Splattered with yellow, green and red (the Lithuanian colors), the shirt represents the passion, love and courage that the Lithuanian basketball team displays. Viewers soon realize that the shirt symbolizes everything Lithuania stands for. Most poignantly, however, the film ends by displaying the independent Lithuanian basketball team rocking the Grateful Dead-sponsored tie-dye skeleton dunking T-shirt in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. At its core, the film documents how the Lithuanians and their basketball team escaped Soviet Communism to form an independent nation. The film then explains this animosity between the players and the Soviet Union by displaying footage of Russia’s 1940 occupation of Lithuania. Of the five starters in this championship basketball team, four were Lithuanians who did not want to be associated with the Soviets. The Other Dream Team begins with the 1988 Seoul Olympics victory of the Soviet Union basketball team over the American team that boasted superstar center David Robinson. The Other Dream Team, a basketball documentary about the Lithuanians’ journey to the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, revolves around the theme of how a basketball team brought a nation to prominence - in essence, taking the “dream team” definition to another level. – | Photo courtesy of Getty Imagesīut to the 1992 Lithuanian Olympic basketball team, basketball represents more than a sport, particularly considering Lithuania’s past clouded with annexation from the Soviet Union. Lithuanian basketball player Sarunas Marciulionis rocks the tie-dye Grateful Dead T-shirt after a 1992 Olympic victory.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. 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.
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