Brittney Griner says airport harassment was 'rock bottom' for WNBA's charter flight situation
Unsurprisingly, Brittney Griner didn't appreciate her preventable harassment at an airport earlier this month.
The Phoenix Mercury star addressed her experience at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport for the first time Monday, referring to the incident as "rock bottom" for the WNBA as it tries to address the players' demands for charter flights.
The comments came during a video call in which the Mercury were introducing interim head coach Nikki Blue after the firing of Vanessa Nygaard following a 2-10 start, via ESPN:
"'I'll say this. I think we should have already had the option to use a different airline, a more private airline, charter flights," Griner said, without specifying exactly what the Mercury are doing now. "It's a shame that it had to get to rock bottom, because I feel like waiting for something to happen and then making a change ... you don't know what that 'something's' gonna be. We've all seen what can happen in this world. And when you play the, 'Let's-wait-and-see-game' you're really playing with fire. You're playing with people's lives.
"So I'm glad that they finally got it together. And, you know, are gonna allow us to do this. It's just a shame that it took so damn long, honestly."
Griner was walking through a public concourse at the Dallas airport June 10 when a YouTuber walked up to her and started asking her a series of inappropriate questions, such as whether she had sex with Vladimir Putin to get out of prison. He was quickly pushed away by a Mercury security employee.
The entire WNBA world knew the potential for Griner to be harassed or worse if she was forced to fly public commercial airlines during her first season back from her 10-month imprisonment in Russia. Her getting harassed on only her second road trip quickly sparked a blame game involving the league.
The WNBA claimed it gave the Mercury permission to fly Griner, and only Griner, privately, while other reports indicated the league landed on a sort of hybrid plan in which Griner was only given initial approval for two charter flights.
The end result was the WNBA being reported as giving Griner explicit permission to fly privately. The league has also been expanding its teams' abilities to charter flights this season through a partnership with the company JSX, which offers customers the ability to buy seats on smaller charter planes for a limited number of flight routes.
