a Black athlete.

But I think this argument crumbles under the weight of the analogy that I most usually use during TV and radio broadcasts about the Griner case – and that is what if this were Kyrie Irving?

If Kyrie would have been taken into custody by the Russians, I guarantee this would be front page news practically every day. That simply hasn’t been the case with Griner. I also guarantee that a couple of months after this all began, no one would have forgotten that Kyrie was in Russian custody.

Ultimately, Griner has been forgotten because it’s too easy for us to do so.

Women’s professional basketball is more high profile in Russia, Turkey, and China – key destinations for WNBA players – than it is here at home. Our best female basketball players remain not second- but third-class citizens, needing to moonlight in places such as Yekaterinburg, Ankara or Shenzhen so that their international and WNBA salaries combined can still be less than a journeyman who rides the bench in the NBA.

That we have forgotten about Griner is not an oversight but rather the product of a design flaw in how we regard and reward our best athletes.

For one of the most talented women to ever play the game, she faces a daily prospect of this all going from bad to worse. Russia is not yet at the point where, to put it as crassly but as realistically as possible, they can use Griner as a good trade bait.

When they will is very hard to ascertain, because rather than the steady flow of information that we are all used to, with Griner, the information has come in irregular trickles.

Which leads us to the most important consideration moving forward:

If we don’t keep Griner as part of an ongoing conversation, who will?

Aron Solomon, JD, is the chief legal analyst for Esquire Digital, a marketing company for law firms. He has taught entrepreneurship at McGill University and the University of Pennsylvania, and was elected to Fastcase 50, recognizing the top 50 legal innovators in the world. Reach him at aron@esquiredigital.com.