PHOENIX — Sarah Douida traveled more than 5,000 miles from Paris with her partner to sit in the rafters at Footprint Center and watch Brittney Griner’s 2023 home debut in person. During warmups, they sit a few rows up from the court and marvel at the Phoenix Mercury center each time she comes around. Doudia is so excited, she forgets her own age. Lea Sourribes, her girlfriend of five years, can only laugh at the mind melt.
“In the WNBA there [are] a lot of queer symbols that we don’t have in France,” Sourribes told Yahoo Sports. “So it’s really important. They’re like a model for us [that] we don’t really have.”
Douida, 31, and Sourribes, 24, were among the hundreds, even thousands, of people in the arena on Sunday afternoon for something bigger than watching a historically successful team’s home opener. Even bigger than watching the talented post go to work in a way only she can. Griner’s safe return to the United States in a prisoner swap after being declared by the U.S. government as wrongfully detained in Russia for nearly 10 months is bigger than the elevated status American society bestows on professional athletes.
For many, it’s about symbolism. What she signifies to them personally before her detainment was made public in March 2022 and what she stands for now as a prisoner freed. Fans who traveled to Phoenix told Yahoo Sports they wanted to make the trip because of what Griner meant to them as gay women, Black Americans and as fans of a sport treated as less-than most of its existence.
Griner, who at 6-foot-9 with characteristic dreadlocks can rarely blend in, has always been a symbol. Ahead of going No. 1 in the 2013 WNBA Draft, Griner became one for the LGBTQ+ community when she publicly and casually said she was gay, something then still controversial in sports and before the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in 2015. In her decade-long career, every time she dominates the glass or dunks, she’s a symbol of the success and power of women’s basketball, making bad faith arguments against it more difficult for naysayers.
