Brittney Griner made her return to the WNBA court on Friday after spending ten months or nearly three hundred days in a brutal Russian prison. The two-time Olympic gold medalist received a standing ovation when she returned to her hometown team, the Phoenix Mercury, as more than fourteen thousand fans showed up to see her return to the game, nearly doubling the average attendance from last year.
Harris wrote along with the video, “Brittney Griner’s return to the court is an inspiration to our nation – and is a testament to her strength and courage.”
Fans noticed that Griner did something during the game that she had not done in years. She stood for the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner after sitting it out for several seasons in a row. Less than three years ago, Griner said that her days of saluting America were done. However, the nine-year sentence she received on Russian soil was enough to make her rethink her allegiance to the United States since Russia is such a horrible place to be imprisoned.
Griner decided to sit out the national anthem in response to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. She was also moved to action by the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in Minneapolis and Louisville, respectively.
Although Griner would stay in the locker room when the national anthem was played, she made it clear that she did not want to show “any disrespect to our country.” She also insisted that she does “have pride for my country,” which was one of the reasons she represented the United States during the Olympic Games.
Now that she is free and back on American soil, the anthem means more to Britney Griner.
“What I went through and everything, it just means a little bit more to me now. So, I want to be able to stand. I was literally in a cage [in Russia] and could not stand the way I wanted to,” she told ESPN. “Just being able to hear my national anthem, see my flag, I definitely want to stand. Now everybody that will not stand or not come out, I totally support them 100 percent. That’s our right, as an American in this great country.”