Brittney Griner is easy to pick out from a crowd. In a public space – let’s say, walking to her commercial flight – she’s the one at 6 feet, 9 inches, towering over almost every average-sized adult in a busy terminal, including the man assigned as her security.

She also has a recognizable face. Again, for kicks and giggles, let’s pretend she’s so distinguishable that maybe an idiot would be able to find her, follow her around and spew incendiary nonsense her way – all because her image has been plastered throughout right-wing media for the last year and a half.

Griner’s size, the infamy attached to her detainment in Russia, and the subsequent high-profile prisoner swap made between the White House and the Kremlin have made her a target. But by taking a confusing and inadequate step, the WNBA allowed open season on the very player it needed to protect.

Griner, the Phoenix Mercury center, isn’t controversial sometimes. Her life – as a Black woman, a queer woman, a woman aided by a Democratic administration, and also a woman who once dared to protest police brutality in this country by not standing on the court during the playing of the national anthem – is a constant affront to those who hate her. Her critics don’t even take Saturdays off. As proved last weekend when a spiteful man with a warped sense of patriotism pulled out his phone and tried his best to denigrate Griner as she walked through Terminal A of the Dallas/Fort Worth International airport. And why exactly was Griner so accessible in the fourth-busiest airport in America? Because her league said it would protect her all the way – but only to an extent.

After Griner was freed from a Russian prison in a prisoner swap involving Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, she decided to get on with her life and return to basketball, a complicated matter, because how do you safeguard a basketball player who’s become a lightning rod in this contentious political climate?

The WNBA does not permit its teams to fly charter flights all the time, citing financial reasons. Before this season, however, the league expanded its limited charter policy to include all of the postseason and longer flights for select back-to-back regular season games, an approximate $4.5 million expense shouldered strictly by the WNBA. (The league had already allowed teams to fly charter for the in-season Commissioner’s Cup and during the finals.) Additionally, the league told the Mercury to make any travel arrangements, including charter flights, that it felt were necessary for Griner – and for Griner alone.

Following the incident last Saturday, the WNBA released a statement: “Given her special situation, the WNBA approved charter flights for BG for the 2023 season. We informed the Phoenix Mercury earlier this year to move ahead with any arrangements they felt were appropriate and needed including charter flights.”

But if Griner had been approved to fly a private charter, then what happened on Saturday? When I asked a league spokesperson why Griner was walking through DFW, I was directed to seek those details with the Mercury. Welp. About that:

“League rules mandate that I can’t speak about travel, but I can speak about safety,” Mercury Coach Vanessa Nygaard told reporters in Indianapolis on Sunday. “We will be making adjustments that maybe should’ve happened before, but right now we’re going to prioritize the safety of our players, and we’ve seen that our organization has supported us.”

The league’s statement, intentional or not, threw the Mercury under the charter bus. But this shouldn’t be the Mercury’s fault, according to Lindsay Kagawa Colas, Griner’s agent. Colas told the Wall Street Journal the airport incident spawned from a “league plan that included a mix of charter and a select number of commercial flights with security protocols that failed.”

Neither should this be on Griner: She had been approved for charter flights, while the rest of the Mercury were not. Wouldn’t someone who had been locked away for 10 months want to rebuild connection and camaraderie with her teammates and not be alone on an empty plane?

There’s context to the charter conundrum: More than a quarter-century into its existence, the WNBA still lacks the gobs of money from media rights deals that the top four American leagues possess. (MLS played its first game in 1996, but its teams do not exclusively fly charter, either.) The WNBA views chartered flights as a competitive advantage issue, because some owners are willing to pay, while others don’t want the cost burden. In 2021, the New York Liberty booked charter flights for the second half of the season. The rogue act cost the franchise a whopping $500,000 fine for violating league rules. And this year, the reigning champion Las Vegas Aces tried to work within league rules while booking all travel with JetSuiteX, a public charter carrier.

According to a person familiar with the team’s plan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the arrangement, the Aces worked with JSX to make public accessible routes that just so happened to coincide precisely with their road schedule. The Dallas-based airline did so, creating limited available “pop up” routes for anyone to book, but the creative plan allowed the Aces to have semiprivate travel without waiting in long security lines and wandering around airports. (JSX offers private terminals and planeside baggage pickup, unlike American, Delta or Southwest.)

The Aces had booked a JSX route from Vegas to Atlanta to Indianapolis to Hartford, Connecticut, for a recent three-game trip, but the league told the Aces to cancel the June 4 flight from Indy to Bradley International Airport at the last minute, forcing the team to scramble to find middle seats on another airline, according to the person familiar with the ordeal. An Aces spokesperson did not return messages, and a media representative with JetSuiteX declined to comment. Asked whether the WNBA forced the Aces to cancel the June 4 flight, and if so why, a league spokesperson responded: “The WNBA approved that all teams can book JSX flights with certain protocols in place. Since this is a new program this year, we had to address a few matters with teams earlier in the season.”

And one more thing: Terri Jackson, the executive director of the WNBA Players Association, had an ambitious idea for the entire league to fly charter, but it never took off.

Jackson’s son, Jaren, plays for the Memphis Grizzlies, and a few years ago, when noticing the fines the league had levied against NBA players – which go to charities – Terri Jackson proposed that some of that money be earmarked for the W. If in a season the NBA collected $5 million in fines, what about repurposing $1 million of that amount to fund a pot for WNBA charters and reimbursement for mental health services? (Players’ insurance does not always cover therapy.) According to Terri Jackson, she had conversations with several players within leadership ahead of the NBA and NBPA’s recent negotiations for the new collective bargaining agreement. She said the players expressed enthusiasm for the idea – the NBPA has already helped financially support the WNBA Players Association – and felt that further investing in their sisters would be a worthy enterprise. It was never formally brought to the table, according to a person with knowledge of the discussion. Eventually, the WNBA shot down the proposal and the NBPA moved on.

“The league said we don’t want to look like charity,” Jackson told me.

“The league has said when players were posting on their social media or talking in interviews about the issues that they face when traveling, they’ve been told that that’s bad for the brand,” Jackson continued. “And when in reality, the league and some teams – because I don’t believe it’s all teams . . . their refusal to adopt policies, their refusal to adopt these reasonable and flexible rules in favor of player health and safety, that is what is damaging the brand.”

By vocalizing their reality, the players aren’t burning down their own house. They’re putting public pressure on team owners to work harder, with more creativity, to find a travel solution. And putting Griner alone on a charter plane was a nonsensical, wasteful solution, so that certain owners wouldn’t cry over the Mercury’s so-called competitive advantage.

We no longer need to come up with hypothetical situations about what could happen when the WNBA’s most controversial player is exposed in an unwelcome space. Outside of the fans in the arena who love her, everywhere Griner goes, she is a target. She needed her league to protect her and her mental state, not the priorities of stingy multimillionaires.

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