The first time most Americans were introduced to Brittney Griner was on March 4, 2010. The 6’8" women’s basketball phenomenon’s hadouken into the face of a smaller opposing player was the first time in months that women’s hoops was the top story on Sportscenter, overshadowing Griner’s breakout freshman campaign when she set the NCAA single-season record for blocks. When you searched "Brittney Griner" in YouTube, "The Punch" relegated videos of Griner’s many in-game dunks to the sparsely viewed second page. Griner was click bait.
Everyone, whether you are a women’s basketball superstar or an aspiring Kate Upton blogger, is more than what they are known for in public. One of the most important stories in In My Skin is how Griner came to terms with her sexuality and grew into a confident gay woman in conservative Texas at the deeply conservative Baylor University, where she played her college ball.
In a calendar year that brought America Jason Collins and Michael Sam, it is a woman who is first able to articulate in a book the travails of being a gay athlete playing in a major sport. The country will have to wait for Collins and Sam to tell their own stories, but Griner didn’t see any big deal in the cascade of attention she received when she casually came out to the national public in a pre-WNBA draft interview. In her mind, she’s been an out gay woman since high school.
In her book, Griner details her awkward, emotional, and at times painful relationships with the two most important people in her life: her father and Baylor head coach Kim Mulkey. The greatest strength of In My Skin are the chapters in which Griner admits to battling depression and speaking with a therapist, which are mixed with humorous trivia about Griner’s affinity for bacon and berry-flavored vodka.
Griner’s violent style of play mirrors her writing style. Unlike in-state rival coach Texas A&M’s Gary Blair, Mulkey didn’t have to recruit Griner very hard in high school. But Griner might as well have played for another school, considering how she treats Mulkey in In My Skin, painting the women’s hoops legend as vain, two-faced, and more concerned with how donors view the program than with taking care of her players.
Recruiting in women’s college hoops is critical, even more so than in football or in men’s basketball, so to have the program’s greatest player put its matriarch on blast could have devastating consequences for the team’s future. Thus far, Baylor’s recruiting appears to be unscathed by Griner’s confessions, but you never know if rival schools will bring a copy of In My Skin with them on recruiting trips.
Griner’s constant headbutting with Mulkey raises the question of why she didn’t just transfer. That option is never mentioned in In My Skin, and the book suffers a bit from its absence. Players transfer from colleges all the time, albeit never the game’s best. So why didn’t Griner just pack her bags and move to a more tolerant campus, considering Mulkey’s lack of support and Baylor’s explicit rules against open homosexuality? She says she chose Baylor because of its proximity to her home in Houston, which was especially important when her mom was diagnosed with lupus her sophomore year. But Texas A&M is in fact closer to Houston than Waco is, and has a coach who actively courted Griner throughout her career and knows how to deploy her.
We might as well chalk up Griner’s emotionally tumultuous college career to bad timing. Baylor made the Final Four, Elite Eight, and Sweet Sixteen, and won the title in her four years, so it wasn’t like she was kicking a garbage team to the curb. It’s as Griner said when Mulkey warned that Griner’s tattoos would limit her sponsorship potential as a pro: All Brittney Griner cares about is basketball and winning, nothing else.
In My Skin is the rare athlete autobiography that reads like the athlete actually wrote the book. While a straight white bro who tackles his man when he tries to box out is not the book’s specific target demo, I found it interesting to read how Griner endured alienation, bullying, and discrimination, and yet found her calling in basketball. While not everyone will grow to be a 6’8 dynamo, it’s important to know, whoever you are, that someone blazed the trail before you and made it out O.K. No matter how many physical or emotional scars or tattoos she may have, Brittney Griner is much more than a girl who can dunk.