In new book, Brittney Griner slams Kim Mulkey, details ‘all the pain I felt’ being gay at Baylor.
Baylor coach Kim Mulkey, right, and Brittney Griner discuss dunking, during a news conference in Des Moines, Iowa, Sunday, March 25, 2012, the day before the team’s NCAA women’s college basketball tournament regional final against Tennessee.(Nati Harnik – AP)
USA Today got a hold of a couple of paragraphs of her book, which can be read below.
‘I would love to be an ambassador for Baylor, to show my school pride, but it’s hard to do that – it’s hard to stand up and say, ‘Baylor is the best!’ – when the administration has a written policy against homosexuality. I’ve spent too much of my life being made to feel like there’s something wrong with me. And not matter how much support I felt as a basketball player at Baylor, it still doesn’t erase all the pain I felt there.’
“Cracks existed beneath the surface. And the game against Louisville, with the pressure cranked up, blew those cracks wide open, she wrote. ‘I didn’t deliver the way I usually did, and Kim got outcoached. We both underperformed. We had created something magical for almost four years, and that night we watched, almost helplessly at times, as it melted away. We were left staring at all our warts and flaws, all the things about each other that drove us crazy. And we didn’t have a national championship, the piece of shiny jewelry, to distract us from that reality.’
The tension between Griner and Baylor increased tenfold after Sports Illustrated ran an article citing Griner saying that Mulkey told her to keep her sexuality quiet so Baylor’s recruiting wouldn’t be hurt from any potential public backlash.
As mentioned in her book, Baylor has a section in it’s student handbook regarding homosexuality.
‘Temptations to deviate from this norm include both heterosexual sex outside of marriage and homosexual behavior,’ the handbook reads. ‘It is thus expected that Baylor students will not participate in advocacy groups which promote understandings of sexuality that are contrary to biblical teaching.’
Griner then told ESPN The Mag that Mulkey knew about her sexual orientation, which further muddied the waters while distancing the coach and former college superstar.
‘I told Coach [Mulkey] when she was recruiting me. I was like, ‘I’m gay. I hope that’s not a problem,’ and she told me that it wasn’t,’ Griner said to ESPN The Mag last May. ‘I mean, my teammates knew, obviously they all knew. Everybody knew about it.’
After the Griner interviews surfaced, former Baylor players came to Mulkey’s aid defending their former head coach.
Jhasmin Player told SB Nation at the time that after she read the Griner interviews, she became angry.
”…My anger and frustration has turned into down right… pain. Pain knowing a woman who has done nothing but try her hardest to love and protect her ‘cubs’ from the media, from the public, from the fans, from the lovers, from the haters, and to end up being hurt by the accusations by a former player.’
