According to Grateful Dead spokesman Dennis McNally, some 20,000 shirts sold in the first week. Here's a newspaper clipping from 1992 about the popularity of these shirts. While the Grateful Dead did provide the team some financial support (one report states that the band wrote a $5,000 check), the band's main contribution was that it allowed the team to sell special Grateful Dead merchandise, which proved massively popular with fans at the 1992 Olympic Games. Our one quibble with this claim is that the band was not the team's sole source of funding. The Grateful Dead really did sponsor Lithuania's men's basketball team, and they did provide the team with tie-dyed shirts bearing the country's national colors (yellow, green, and red), and a "Skullman" logo designed by Greg Speirs, which can be seen above. A viral Reddit post claimed that "after the breakup of the USSR, the Lithuanian basketball team couldn't afford to participate in the 1992 Olympics, so the Grateful Dead funded the team's expenses and sent a box of tie-dyed outfits in Lithuania's national colours. In July 2021, as the pandemic-delayed 2020 Olympic games approached, an interesting tidbit about basketball, Lithuania, and the 1960s psychedelic rock band the Grateful Dead started to circulate on social media. However, the band was not the sole source of funding for the team.
#Lithuania grateful dead basketball license
More importantly, they provided the team with a license to sell special Grateful Dead-Olympics merchandise. The response was overwhelming.The Grateful Dead provided some financial support to fund the Lithuania basketball team's trip to the 1992 Olympics. Nelson says the players were offered as much as $150 for their shirts, and when he came home he suggested to the Warriors that it might be a nice gesture to sell some of the shirts, with the money to go to the Lithuanian Children's Fund. Overnight, Lithu-mania struck, and they had the hottest T-shirts at the Games.
#Lithuania grateful dead basketball full
They took the stand in full Dead regalia. But the guys figured they should honor the group that had backed them from the first. By this time they had attracted a shoe company as a sponsor, which had provided them with some very spiffy warmups to wear on the victory stand. The kicker came when the Lithuanians won the bronze medal. And that's how he ended up leaving the locker room wearing a tie-died Grateful Dead T-shirt. No one is sure how it happened, but somehow the President of Lithuania ended up doused in champagne. There wasn't a dry eye in the place."Īnd then, well, they got a little carried away again. And at that moment the President of the country walked in and everybody started singing the national anthem. "The guys went crazy," Nelson recalls, "and then all of a sudden everybody quieted down. When they won that game, there was delirium in Lithuania, not to mention the team's locker room. Many of them, including Marciulionis and 7- foot-4 center Arvidas Sabonis, were key players on the Russian team that beat the Americans in 1988 to win the gold. The big game was against the Russian team, because the Lithuanians had been forced to play for the Soviet Union for years. And once the players arrived in Barcelona, Spain, and started to knock off some of the teams, they turned into a cult favorite. To make a long story short, the team not only raised the money to compete, it managed to qualify for the Olympics.
They ended up wearing them to bed, to practice, everywhere." "After all those years of those Soviet colors (in daily life), nothing but blues and grays," he says, "the guys went nuts for those shirts. They mailed the Lithuanian team a nice check, and threw in a load of tie- died T-shirts and shorts showing a skeleton dunking a basketball.ĭonnie Nelson, son of former Warriors coach Don Nelson and a coach for the Lithuanians in the offseason, recalled the reaction. It was at that point that the Grateful Dead stepped in. Money was scarce, and it wasn't exactly pouring in, although Marciulionis made several appeals for help. As you probably recall, it was back in 1992 that Sarunas Marciulionis, who came to this country to play guard for the Warriors, decided to attempt to put together a basketball team to represent his newly-independent homeland.
0 kommentar(er)
