![]() ![]() These items were a major hit and helped the team raise funds that were then used to fund their participation in the 1996 Olympics. More importantly, the band gave the team a license to use and sell special Olympics-Grateful Dead merchandise. ![]() NBC reported that the band ended up writing the team a check for $5,000. That's a paraphrase but, if you've ever heard Jerry (who died in 1995), it's pretty close. "You're all about liberty and freedom and, man, we're all about that, too, so we dig what you guys are doing," said Jerry Garcia, the Dead's leader. The Dead had heard about the Marciulionis-Nelson crusade to raise money to enable Lithuania, Marciulionis's native land, to try to qualify for the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. "I always think back and wonder what it would be like if someone caught that scene today - Sarunas in the Dead pot garage." They're terrible.'" Nelson shakes his head and smiles. Sarunas pulls me aside and says, 'Donnie, no way these guys are famous. "The Dead were trying out Beatles covers, doing stuff like 'Here Comes the Sun' and 'Hey Jude,' but they were just kind of working through things and sounding kind of nasally. "Well, there was a little pot going on," Nelson recalls today. Somebody said to enter, and so they did, metaphorical hats in hand, taking in the sights and, more vividly, the smells. The Grateful Dead is in here? Nelson thought to himself. On a cold and windy Bay Area winter day 20 years ago, Sarunas Marciulionis and Donnie Nelson, a starting guard and a scout, respectively, for the Golden State Warriors, knocked uncertainly on the door of a nondescript garage in San Francisco. Here's an excerpt from an article published on in 2012 (archived here): 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. 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. , Fri The Times Recorder (Zanesville, Ohio) A third of the money raised went to the Lithuanian Olympic Committee, and the band got "nothing more than a good time." 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. ![]() More importantly, they provided the team with a license to sell special Grateful Dead-Olympics merchandise. The Grateful Dead provided some financial support to fund the Lithuania basketball team's trip to the 1992 Olympics. ![]()
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