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  • 2021-07-07 (xsd:date)
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  • Did the Grateful Dead Fund Lithuania's Olympic Basketball Team? (en)
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  • 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. 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. They went on to win bronze. This post is generally accurate. 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. Our one quibble with this claim is that the band was not the team's sole source of funding. 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. Here's a newspaper clipping from 1992 about the popularity of these shirts. According to Grateful Dead spokesman Dennis McNally, some 20,000 shirts sold in the first week. A third of the money raised went to the Lithuanian Olympic Committee, and the band got nothing more than a good time. 28 Aug 1992, Fri The Times Recorder (Zanesville, Ohio) Newspapers.com The Grateful Dead's connection with the Lithuanian basketball team started in 1992 when Sarunas Marciulionis, the team's star guard, and scout Donnie Nelson showed up at a garage in San Francisco to hear the band play. The team, which would be competing in its first Olympic games since the country declared independence from the Soviet Union a few years earlier, was seeking sponsors to fund their trip to Barcelona. Here's an excerpt from an article published on NBCOlympics.com in 2012 (archived here): NBC reported that the band ended up writing the team a check for $5,000. More importantly, the band gave the team a license to use and sell special Olympics-Grateful Dead merchandise. These items were a major hit and helped the team raise funds that were then used to fund their participation in the 1996 Olympics. For many American basketball fans, the 1992 Olympics are probably remembered for the dominant play of the Dream Team, the American Olympic team that featured superstars such as Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird. But the Lithuanian team made its mark as well. In 2012, a documentary was released entitled The Other Dream Team, which followed Arvydas Sabonis and Šarūnas Marčiulionis on their somewhat psychedelic journey to a bronze medal. (en)
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