Why Brittney Griner was in Russia, and what it says about women’s sports in the U.S.

I woke as much as the cellphone ringing simply after 5 a.m. in Portland. My colleague was calling from the East Coast. “Lindz, it’s BG. She’s been taken into custody on the airport. She has her cellphone and may textual content.” Brittney Griner, who had spent a number of WNBA offseasons starring for UMMC Ekaterinburg, an elite Russian basketball membership workforce, had been touring again to Ekaterinburg from the U.S., connecting in Moscow when she was detained. She was now within the custody of Russian officers on the airport and, for the subsequent a number of hours, I tracked her location on my cellphone and continued texting her, making an attempt to stick with her so long as I might.

Staying along with her was what Brittney had requested me to do once I began representing her as her sports activities agent proper out of school in 2013. Although she was projected to be the No. 1 decide total within the WNBA draft, a very powerful dialog we had early on wasn’t about endorsements or fame. From my expertise within the enterprise, I knew that success on the court docket for girls has by no means been sufficient to ensure girls comparable business rewards to males. Solely girls athletes considered conventionally lovely by a Western commonplace, “female” — or just perceived to be straight, who had been each white and infrequently much less necessary, profitable at profitable, bought any trace of endorsement alternatives. The WNBA and its gamers, in all of their intersectional energy and sweetness, are nonetheless ready for society to catch up.

Preventing to shift how {the marketplace} views and values girls athletes has been on the heart of my complete profession as a sports activities agent. For Brittney, a very powerful issues I might do to help her profession and guarantee she maximized alternative had been 1) to make her as a lot cash on the court docket, as rapidly as attainable and a pair of) to at all times inform her the reality, do my finest to guard her and be there for her, it doesn’t matter what. Earlier than that February morning, that included advising her (together with a number of different shoppers) to benefit from the chance to play in Russia for the very best paying workforce on this planet. Ever since that day, it has meant working furiously to attempt to summon each useful resource I can to assist her, in order that I can maintain one other promise I made after she was formally charged and minutes earlier than she was led away. “BG,” I stated, “We love you. We’re right here. Be courageous. We are going to get you house.”

So whereas her detention has risen to the highest of stories for its geopolitical relevance, supercharged by movie star, at its underbelly lies a narrative of gender-pay disparity right here in the USA.

I spend hours in communication each day with a devoted group of people who find themselves working to get BG house. It’s a group full of activists — together with WNBA gamers who’ve led a few of our most necessary cultural conversations lately. It’s a group that chooses its phrases fastidiously, that’s used to shifting collectively as a unit. For now, that group is doing its finest to belief in BG’s authorized workforce and have faith within the White Home’s dedication to doing every little thing of their energy to deliver Brittney house. But as the method performs out, figuring out that we can not get into the small print of her case, I need to discuss why Brittney was in Russia within the first place.

These unfamiliar with the layered challenges girls face in skilled sports activities will in all probability marvel why an athlete so achieved — a three-time All-American, ESPY award winner, seven-time All-Star, All-WNBA choice, two-time Olympic gold medalist and WNBA champion universally appreciated with a megawatt smile who provides the warmest hugs you’ll ever obtain, set an NCAA file (amongst men and women) for blocked photographs, retains sneakers within the trunk of her to automotive to offer to individuals experiencing houselessness round Phoenix and does volunteer work with youngsters who’re bullied as she was as a baby — would wish to go away the USA to seek out offseason work.

The truth is that greater than half of the ladies within the WNBA at present complement their incomes by taking part in for skilled golf equipment abroad from the tip of the WNBA season to the beginning of the subsequent. To this point, the biggest contracts paid to girls basketball gamers have come from Russian and Turkish golf equipment. Prime athletes could make six to seven instances the utmost WNBA wage abroad — and the disparity as lately as 2019 was 10 to fifteen instances greater than WNBA salaries. Then you definately consider endorsements, with a first-round NBA draft decide securing a median of 10 instances greater than girls of the identical caliber by way of shoe contracts. That’s about $500,000 to $1 million of misplaced income per yr the ladies are going abroad to make up. A lot of the gamers who select to play abroad get solely per week or two off between the tip of 1 season and of the beginning of their subsequent. Actually, the EGOT of ladies’s basketball has been to seize NCAA, WNBA, Olympic and Euroleague titles.

It’s no secret that girls in skilled sports activities are paid rather a lot lower than males. There isn’t a magic WNBA commissioner wand that can enable Cathy Englebert to right away pay gamers larger salaries — and demanding that the Ladies’s Nationwide Basketball Gamers Affiliation negotiate a bigger share of income for gamers received’t make a lot of a distinction with out extra income development.

And but the identical system that rendered a lady who’s a generational expertise almost invisible till she was detained in Russia presents a wealthy ecosystem of revenue alternatives which are nearly solely accessible for males.

The important thing to unlocking financial alternative for girls in sports activities lies in elevated funding throughout 4 key, interconnected areas — media, sponsorships, merchandise and ticketing.

Greater media investments and extra networks committing to airing girls’s sports activities in common, recurring programming blocks have been proven to extend consciousness and end in extra followers tuning in.

Elevated sponsorships, in flip — and a reimagined software of sponsor {dollars} that prioritize and correctly worth girls’s leagues, groups and particular person athletes — will make it attainable for extra girls to maintain (and for extra ladies to aspire to) wholesome and significant careers in sports activities. Sponsor {dollars} paid on to WNBA stars would offer the quickest, most direct path to dramatically lower the variety of gamers who go abroad to complement their revenue.

And investments in merchandise that includes and celebrating girls’s sports activities groups and athletes may also deepen fan participation and assist develop the group round girls’s sports activities. Proper now, demand is already outpacing provide and merch is simply too laborious to seek out as it’s — as anybody who’s ever tried to seek out the WNBA emblem to buy on the Fanatics homepage will know.

Now we have now a high-stakes instance of how financial disparity can have terrifying penalties. For this reason I’m calling on corporations to decide to investing thrice the sources in girls’s sports activities that they spend money on males’s, to assist speed up sports activities business parity. Knowledge exhibits {that a} greenback spent on girls’s sports activities is the perfect greenback spent in sports activities as a result of it offers an outsized return for manufacturers. So whereas spending equally on women and men is an effective begin (and must be celebrated, but in addition be the agreed-upon minimal), any firm that really desires to guide in closing the hole might want to do extra. It’s time to really, measurably wager on girls.

The funding is wise and its overdue.

With the lives and freedom of gamers at stake, we will’t afford to attend or to proceed to simply accept the identical errors.

We should acknowledge our shared accountability and take motion.

A rise of thrice can be symbolic. The 75-year-old NBA is thrice older than the 25- year-old WNBA — and thrice evokes the “rule of three,” a “just-right” Goldilocks take a look at and, for good measure, is the jersey variety of Diana Taurasi, who was lately voted the WNBA’s GOAT by its followers, is considered one of Brittney’s teammates and was my very first shopper as an agent. If Diana was measured by success, charisma and talent — and if not for being a lady — she would absolutely be the world’s most well-known athlete.

In the end, a extra significant dedication from the broader sports activities group is required to maintain development for the league and its stars in all the mandatory mediums. And transparency can be key.

If corporations undertake an method just like the brand new local weather guidelines proposed by the U.S. Securities and Alternate Fee — which can quickly require corporations to reveal details about their influence on local weather change — I imagine they are going to be rewarded by shoppers, who anticipate manufacturers to take a stand.

For instance, disclosure from different sorts of manufacturers may element what was allotted to girls’s leagues versus males’s leagues, what athletes had been paid and details about whether or not women and men had been compensated equally for his or her providers. An excellent deeper dive might reveal how these investments elevated Black girls; Black, Brown, Asian or Indigenous creatives; athletes with disabilities; non-binary or trans athletes; or different traditionally underrepresented teams.

In an business that celebrates and thrives on competitors, corporations that take the initiative proper now to guide — taking actions like conducting inside audits, articulating a transparent imaginative and prescient for the progress they wish to make, sharing success tales and being clear about their dedication — will reap the advantages of being the primary out of the gate.

By the point the world first discovered about what occurred to Brittney, a wave of shock had already hit the tightly knit girls’s basketball group. Because it rippled out by media into dwelling rooms, Zoom conferences, enterprise dinners and bars throughout the nation that had, till then, not typically contained conversations about girls in sports activities, curiosity in Brittney Griner and the WNBA spiked.

American Brittney Griner scores towards Elizabeth Williams, of Nigeria, throughout an exhibition recreation on July 18, 2021, in Las Vegas forward of the Tokyo Olympics.

(Ethan Miller / Getty Pictures)

As we, Brittney’s household and associates, attempt to compartmentalize our anguish over the unknowns, working whereas additionally holding our breath for her protected return, what higher approach to make her proud than to do every little thing we will to make sure that what’s taking place to her now won’t ever occur once more?

We owe it to Brittney to make sure this historical past doesn’t repeat, in order that no different participant, household or group must expertise this once more.

BG, I’m nonetheless with you. All of us are. And we will’t wait to point out you all of the change you’re inspiring.

Lindsay Kagawa Colas is the chief vp for Expertise and The Collective at Wasserman, the place she represents basketball stars Brittney Griner, Diana Taurasi, Sue Hen, Maya Moore, Breanna Stewart and Paige Bueckers, in addition to high Olympic and Paralympic athletes. She secured the primary maternity protections and first inclusion rider in shoe and attire contracts.