Sports of The Times; A Great Time And a Better Friendship
THEY have moved well beyond their fantasy-come-true in a haven called Golden State, when they unlocked the Iron Curtain to build a friendship and an opportunity in the wild and capitalist West. Donn Nelson and Sarunas Marciulionis remain tethered, though, a bicultural statement about good will, sports and the best time of their lives.
International basketball competitions are the stage for their reunions, on the bench of the Lithuanian national team.
'I told Sarunas when I made the commitment that I was in for the long haul,' Nelson said yesterday after Lithuania defeated Argentina, 81-77, in overtime at Madison Square Garden, the near-empty site of the Goodwill Games basketball tournament.
Ted Turner's first Goodwill Games in 1986, and his sending of the Atlanta Hawks to the Soviet Union two years later, quite possibly contributed to their meeting in the first place. It was before the crash of Communism in Eastern Europe that Nelson began recruiting the Soviet star Marciulionis to play for his father's team, the Warriors of the California Bay Area, and after Lithuania's independence that Marciulionis lobbied his country's federation to bring Nelson on as assistant coach.
Close friends by 1992, they went to the Olympics in Barcelona, Spain, and to the bronze medal stand. Mixing politics with sport, they stirred the passions of every Lithuanian by defeating the Russians in the game that small country loves most. Marciulionis merely calls that victory 'the greatest moment of my life.'
He was the shooter and Nelson was support, but even before the Olympics, they were a team, promoting the cause and raising some cash, which in the process produced a cachet. Lithuania rocked the Olympics, sponsored in part by the Grateful Dead.
'We had been doing every speaking engagement we could get, for $50 or $75,' Nelson said. 'Someone wrote a story in one of the Bay Area papers, and a couple of the Grateful Dead members read it and called to say they wanted to help.'
Marciulionis said he'd never heard of them, but he went with Nelson to their concert, where he was introduced to the fashions of the tie-dyed nation. In Barcelona, the hottest merchandise at the basketball venue was the splashy Lithuania warm-up shirt with the skeleton on the front, which in Europe remains essential to the look of the true Lithuanian fan.
Who can forget Marciulionis roaming the medal stand and ordering his teammates to slip on the tie-dyed shirts, infuriating the company that paid to have its logo on the team's uniform? Too bad, he said. In contrast to their rich peers from the National Basketball Association, the Lithuanians' Olympics were not about corporate fidelity but were instead a pledge of renewed national allegiance.
Nelson, of Swedish and German descent, did not have to be Lithuanian to participate in the spraying of Champagne on the country's former President, Vytautas Landsbergis, in a dramatic locker room scene. He did not have to be fluent in the language to join in the singing of the anthem with Landsbergis, Marciulionis and the others, tears running down all their cheeks. Nelson knew he'd hit a note he would likely never reach again if he spent a dozen more lifetimes in sports. He knew at that moment a part of him would always be with Lithuania, his adopted country, home of his very good friend.
'My wife is Swedish and every summer I go back to Lithuania, I drop her off,' Nelson said. 'It works out.'
In two years, he is scheduled to slide into the seat of his father -- same name, less one 'n' in Donn -- as head coach of the Dallas Mavericks. But he expects to remain an assistant to Jonas Kazlauskas or whoever is coaching the Lithuanian team. He promised Marciulionis, who retired a couple of years ago to run Lithuania's modest pro league, that he would stick with the program 'in good times and bad.'
This is a young, star-less Lithuanian team, feeling its way when basketball's global expansion seems to have flattened from the dizzying summer of 1992. Croatia, the silver medalist in Barcelona, did not even qualify for next month's world championships in Greece, an event devalued by the N.B.A.'s lockout and resulting player-inspired pullout.
'Almost sacrilege,' is what Nelson calls this job action, though he admits his perception is skewed because of his relationship with Marciulionis, the ultimate player-patriot. And then, Lithuania's best player, center Zydrunas Ilgauskas, won't be playing in Athens either. He's a Cleveland Cavalier free agent, afraid to risk injury and lose a windfall that Marciulionis's pioneering helped make possible.
This is progress, apparently.