WNBA president talks about fining players over warmup shirts

Associated PressJul 23, 2016, 2:23 AM EDT

AP Photo

NEW YORK — WNBA President Lisa Borders applauds the league’s players for taking an active stance on social issues, she just wishes they would keep it off the court.

Borders spent the past two weeks talking with the union and its executive council, trying to come up with ways that both the league and its players could constructively address the Black Lives Matters movement. Nothing concrete was decided.

“We were making every effort to engage our players,” she told The Associated Press in a phone interview Friday night. “We made an effort to support them and we were trying to get them to come to the table to have a conversation. The players have an open invitation with the league. Our players are important to us. We believe in them. We want them to be the people they are and we’re proud of them. We want to make sure they play well on the court and they are happy off the court.”

Right now the players aren’t happy.

On social media and in post-game interviews, players are showing their solidarity after the league fined the Indiana Fever, New York Liberty and Phoenix Mercury players $500 each this week for wearing plain black warm-up shirts that violated the league’s uniform policy. The normal fine for a uniform violation is $200. Each team also was fined $5,000.

Washington Mystics players had shirts saying “Black Lives Matters” in the locker room after their game Friday night. Seattle Storm and Minnesota Lynx players tweeted out pictures of their teams wearing black T-shirts featuring a Martin Luther King Jr. quote before their game. They didn’t wear those shirts on the court to avoid getting fined.

“We’re sick and tired of waking up every morning and seeing something like this (shootings) happen,” Mystics player Ivory Latta said after her team played its final game before the Olympic break. “We need change and we have a platform to speak. Don’t tell us we have a platform and then you penalize us for our platform for speaking and showing our actions. That’s not right.”

Borders, who has been on the job for four months, disagreed with the notion that the league was suppressing its players’ voices in the wake of shootings by and against police officers.

“We want the players to know that we have supported them in the past, support them today and will continue to support them in the future,” she said. “We’re not trying to stop them from expressing themselves.”

The league just doesn’t want them to do it on the court if it violates the WNBA uniform rules. The shirts that the players were fined for wearing were the Adidas brand – the official outfitter of the league. WNBA rules state that uniforms may not be altered in any way.

“The Adidas black shirts are not regulation,” Borders said. “They are sponsor appropriate, but the Adidas plain black shirt would not be a regulation-issued shirt.”

The union felt it was unnecessary for the league to issue a memo this week reminding the players of the uniform policy. Because of that memo, the players and union weren’t surprised by the fine. They were just disappointed.

“This isn’t about a shirt, but that was the starting point,” new WNBAPA director of operations Terri Jackson told the AP. “The players want to blog about (Black Lives Matter), tweet about it, do videos. They want to raise visibility and keep the conversation going. They don’t want this to die out.”

Jackson said the union’s legal team is looking into what it can do about the fines, which she called excessive.

She said the union proposed letting the players have a limited time to express their opinions on the court.

“We talked about doing it pregame at the 10-minute mark or the 15-minute mark and they’d go back and put on their regulation warmup. Wear the regulation warmups for the national anthem and life goes on. That was declined by the league.”

While the league begins its monthlong break on Saturday, its top players will be playing in Rio at the Olympics. U.S. coach Geno Auriemma said he was proud of their social activism.

“I respect Tina (Charles) and the players in the WNBA for their concern and their voices and the passion that they have and for their beliefs. I really do,” he said, citing the Liberty star for wearing her warmup shirt inside-out on Thursday. “I’m really proud of some of my former players and the way they’ve stepped forward and spoken their conscience and express their feelings.”

The league was still undecided on whether Charles would be fined.

Auriemma wasn’t sure what the players could do at the Olympics to continue the discussion.

“As far as USA Basketball is concerned, you know, that’s a very delicate subject. Obviously each player has an opportunity to be who they want and say what they feel, but at the same time, you are representing the United States of America, and you are part of the Olympic team. So somewhere – it’s a delicate, I think, question, and I’m sure it’ll come up, and we’ll have to deal with it. Not me per se, but Carol (Callan) and the USA Basketball and the USOC, the Olympic committee.”

Both the league and the union hope there can be constructive conversations during the break. Borders said she’ll be in Rio for two weeks at the Olympics but will participate in the monthly conference call between the two groups on Aug. 1. She missed the one on July 11 when the shirts initially were discussed.

“I love this league and its players. I’d never do anything to harm the league, franchises or players,” Borders said. “I want them to understand we’re here to support them. We’ve hit a bump in a road. This too shall pass.”

In rare contact, U.S. offers Russia deal for Griner, Whelan

Associated PressJul 27, 2022, 6:16 PM EDT

Getty Images

WASHINGTON – The U.S. has offered a deal to Russia aimed at bringing home WNBA star Brittney Griner and another jailed American, Paul Whelan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday. In a sharp reversal of previous policy, Blinken also said he expects to speak with his Kremlin counterpart for the first time since before Russia invaded Ukraine to discuss the deal and other matters.

Blinken’s comments marked the first time the U.S. government has publicly revealed any concrete action it has taken to secure the release of Griner, who was arrested on drug-related charges at a Moscow airport in February and testified Wednesday at her trial. Though it is unclear if the proposal will be enough for Russia to release the Americans, the public acknowledgment of the offer at a time when the U.S. has otherwise shunned Russia reflects the mounting pressure on the administration over Griner and Whelan and its determination to get them home.

“We put a substantial proposal on the table weeks ago to facilitate their release. Our governments have communicated repeatedly and directly on that proposal, and I’ll use the conversation to follow up personally and, I hope, to move us toward a resolution,” Blinken said.

Blinken did not offer details on the proposed deal outlined to the Russians, but U.S. officials suggested it is similar to the prisoner swap that secured the release of Marine veteran Trevor Reed in April. Russia has made no secret of its desire for convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout to be freed from U.S. prison and the officials would not rule out that Bout’s release is on the table.

President Joe Biden, who authorized the Reed prisoner swap after meeting with his parents, signed off on the deal the U.S. offered in this case, officials said.

“The president and his team are willing to take extraordinary steps to bring them home,” John Kirby, a White House national security spokesman, told reporters.

Should the call with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov take place, it would be the first conversation that the men have held since Feb. 15, about a week before Russia invaded Ukraine. U.S. officials said the desire for an answer on the prisoner offer was the primary, but not only, reason that the U.S. on Wednesday requested a new call with Lavrov.

Blinken said he would also be speaking to Lavrov about the importance of Russia complying with a U.N.-brokered deal to free multiple tons of Ukrainian grain from storage and warning him about the dangers of possible Russian attempts to annex portions of eastern and southern Ukraine.

“There is utility to conveying clear, direct messages to the Russians on key priorities for us,” including the release of Griner and Whelan, he said. They also include “what we’re seeing and hearing around the world is a desperate need for the foods, the desperate need for prices to decrease.”

Whelan, a corporate security executive from Michigan, was sentenced in 2020 to 16 years in prison on espionage charges. He and his family have vigorously asserted his innocence. The U.S. government has denounced the charges as false.

Griner, in Russian custody for the last five months, acknowledged in court that she had vape cartridges containing cannabis oil in her luggage when she arrived in Moscow in February but contends she had no criminal intent and packed the cartridges inadvertently.

At her trial Wednesday, Griner said she did not know how the cannabis oil ended up in her bag but explained she had a doctor’s recommendation for it and had packed in haste. She said she was pulled aside at the airport after inspectors found the cartridges, but that a language interpreter translated only a fraction of what was said during her questioning and that officials instructed her to sign documents without providing an explanation.

Griner faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted of transporting drugs.

The U.S. government has long resisted prisoner swaps out of concern that it could encourage additional hostage-taking and promote false equivalency between a wrongfully detained American and a foreign national regarded as justly convicted. But an earlier deal in April, in which Reed was traded for jailed Russian pilot, Konstantin Yaroshenko, appeared to open the door to similar resolutions in the future and the Biden administration has been hounded with political pressure to bring home Griner and other Americans designated as unjustly detained.

Russia has for years expressed interest in the release of Bout, a Russian arms dealer once labeled the “Merchant of Death,” who was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2012 on charges that he schemed to illegally sell millions of dollars in weapons.

There was no indication that Blinken and Lavrov had communicated to secure Reed’s release. Their last publicly recognized contact was Feb. 22, when Blinken wrote to Lavrov to cancel a meeting they had planned as a last-ditch effort to avert the Russian invasion, saying Moscow had shown no interest in serious diplomacy on the matter. The State Department said later that Russia’s diplomacy was “Kabuki Theater” – all show and no substance.

The two last met in person in Geneva in January to discuss what was then Russia’s massive military build-up along Ukraine’s border and Russian demands for NATO to reduce its presence in eastern Europe and permanently deny Ukraine membership. The U.S. rejected the Russian demands.

Blinken and Lavrov avoided each other earlier this month at the next time they were in the same place at the same time: at a meeting of foreign ministers from the Group of 20 nations in Bali, Indonesia.

The two men will next be in the same city at the same time next week in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where they will both be attending the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Regional Forum. It was not immediately clear if the phone call ahead of that meeting, set for Aug. 4-5, would presage an in-person discussion.

LeBron critical on his show of US efforts to get Griner home

Associated PressJul 12, 2022, 8:36 PM EDT

Getty Images

LeBron James is publicly criticizing the United States’ handling of WNBA All-Star Brittney Griner’s case in a trailer for an upcoming episode of his television show: “The Shop: Uninterrupted.”

Griner is on trial in Russia for drug possession. She pleaded guilty last week and will appear again in court on Thursday.

“Now, how can she feel like America has her back?” James said in the trailer. “I would be feeling like, `Do I even wanna go back to America?”‘

It’s unclear when the show was filmed, although in the trailer it is mentioned that Griner had been in Russia for more than 110 days, which would have been nearly five weeks ago as she was detained on Feb. 17.

During the weeks since day 110, in addition to the trial beginning and the guilty plea, Griner’s wife Cherelle has had a phone conversation with President Joe Biden. Biden also received a letter from Brittney Griner on July 4 and sent a letter back to her which she was given in court last week.

There is also no mention of other detained Americans in the trailer.

Klutch Sports Group, the agency that represents James, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Washington hasn’t disclosed its strategy in the case and the U.S. may have little leverage with Moscow because of strong animosity over its actions in Ukraine. The State Department’s designation of Griner being wrongfully detained moves her case under the supervision of its special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, effectively the government’s chief hostage negotiator.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said Washington will continue to work for the release of Griner, as well as other Americans held by Moscow, including former Marine Paul Whelan.

“We will not relent until Brittney, Paul Whelan, and all other wrongfully detained Americans are reunited with their loved ones,” he tweeted last week,

National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said Monday that former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson had been in contact with the National Security Council, but wouldn’t comment on “his travel or what he intends to do” amid reports that Richardson plans to travel to Russia and work on Griner’s release.

James’ show will air on Friday.