The Washington Post put the issue of lesbian domestic violence front and center on the front of Sunday’s sports section. Or did they? The story was on WNBA (women’s pro basketball) star Brittany Griner and her “spouse” Glory Johnson, also a WNBA player...but the violence was buried under praise for Griner's "gentle giant" character.
This story is more than a month old...and this is the first time it made the paper edition of the Post. Pro sports star beats fiancee, then marries her. Remember when it was NFL player Ray Rice? That was a massive story. This has been remarkably close to nothing.
Last fall, NFL domestic-abuse scandals spurred 171 news stories in just six weeks on ABC, CBS, and NBC. Griner and Johnson were suspended seven games by the WNBA for this fight. Network coverage? Zero, for both the orginal fight and arrest, and for the league penalty. Also missing in action: CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, NPR, and PBS.
While the Post and The New York Times have reported a little, USA Today – quite a progressive sports section – mostly avoided the LGBT narrative-ruining story. On May 5, they ran....a tweet:
"I'M SURE SHE'S GOT SOME ISSUES THAT SHE WANTS TO FIX. UNFORTUNATELY THEY'VE ALL BEEN MADE PUBLIC. I WOULD SAY IT'S NOT EASY BEING BRITTNEY GRINER."
--Coach Geno Auriemma, on Griner skipping the U.S. women's national basketball training camp. Griner has entered a diversion program after her arrest last month on suspicion of assault after a fight with fiancée Glory Johnson.
The Los Angeles Times ran a 64-word brief on page D-9 at the arrest, and 27-word sentence on page D-6 at the suspension.
Last month, the Post published a blog by Justin Moyer with this headline: “Brittney Griner, Glory Johnson and the WNBA's domestic violence problem; ‘Intimate partner violence among LGBT couples is also a huge problem that gets considerably less attention,’ according to a WNBA-watcher.”
No kidding. Moyer listed several other WNBA players with domestic-violence story lines. Cindy Boren’s first blog for the Post before that offered some details that were missing in the new Sunday story:
Police reports indicate that Johnson’s sister called Goodyear police Wednesday afternoon to report that Johnson and Griner were “in the living room throwing things at each other.”
When police arrived at the home on 133rd Drive, Johnson’s sister, Judy, told officers she was at a loss for what to do because of the way the two were fighting, so she called police.
“We couldn’t get them pulled apart,” Judy Johnson said, according to a police report.
Griner told officers that she and Johnson were having relationship issues and that they had just purchased their first home together.
Griner suffered minor injuries to her hand, wrist and fingers, including a “tooth mark” on her hand. Johnson suffered lacerations to her lip, and a man who was in the house and tried to break up the fight also suffered minor injuries.
Get a load of how Chuck Culpepper’s Sunday story worked hard to boost the accused abuser. The sympathetic (and plainly inaccurate) title was “Tough, But No Fighter”:
An authentic American athlete has a fresh blotch on her bio, so it might help that she also has uncommonly sturdy innards. It might help that Brittney Griner had the guts to confirm her homosexuality to a student who asked . . . at the dawn of ninth grade.
It can't hurt that the former assistant coach at Baylor, Damion McKinney, found it "amazing to me how she could take being mocked," and said, "I've never seen a kid who could handle things like people holding up [unkind] signs, the way she could."
It surely helps that her keen sense of self dates back to a girlhood in which she would slide blithely under the car to help her father repair it, cut the hair off her Barbies and then paint them black and green, study military shows with her Vietnam-veteran dad, dream of following him into the police, even stand up to him when life asked for that. Even the professor who helped the WNBA parse her recent domestic-fight case deems her "a very, very brave, brave, brave person."
The specifics from the violence were not listed:
While she has fought only episodically and draws raves for her gentility, her two fights in six years of national fame have circulated publicly. Even at a mere 24, maybe only this 6-foot-8 star of the WNBA champion Phoenix Mercury could navigate a 16-day stretch of both absurd police photos and exhilarated wedding photos, then emerge with some Hemingway. On April 22, she scrapped in a brand-new Phoenix-area house with her fiancee, Glory Johnson of the WNBA's Tulsa Shock, causing mutual minor injuries, the arrest of both players and the ensuing Griner apology with its five strong words: "It will not happen again."
On May 8 in Phoenix, she and Johnson, 24, wed. On May 10, Griner tweeted a wedding photo with the Ernest Hemingway quote, "The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places."
The breaking in April led to something beyond the seven-game suspension the WNBA levied and something beyond the 26 weeks of counseling Griner must undergo to erase the charges. It led to more than the Mercury starting the 34-game season Friday without the force who alters the ecosystem of the court. And it led to still more than the added curiosity slated for July 2, when Phoenix will play Tulsa at home, spouse's team vs. spouse's team, a dynamic on which Griner elaborates rather humorously.
No, the Johnson-Griner fight also lent some light to an issue long invisible to the general public: same-sex domestic violence.
At least Culpepper arrived at the obvious point: this brand of domestic violence hurts the “progressive” cause, so the liberal media aren’t very happy to touch it. Sociology professor Valli Kalei Kanuha elaborated:
"In a funny way, I think the acceptance of same-sex marriage as a public-policy matter and a civil right, in a way, what it's put forward is, 'We're just as normal as heterosexual people are, and we have a right to marry as heterosexual people do,' and in a really weird way, I think it has suppressed dialogue on the issue at the same time it's brought it to light.
"You don't want to air your dirty laundry in a situation where you're moving ahead."
But most of Culpepper’s story oozed sympathy for Griner:
In a broader sense, peace has marked her landscape. The "gentle giant" theme got such a run during her Baylor years that, with characteristic frankness of her book, she contended it had grown too simplistic.
"She's very helping," guard Tiffany Bias said. "Just a big teddy bear, pretty much. It doesn't matter your playing time, she just cares. Like if you're sick or if you're doing well on the court, off the court, if you just need to go eat somewhere. . . . She's just one of those people who genuinely cares about you, no matter what."
Having coached her in AAU and at Baylor, McKinney calls her "the greatest teammate I've ever coached," a person with "a natural instinct to know what her teammates need, and that goes from the first person to the 15th." He said, "It bothered Brittney when people around her weren't happy."
Her high school coach at Nimitz in Houston, Debbie Jackson, said, "She always thought everybody on the team was important and everybody contributed something important in some way."
The inside headline on this propaganda piece was "Griner called 'a teddy bear'." If you had a teddy bear that was 6-foot-8 in size 17 shoes, that might defeat the marshmallow metaphor.
