-Brennan: The greatness of Griner,
DENVER — On the eve of the women’s national championship basketball game, Brittney Griner is known almost universally as the 6-8 dunking and shotblocking phenomenon who might someday be remembered as changing the women’s game as much as Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell or Kareem Abdul-jabbar changed the men’s.
“There have been players before her that dunk, there have been players before her that block shots, but there’s never been a player before her that intimidates you on the defensive end of the floor,” her coach, Baylor’s Kim Mulkey, said Monday. “She has a presence in the paint on the defensive end of the floor like none other. I’ve played with 6-9. I’ve watched 6-9 dunk the ball. I’ve been on an Olympic team. . . . Brittney Griner’s presence on the defensive end of the floor separates her from any player that has ever played.”
But before Griner became all of that, she was a little girl who was never very little, a kid who came to sports rather late, as a seventhgrader. But once she got there, she never left.
“I didn’t hit 6 foot until ninth grade,” she said, as an explanation of sorts for her late arrival into athletics. Griner played soccer goalie and volleyball until the day she dunked a volleyball and somebody told the basketball coach. Her basketball career, which began in the ninth grade, coincided perfectly with a 7-inch growth spurt in high school.
“I went through pants like crazy,” Griner said. “At first, I think my parents were kind of like, ‘You’re not outgrowing them, you just want some more.’ And I was like, ‘No, look, they’re on my waist.’ I would come downstairs, and (say), ‘Dang, I think I grew last night.’ ”
She said the growing pains were memorable, with the worst aches in her knees coming in middle school. At least she got them out of the way early. It appears some in the sports world are going through them now.
What do we as a society make of a rangy, deep-voiced, shoe-size-17, 6-8 woman who, just in this NCAA tournament, slammed down a ferocious, twohanded dunk?
Mulkey knows what some of the less progressive members of the sports community make of it. She says she doesn’t read the Internet message boards, but she has a pretty good inkling what’s on them from the excerpts she hears shouted from the stands.
“This is someone’s child,” Mulkey said. “This is a human being, people. She didn’t wake up and say: ‘God, make me look like this, make me 6-8, make me have the ability to dunk.’ This child is as precious as they come when it comes to being a good person, a sweet kid. . . . Yet the stuff she’s had to read about, the stuff she’s had to hear, the stuff people say about her, the stuff people write about her, it’s got to stop.”
Griner handles it well, often with a shrug and a smile. “You look at how she walks, with a great sense of pride,” Hall of Famer Ann Meyers Drysdale said. “You see a lot of tall women slouch, but not Brittney.”
The same sports arena that makes her a target also takes a woman who might have been an outcast 50 years ago and turns her into a star.
“The average fan, and I’ll even go so far as to say the male fans, all they want to see is the dunk,” Mulkey said. “And they can’t believe a girl can do what she can do. So they may turn the TV on and watch the highlights and go ‘ Wow,’ where before they never had any interest in the game because it was played below the rim.”
To hear Mulkey tell it, it’s all part of a great transformation, for Griner, for the game, for all of us. Kind of like finding women’s size 17 shoes.
“Just go online, really,” Griner said. “Can’t really go in the store (and say), ‘Hey, I need a 17.’ But I can go online. More options, more colors, different styles. It’s not bad.”