In My Skin (15 page)

BY THE TIME BASKETBALL SEASON
started, our team was locked in. It was scary how good we were right from the beginning. Kim always schedules tough nonconference teams, so we had a chance to test ourselves early on. We beat Notre Dame and Tennessee in November, then Connecticut in December. And when the Big 12 season got going in January, we were rolling through teams, blowing them out by 30 points a game. We had a close game at Texas Tech in mid-January, when we won 72-64, and then we crushed our next eight opponents. It was during that stretch when we started saying to each other, “Damn, we could go undefeated in conference.” That is a hard thing to do in a league as strong as the Big 12, which is known for hard-nosed defense, low-scoring games, and loud crowds. The Big 12 always leads the nation in attendance for women's basketball. Fans come out to support their schools, especially against us, and we were going into opposing arenas and making good teams look bad.

Our goal entering the season was to win the national championship. We had four starters returning, and we were No. 1 in the preseason polls. So we were focused on going undefeated when it mattered most, in the NCAA tournament. Win six games, and you win it all. But we were so dominant in the Big 12, we started talking about it among ourselves, that maybe we could run the table and go 40-0, something no team had ever done in college basketball. A few other schools had gone undefeated in the past—Texas, Tennessee, and Connecticut—but no team had won 40 games in a season. When reporters asked us about it, we deflected the questions and said the usual things about wanting to win the Big 12 title, the Big 12 tourney, and the NCAA championship. In private, though, the idea of going undefeated gave us extra motivation as we got deeper into the season.

You could see it with the coaches, too. They tried to crack down on us more. Kim was all about us being a unit. She wanted us wearing the same color shoes, the same color socks, the same practice outfits. She was really anal about it and kept telling us, “I'm not letting anything go this season. I relaxed on y'all last season, but we're going to do this right. Everybody is going to buy into it.” We would laugh about some of that stuff as players. I mean, why does it matter if I have on white socks and someone else has on black socks? Most of us were thinking,
Okay, Kim, whatever you say
. But one thing we could all agree on, coaches and players alike, was that we had unfinished business. That was our motto all season. We even made a video that we played on the big screen in the Ferrell Center before our home games. In the video, Kim is talking to us in the locker room, preaching about the dedication and hard work that goes into winning a national championship, reminding us of how we felt when we came up short the previous season. We knew we were more talented than most teams; what clicked for us was how much better we could be as a team if we each took care of our own business.

You could really see it that season with Odyssey Sims, our sophomore point guard. My recruiting class had been the best in the country when we showed up at Baylor, but like anybody making the transition from high school to college, we all had a lot to learn. And Odyssey was no different when she joined our team the following year. She brought a lot of effort and intensity to our games, but practice was a different story. She had mental lapses, some issues with how she handled criticism from the coaches, just like I did as a freshman. It's an adjustment when you're used to having a lot of success doing things a certain way as a player, and then you find yourself constantly being scrutinized and called out by a big-time college coach who says, “You will do it my way now.” I imagine that was especially tricky for Odyssey—aka “O”—because she played the same position Kim did in college. They're both feisty, strong-willed point guards who like to run the show. But we could see things click better for O her sophomore season. She was executing at a higher level on offense, which made her even more focused on defense. You hear people say about football players, “He has a nose for the ball.” Well, O has a whole face for the ball. You won't find too many players who work harder on defense than she does. A lot of what we were able to accomplish defensively started with her, because she set the tone up top, pressuring the opposing point guard full court, making it harder for the other team to set up its offense and get the ball to the wings. And obviously they had to deal with me in the middle. As much as O loves stealing the ball, I love blocking shots. That's a good combination right there.

Coaches are always looking for different ways to motivate players. When a team is struggling, you have to push one set of buttons, to help the players get some confidence back. When a team is steamrolling everybody, you have to push a different set of buttons, to keep the players from being overconfident. There's no question Kim pushed a lot of the right buttons with our team that season. But she didn't always push the right buttons with me. Or maybe the way she went about it reminded me too much of my father. I just know that the push-pull with me and Kim started to get under my skin more during my junior year. And when I think about our run through the NCAA tournament, the game that stands out the most is the one against Tennessee in the Elite Eight, because Kim and I had one of those button-pushing moments.

Most people remember that matchup as Pat Summitt's last game. She had announced going into the season that she'd been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, so everyone was wondering if the NCAA tourney was her last run as Tennessee's coach. At the time, of course, we weren't thinking about that as players; all that mattered was that Tennessee stood between us and a trip to the Final Four. And from what I know about Coach Summitt, she wouldn't have wanted us looking at it any other way, because her teams always competed hard. They were known for their defensive intensity, and that's how we'd been winning all season—-just shutting people down.

Women's basketball fans probably remember something else about that game: I got tossed out. It happened toward the end, when the outcome had already been decided. (We won 77-58.) I was on the bench with Jordan Madden and Terran Condrey, one of our seniors, and there was a little altercation out on the court. Odyssey got tangled up with one of Tennessee's players, and she landed on the floor in a vulnerable spot. The two of them started jawing at each other, so we walked onto the court—-Jordan and Terran and me—to keep O from getting into any trouble. It's not like we ran out there looking to fight. When you watch the replay, you can see us hesitate a little; we were just trying to make sure everybody kept their cool. But the NCAA has a rule against leaving the bench, so the three of us got ejected. And Kim was so livid. Right before we got tossed, the refs were looking at the replay, to make sure they got everything right, and Kim went off on us. She was throwing her hands in the air, yelling at us: “That's the stupidest thing y'all did! You're probably done now! They're not gonna let you play the next game!”

That pissed me off. I know she was worried we might get suspended for the next game, at the Final Four, but it was clear we were trying to keep the peace, and the refs could see that on the monitor. They did everything by the book. (Well, except they somehow missed that two Tennessee players had also left the bench.) We didn't get suspended because none of us went out there fighting. But the refs had to eject us for leaving the bench, which meant we had to walk to the locker room and wait for the game to end before we could come back out on the floor to cut down the nets and celebrate advancing to the Final Four. As you might imagine, that put a damper on things for me. It's not like I could just run back out on the court and be all happy. And Kim knew it. I was standing there at one point, several feet away from her, while everyone else was whooping it up, and she looked at me and pointed to her cheeks, signaling for me to smile. I just turned my head away from her.

When we all got back to the locker room, she came up to me and said, “You know I had to do that.” She told me she had to yell at us on the court to prove a point. She was always doing that, getting on me in front of everybody and saying, “This team is bigger than Brittney Griner.” But then in private, she would tell me, “I'm not really mad at you, Big Girl. You know how much we need you.” Um, okay. Then what is the point of that exactly? It was all for show? Sometimes I would get in trouble for passing the ball too much. Kim made such a big deal about running the offense through me—and sure, I know my height caused a lot of problems for teams. But I didn't want anybody thinking I had to have the ball all the time for us to win. And I certainly didn't need to be reminded that the team was bigger than me. We were all pieces that fit together. So why call me out in front of my teammates if you're just going to take me aside afterward and downplay the whole thing? Kim has a lot of qualities that I respect, but I can't stand all that business about putting on a public front. I would understand if she got mad at me for something and stayed mad. That happened, no doubt. It was the mixed messages that made it hard for me to know where she was coming from sometimes.

Maybe that had something to do with everything that was happening off the court. Maybe she worried more about my mind-set than I thought she did. I really don't know. During a big media session at the Final Four in Denver, the day before we played Notre Dame for the national championship, a reporter asked Kim about all the awful things people said about me on social media and the taunts I heard when we played on the road. It was an interesting moment, for a few different reasons. Up until that point, there hadn't been much public acknowledgment of all the trolling, all the ugly comments. People are always attacking women's sports, especially women's basketball, calling us inferior, comparing us to men, trying to knock us down—all the sexist garbage that women face every day in society. I learned in college that you can't dwell on it, because the stronger we get, the more threatening we are to those small-minded people. But sometimes it feels like people within women's sports don't want to talk about it in public. They just want to put a happy, smiley face on everything
(look how far we've come!)
, as if ignoring the sexism and the racism and the homophobia will somehow make it less of a problem. The more that I was in the spotlight, the harder it became for people involved in women's hoops—players, coaches, fans, media—to pretend that this dark cloud didn't exist. And to Kim's credit, she didn't sidestep it that day. You could hear the passion in her voice when she answered that question and defended me. She was Kim the protective mom, reminding everyone that I'm a real person with real feelings. She said, “This child is as precious as they come,” and that she loved going to work and seeing my face, because I made her happy.

That last part made me laugh a little, because there were plenty of days I did not make Kim happy, and vice versa. We both have a flair for the dramatic, which is another reason I remember that media session in Denver. Don't get me wrong: I believe Kim meant what she said on that podium. It wasn't just for show. But at the same time, it reminded me of all that was left unsaid. We could acknowledge, in a general way, that people were questioning my gender, calling me a freak, a man, a female imposter. And yet I couldn't talk about being gay. Most of the time, I was on autopilot with the media, because I couldn't really show who I was off the court, not the whole picture. The way I was often portrayed—just a big, fun-loving, goofy kid—felt like a two-dimensional version of the real me.

When we beat Notre Dame to win the title, I celebrated by making “snow angels” in the confetti on the court. There was so much paper, I couldn't resist dropping down like a kid in the snow. That was pure joy right there, but also a huge release. For one thing, the previous forty-eight hours had been draining, both mentally and physically. You don't necessarily feel that way when it's all happening, but it hits you afterward. I'll admit, during the first half of our semifinal game against Stanford, I was worried we might lose. We were sluggish and out of sync, and they played great defense the whole game, especially on me and Odyssey. Thank God for Terran Condrey, who gave us a huge spark off the bench. She made some big shots early in the second half, and really showed what kind of depth we had as a team. That game was a grind. And as soon as we won, our attention shifted to Notre Dame. Even though we had faced them early in the season, I acted like I knew nothing about their players and needed to watch as much video of them as I could. I felt like I was cramming for an exam, and that DVD was my textbook. I studied their big girl, Devereaux Peters, so much that I saw her in my sleep. She was a high-energy player, just really active around the basket, so I knew I needed to box her out and try to get her in foul trouble (which I did). I also studied Skylar Diggins, their point guard. She was maybe the only guard in college who could get a floater off over me. She had figured it out in previous games—releasing the ball very quick—so I had to change my footwork and take an extra step to go up and try to block or alter her shot. At one point, I was sitting in my room watching clips, and I texted Odyssey and said, “Hey, we gotta get this thing done.” She wrote back, “We gonna get it. We gonna get it.”

And we did. We pulled away in the second half and won big over Notre Dame. On a personal level, it was special because that was the first real championship I had ever won—not just a conference title, but the first time I had finished a season with a win. Also, I already had been named national Player of the Year that season, so lifting a championship trophy made all the individual awards so much more special. Most of all, winning the national title meant we had accomplished what we had set out to do as a team, and what my class had talked about doing when we all committed to Baylor. We finished our business. And for all the doubts I had earlier in my college career, all the frustration and emotional struggles, I never stopped wanting to bring a championship to Waco, because the campus and the community always supported our team. We also knew how much it meant to Kim, to get that second ring. A lot of people were surprised when Baylor won the national championship in 2005, but everyone expected us to win this time around. And even though we turned that pressure into fuel, it still took its toll. Kim was diagnosed with Bell's palsy the week before the Final Four. Her facial nerves were messed up. One side of her face was droopy (she couldn't smile), her hearing was bothering her, and her eyes were really sensitive. She had to wear sunglasses during some of her interviews, which made her look like a celebrity recluse. She joked about it with the media, but it was a visible reminder for everybody, the stress on her face.