Excellent story. Here's another one:


(What follows was cut & pasted from an article in the Deseret News by Jamshid Ghazi Askar)

The Soviet Union annexed Lithuania in 1944. Then, as now, Lithuania was a small Baltic country with its own language, a strong national identity and an intense affinity for basketball. Lithuania, the last sovereign nation to be absorbed by the Soviet Union, never viewed the occupying Soviets as its comrades.

At the 1988 Summer Olympics, the men's basketball team from the Soviet Union (population: 286 million) trounced the U.S. in the semifinals en route to a gold medal. Four of that Soviet team's five starting players hailed from Lithuania (population: 3 million).

In 1991, Lithuania became the first republic to break away from a crumbling Soviet Union. At that point, the four Lithuanians who had starred for the Soviet Union at the '88 Olympics — Arvydas Sabonis, Sarunas Marciulionis, Rimas Kurtinaitis and Valdemaras Chomicius — committed to do everything possible to qualify for, and compete at, the upcoming 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona as Team Lithuania.

There was, though, one significant speed bump on Lithuania's road to Barcelona: in 1991 no one had the necessary funds to cover the team's travel costs and operating expenses.

By 1991, Marciulionis was playing in the NBA for the Golden State Warriors. To begin raising money for the brand new Lithuanian men's national basketball team, he started making personal appearances at private homes around the Bay Area for a couple hundred bucks a pop. But fate intervened when a local newspaper penned an article about Marciulionis' fundraising efforts — and several members of iconic musical group the Grateful Dead read the story.

The Grateful Dead greatly admired the courage the Lithuanian people showed in standing firm for freedom in the face of communist intimidation. Hence, after Marciulionis met the Dead backstage following a concert in Detroit, the musicians handed him a substantial check that allowed the Lithuanian men's basketball squad to enter a qualifying tournament for the 1992 Olympics.

Additionally, the Grateful Dead subsequently mailed the Lithuanian basketball players several boxes of shirts and shorts emblazoned with a skeleton (the Dead's de facto mascot) dunking a basketball beneath the word "Lithuania." All of the apparel was tie-dyed in red, yellow and green — the colors of the new Lithuanian flag.

Led by Sabonis and Marciulionis, the Lithuanians play their way into the semifinals. There, though, they lose to the "Dream Team" — a U.S. squad populated with the likes of Michael Jordan, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson that is widely considered to be the best basketball team ever assembled.

In the bronze medal game, the Lithuanians are pitted against the Unified Team, i.e. all of the former U.S.S.R. except Lithuania. With Lithuania's president urging them on in the locker room and from a courtside seat, the players feel it is their duty to beat the Soviet vestige in order to validate a new nation.

A back-and-forth barnburner ends in an 82-78 victory for Lithuania. Interviews recalling that game, Kurtinaitis and Chomicius become so emotional that they break down and start crying. Seeing these two stoic, successful, middle-aged men shed tears of joy 20 years after-the-fact vividly illustrates just how much it meant to Lithuania when its own "dream team" vanquished nearly five decades of Communist occupation with a big win on the hardwood.

In a one-of-a-kind moment that borders on the surreal, the jubilant Lithuanians accept their bronze medals clad entirely in the tie-dyed garb from the Grateful Dead — a very visible salute to the band that helped them get to the Olympics.

The act effectively pierces the pervasive corporate-sponsor vibe hanging over a medal ceremony where several American players drape towels over their warm-ups to cover up logos on their jackets because they endorse a different company's shoes.