Column: Brittney Griner has trade value a teacher does not

The American arrived at Sheremetyevo airport outside Moscow and was arrested after a luggage search found vape cartridges containing cannabis oil that was prescribed by a U.S. doctor to treat chronic pain. There were various detention facilities, a guilty plea, a hearing in front of Russian judge and an implausibly long prison sentence.

We’re not talking about basketball player Brittney Griner.

We’re talking about Marc Fogel, a 61-year-old history teacher at the Anglo-American School in Moscow that was created by the U.S., Canadian and British embassies to teach the children of diplomats stationed there. Among his students was the son of a former U.S. ambassador to Russia.

Fogel was returning for the school year last August when drug-sniffing dogs at Sheremetyevo sensed something in his luggage. He had spinal and shoulder surgeries, plus a knee replacement, and marijuana was prescribed as an alternative to addictive opioids. The Russian judge wasn’t buying it, sentencing him to 14 years of hard labor for “large scale drugs smuggling” they claimed he intended to distribute to his students.

That was June. Last week, Griner was sentenced to nine years, six months in a penal colony after being convicted of carrying vape cartridges in her luggage with less than a gram of cannabis oil, although a smaller amount than Fogel, who had about 20 grams.

There’s another difference between the cases. The United States is offering a prison swap to secure her release.

Fogel is not part of it.

If anything, in a backhanded sort of way, the Griner ordeal illustrates how far women’s sports have come in the United States, how far their profile has been elevated — offering to trade a Russian arms dealer who is nicknamed the “Merchant of Death” and is serving a 25-year sentence for a Black, openly gay, women’s basketball player who admitted transporting marijuana into a country that strictly forbids it.

Does that happen 20 or 30 years ago?

Now Griner is immediately classified as “wrongfully detained” by a foreign government, which shifts her case to the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs. Now the national security adviser, secretary of state and vice president are calling Griner’s spouse, Cherelle. Now President Joe Biden is calling, too, promising to pursue “every avenue to bring Brittney home.”

Fogel’s wife says she has yet to hear from anyone other than what she describes as mid-level State Department officials.

“That hurt,” Fogel wrote in a letter to his family, according to The Washington Post, after learning he wasn’t part of the proposed prisoner swap. “Teachers are at least as important as bballers.”

Or are they? Maybe Vladimir Putin knows America better than we do.

The 6-foot-9 Griner is the only NCAA women’s player to finish her college career with 2,000 points and 500 blocks, and she’s part of an exclusive club that has won NCAA and WNBA titles plus an Olympic gold medal. She is the first openly gay athlete to sign an endorsement deal with Nike.

The proposed trade: Griner and former Marine Paul Whelan for Viktor Bout.

The notorious arms dealer was arrested in Thailand in 2008, extradited to the United States and sentenced to 25 years after trying to sell antiaircraft weapons to undercover DEA agents posing as Colombian rebels who wanted to shoot down U.S. military helicopter pilots, to which Bout reportedly responded, “We have the same enemy.” He also is accused of selling arms on the black market to al-Qaeda, the Taliban and paramilitary groups across Africa.

Russia is said to have countered by demanding any deal include Vadim Krasikov, who is serving life in prison in Germany after murdering a former Chechen fighter in a public park in Berlin. German authorities said it was a planned assassination facilitated by the Russian government (Krasikov was issued a fake passport).

Whelan, who also holds Canadian, British and Irish passports, was arrested in Moscow in 2018 on espionage charges after allegedly receiving a USB drive with classified material from a Russian citizen. He was sentenced to 16 years in 2020 and talk of including him in a prison swap didn’t accelerate until Griner was detained at Sheremetyevo airport in February, just weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

But as much as the widespread media coverage and intense pressure on Biden to return a basketball player reflects the rise in popularity of U.S. women’s sports, it also illustrates how far they have to go.

Why was a 6-9 star basketball player traveling to Russia in the first place? Because she makes $221,515 per year with the Phoenix Mercury — the league’s max salary is $228,000 — and was paid $1 million (plus use of a luxury apartment and other amenities) by Russia’s UMMC Ekaterinburg during the WNBA offseason.

Griner, like dozens of WNBA players, had done this for years. She first played for a team in China that paid her $600,000, more than 10 times her rookie salary in the WNBA. Since 2015, she has moonlighted with UMMC Ekaterinburg, which is bankrolled by two Russian oligarchs who want to win women’s basketball titles.

The 12-team WNBA has hummed along since its inception in 1997 but by all accounts has never turned an annual profit despite being partially subsidized by the NBA.

TV ratings and sponsorships, the main revenue drivers in professional sports, are increasing, just not nearly to the levels needed for salaries commensurate with the players’ heightened popularity — or that would deter them spending the winter in Russia or China.

In 2018, the WNBA reportedly had $60 million in revenues (against $70 million in expenses). The NBA is estimated to generate $10 billion per year.

It doesn’t, of course, excuse the sheer stupidity of carrying even a gram of drugs to a country where they are illegal, particularly one where you’ve lived extensively and presumably understand the laws and severity of punishment (not to mention the adversarial relationship with your homeland).

Griner’s Russian attorney said the typical sentence for that amount of marijuana is five years, half the maximum, and many get paroled. Griner got nine years, six months, a sudden pawn on a political chessboard.

Marc Fogel, meanwhile, got 14 and is in a labor camp in Siberia or some other far-flung outpost.

“There’s a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach,” Jane Fogel, his wife, told The Washington Post recently, “that Marc will be left behind.”