Extended Knowledge ; Grateful Dead for Lithuanian Basketball Team

In 1992, the Lithuanian basketball team wore Grateful Dead tie-dyed uniforms at the Barcelona Summer Olympics, where they won the bronze medal after defeating the Unified Team.

This story begins in the wake of the Soviet Union's dissolution and Lithuania's emergence as an independent nation. The newly free country faced the challenge of funding its 1992 Olympic aspirations. Sarunas Marciulionis, a Golden State Warriors star who led the fundraising effort for the basketball team, attended a Grateful Dead concert at The Palace of Auburn Hills in Detroit, Michigan. He met the Grateful Dead backstage and handed them a letter asking the band’s non-profit, The Rex Foundation, to consider donating to the Lithuanian basketball team. The band asked Marciulionis what made him think this would work. “They’re free-minded people. We had just become a free country. There was a freedom connection,” Marciulionis said. Later, the band agreed to donate $5,000 and a box of tie-dyed shirts, shorts, warm-up suits, and polo shirts designed by Greg Speirs.

“They’re free-minded people. We had just become a free country. There was a freedom connection,” Marciulionis said.

Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir once explained why the band chose to help the basketball team: “The Lithuanian basketball team, these aren’t homeless people. This isn’t a soup kitchen. But at the same time, here’s something that can do a lot of good for a lot of people. That whole country of Lithuania can have a spirit of national identity, and these people can go to the Olympics,” Weir said in a press conference in 1995.

The tie-dyed shirts became popular among Deadheads and quickly became an immediate classic, with 5,000 orders reported within the first 48 hours and 50,000 orders within the first week.

Credit By : Abyan Hanif