Even after the shirts were given to the players, sales continued and the remaining profits, $450,000, was also donated to the team, as well as several Lithuanian charities.
Grateful dead lithuania shirt series#
Greg Speirs, an artist from New York, had also heard of the team's financial struggles and, taking inspiration from the Dead's own imagery, personally designed a series of tie-dye shirts using the colors of the Lithuanian flag and and a slam-dunking skeleton emblazoned across the front. He showed it to the band members, who took sympathy and swiftly cut the team a $5,000 check so they would be able to participate in the games, along with a box of tie-dye shirts.īut the generosity didn't stop there. To raise money, Sarunas Marciulionis, a Lithuanian native who was then playing for the Golden State Warriors, and assistant coach Donnie Nelson launched a small, local fundraiser in the San Francisco Bay area, where a newspaper article about their plight caught the attention of the Dead's publicist, Dennis McNally. In the aftermath of their break from the Soviet Union in 1990, the country of Lithuania was finally free, but strapped for cash, and that included funds for Olympic teams to travel to Barcelona for the 1992 Games. There was no mistaking the Lithuanian basketball team at the 1992 Olympic Games - they could easily be spotted wearing their bright tye-die uniforms with an image of a slam-dunking skeleton across the front. The explanation for the one-of-a-kind design could be traced back to a generous New York City design artist and the reigning experts on tie-dye themselves: the Grateful Dead.
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