Free In My Skin by Brittney Griner Page A

launch into a big long tangent here about the business of college sports, and the NCAA, and the hypocrisy and controversy around all of it, but that’s not really my battle. I have other issues and causes that are closer to my heart. Let’s just say I can’t even imagine what a circus my life would have been like if I hadn’t picked a college early on, if I had waited for other schools to roll out the red carpet and recruit me hard. No thank you.
    I will admit, though, I did enjoy the ego boost I got when the recruiting letters first started coming after ninth grade. I was reminded of that a few weeks into my rookie season in Phoenix. My mom called me one day when she was doing some spring cleaning and came across a box of recruiting letters I had saved. She asked me, “Do you still want these?” And I didn’t even hesitate. “Yes!” I said. “Do not throw away my letters!” I’m sure at some point I won’t care anymore, but right now I still see that box of letters as a reminder of how my life went in a different direction, and how I’m trying to make the most of this opportunity.

RAY FINDS OUT
    I love my dad so much. When I close my eyes, I can see myself as a little girl, following him everywhere. I wanted to be just like him. And I hold tight to the good memories now—us fixing cars together, watching military shows, me looking through an old trunk filled with his letters from Vietnam—because so much has changed between us. I know I can’t let myself forget how close we were. I can’t let myself forget that I was once a daddy’s girl. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to realize my father is not an easy man. Maybe the problem is we’re too much alike. It’s almost as if we’re the same puzzle piece, so nothing fits together; we’re just always clashing, bumping heads. He is an old-school tough-love disciplinarian, because that’s how he was raised.
    My dad had a rough upbringing. I mentioned earlier he was born in Texas. But to be more specific, he was born in Jasper, which was a tough town for blacks in the 1950s and 1960s and still has a lot of racial tension today. (One of the most infamous hate crimes in U.S. history happened there, in 1998, when James Byrd Jr., an African American, was chained to a pickup truck by three white men and dragged to his death.) My dad spent the first few years of his life in Jasper, but his mother died when he was real young, from some kind of heart issue, and he was raised by extended family before getting sent off to California in middle school, because he didn’t really like his father’s second wife. He lived with his aunt and uncle in the Watts section of Los Angeles, and his uncle made him stay in the house or yard all the time, especially after the Watts riots in 1965. My dad was a teenager by then, but whenever he asked if he could go play with friends or walk to the corner store, his uncle would say, “Hell, no. You’re staying in the house.” He couldn’t go anywhere.
    Sound familiar?
    When I was a kid, my dad still had a lot of family near Jasper, and sometimes I would tag along when he’d visit one of his aunts, who lived in the same house he had once lived in. We’d cut the grass and do some chores, and I loved going up there and exploring. The property had two houses and a barn, but I couldn’t go into the house in back, his grandparents’ old place, because it was all boarded up. (Dad didn’t go near it because he thought there might be snakes.) I would look at that house and sigh. He made it seem like it was filled with treasures: photos, pictures, all kinds of good stuff I wanted to get. But I’ll never know, because we usually just cut the grass and drove home. And once Dad’s aunt died, we stopped going altogether.
    I know it was hard for him, moving from Texas to California as a kid, growing up in a place that