Lithuanians Are Grateful to `Dead' / Rock group came to rescue

THIS IS the story of how the Grateful Dead ended up on the victory stand of the 1992 Olympic Games, how tie-die became the official color of the Lithuanian basketball team and why it all matters to you.

The official announcement will be made at a press conference today in San Francisco. Basically it is simple. The Dead, the famous rock band, are once again teaming up with little Lithuania to take on the world. Don't bet against them.

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. Frankly, it didn't look good.

Money was scarce, and it wasn't exactly pouring in, although Marciulionis made several appeals for help. It was at that point that the Grateful Dead stepped in. 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.

Donnie Nelson, son of former Warriors coach Don Nelson and a coach for the Lithuanians in the offseason, recalled the reaction.

"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 ended up wearing them to bed, to practice, everywhere."

To make a long story short, the team not only raised the money to compete, it managed to qualify for the Olympics. And once the players arrived in Barcelona, Spain, and started to knock off some of the teams, they turned into a cult favorite.

The big game was against the Russian team, because the Lithuanians had been forced to play for the Soviet Union for years. 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.

When they won that game, there was delirium in Lithuania, not to mention the team's locker room.

"The guys went crazy," Nelson recalls, "and then all of a sudden everybody quieted down. And at that moment the President of the country walked in and everybody started singing the national anthem. There wasn't a dry eye in the place."

And then, well, they got a little carried away again. No one is sure how it happened, but somehow the President of Lithuania ended up doused in champagne. His suit was completely soaked. He had to change clothes. And that's how he ended up leaving the locker room wearing a tie-died Grateful Dead T-shirt.

The kicker came when the Lithuanians won the bronze medal. 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. But the guys figured they should honor the group that had backed them from the first. They took the stand in full Dead regalia.

Overnight, Lithu-mania struck, and they had the hottest T-shirts at the Games. 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. The response was overwhelming.

"We ended up shutting down the Warrior phone system for two days," Nelson says.

All of which brings us to now. The Lithuanian basketball team is better than ever, having just won a silver medal at the European championships, and the Dead are as involved as ever. This year they have teamed up for an entire line of Lithu-mania sports clothes, including a tie-die game jersey. There's also a new T-shirt.

"It's a skeleton, dribbling a ball," says Nelson. "It looks like Sarunas, when he's dead, dribbling a ball."

To order them, call 1-888-977- SLAM or 1-888-633-DEAD. They're going to be hot, trust us.

"We will be the most marketable team at the Olympics," says Nelson, "with the exception of the Dream Team."

And we hear the Dream Team is hearing footsteps.