During an interview on the She Knows Sports podcast, WNBA star Brittney Griner revealed she and her wife Cherelle welcomed their first child – a son – on July 8, ABC7 reported.
“That’s my man,” the Phoenix Mercury star responded when she was asked about their new bundle of joy. “He is amazing. They say as soon as you see him, everything you thought mattered just goes out the window. And that’s literally what happens.”
Griner, 33, is part of the Team USA women’s basketball team to compete in the 2024 Paris Olympics which is slated to start on July 26. “Kind of sucks, I got to leave,” she admitted. “But at the same time, he will understand. … My whole phone has turned into him.”
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In April, Griner and Cherelle took to Instagram to announce they were expecting their first baby in July, Face2Face Africa previously reported. The couple made the announcement with a photo of them holding hands and their yet-to-be-born baby’s ultrasound.
“Can’t believe we’re less than three months away from meeting our favorite human being ? #BabyGrinerComingSoon #July2024,” Cherelle captioned in that post.
Per PEOPLE, Griner and Cherelle were students at Baylor University between 2009 and 2013. And though the pair had crossed paths during that period, they only became romantically involved in the subsequent years. The couple eventually got married in 2019 after their engagement.
But the couple experienced a setback in February 2022 when Griner was detained in Russia on drug smuggling charges. The Phoenix Mercury star was arrested at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport on February 17 for allegedly possessing vaporizer cartridges containing cannabis oil in her luggage which she reportedly said was used to treat a medical condition. She was later sentenced to nine years in a Russian penal colony.
The two-time Olympic champion had been playing for the Russian women’s basketball team UMMC Ekaterinburg during the WNBA offseason. The 33-year-old was also part of other WNBA stars who were set to feature for teams in Russia as well as Ukraine for the winter season, the New York Post reported.
Griner was eventually released in December 2022 following a one-for-one prisoner swap for international arms dealer Viktor Bout, U.S. officials told CBS News. In the wake of her release, Cherelle in an interview with PEOPLE spoke about her reaction after learning her wife was finally coming home.
“I had thought about that moment a thousand times, and I thought I would be full of tears,” she said. “But I was overwhelmingly happy. It was the first time I was able to finally exhale, and I’m like, ‘Oh, thank God, this is such a great day.’”
She also spoke about how they were coping following her release. “It’s unfortunate that those 10 months happened without us being able to be side-by-side,” she said. “But it happened, and we’re embracing the fact that we now get to learn each other’s story through that time. So we’re taking it slow. We are not doing it all at once. But we are honoring the fact that I went through something that was really hard and difficult without BG’s awareness, and vice versa.”
“Day by day, we’re just feeding a little bit to the soul and understanding each other’s journey so we can actually start walking together,” she explained.
