“If 30 teams think I can’t play, I can’t play.”

In Mikutavičiaus “Trys Milijonai,” which has been casually referred to (in Lithuanian media) as an alternate national anthem, there’s that great line at the end of the chorus: “tik per klaidą netapom mes čempijonais” (“if not for a mistake, we would have been champions”). The chorus itself is a good bit of ambivalent strength-in-foregone-loss stuff, encouraging Lithuania to take pride in even coming close to Olympic gold in Sydney, being merely a teeny nation (Mikutavičius, when asked, suggested to me that he meant ethnos here and not state, but he was drunk and making a joke) of three million (hence, the name of the song). Still, that line, for me, always referenced �arūno Jasikevičiaus desperation three as the seconds ticked off in the semi-final against the US (the prediction about being champions may be a bit premature, but I’m sure Lithuania would have ridden a defeat of the US to Olympic gold against France). For the third straight Olympics, the Lithuanian team met the Americans in the semis, and for the third time, Lithuania had to settle for bronze, at best. That won’t repeat itself this time, as Lithuania will only face China, and Italy or Puerto Rico en route to the final, but, still, for the first time, Lithuania is in the catbird seat, owners of a perfect record in Athens.

Lithuania has a long history of kicking a lot of ass in basketball, it’s just that that history is either pre-WWII (Euro champs in �37 and �39) or hidden under the giant red blanket of the USSR. In 1988, it was especially grating to see names like Sabonis, Marčiulionis, and Kurtinaitis (who combined for 60 of the 83 Soviet points in their semi-final 83:76 defeat of the US, led in Seoul by David Robinson and Dan Majerle) stitched on red uniforms, but I still rooted for the Soviets. Part of the wide-spread effort to try and raise the profile of the USSR’s occupation of Lithuania involved trying to get Lithuanian players into the NBA—and it would eventually work, with Marčiulionis playing in Golden State and an older, slower Sabas playing in Portland. Neither player made quite the splash we’d hoped (especially as Portland sat on its rights to Sabas for years, letting him establish European prominence playing in Spain), but the wheels were in motion.

After Lithuania declared its independence in 1990 and fought it out for the rest of that year and into 1991, a lot of the little “firsts” (not really such, as Lithuania had been, in effect, “independent” for some 581 total years since coalescing around 1236, though we could argue that these were significant firsts in the imagined community of Lithuanians) carried a whole lot of value; the photo of the Lithuanian flag’s being raised among the member nations of the UN, for example, was the cover photo for a Franciscan calendar I had at that time. And, of course, we all looked eagerly to the chance for the likes of Sabas, Marčiulionis, and Kurtinaitis to finally go for Olympic gold in Barcelona under the Lithuanian tricolour. The situation got even more interesting when Marčiulionis parlayed friendships with the Grateful Dead into some sort of sponsorship deal (the details of which I never understood) that linked the Steal Your Face and tie-dye to the Lithuanian basketball team—something that continued at least into 1996, and perhaps beyond. This year, Nike is providing Lithuania’s shirts.

But the connection, not unlike what happened with the Jamaican bobsledders, created quite a bit of buzz around the team, which then made the subsequent bronze medal look like a fluke. Yet any Lithuanian in the US would have calmly told you that, depending on the draw, the bronze was a gimme (even after the loss to the CIS). I distinctly remember thinking that, come knockout round, only the US could beat the Lithuanians, which was how it played out. The team didn’t need a gimmick to vault it to Olympic hardware, but it looked that way.

In any case, because of the timing of history, basketball is something that the expatriate/exile/emmigrant community takes very seriously. It’s one of the main things that have crystal clear pre-/post-1990 splits (the uniforms are differently colored), yet also manages to somehow present Lithuania as a little mouse that roared. The successes of the team in the Olympics or the European championship give the diaspora community a touchstone of pride. Every Lithuanian-American born during the �70s probably has had at one point at least one iteration of the tie-dye Lithuanian shirt. We get together to watch matches. We cheer for the guy with the laughably long last name during the NCAA tournament. Through their successes, we see the profile of the nation rising. What, precisely, the goal of this is is rather unclear (though I did fantasise about a Vilnius Olympiad last night), but it still exists.

This sort of interaction is not particularly special or at all unique to Lithuanians—I can only imagine how proud the people on Halsted and Jackson must be for these two weeks as their native land hosts what, so far, has been a pretty successful and interesting games. Just as the Greek community rallied around a legitimately terrible movie a few years ago just because it raised the profile of the ethnicity, so do Lithuanians rally around their basketball. It’s all the same feeling, but, again, it’s all still unclear what the payoff is.

So what does it mean that Lithuania beat the US on Saturday? First, this is a defeat now twelve years coming. There was no way Lithuania would beat the first two incarnations of the Dream Team. The diaspora merely hoped for the lowest margin of defeat both times—but failed in �92. In 2000, there was that one desparation shot that separated the two teams. That game signalled that the Dream Team was not invincible any longer. A team that had lost the exact same match eight years before by 51 points now was a missed three from victory. And, of course, the US’s first loss was right around the corner, when they bowed to Argentina in 2002. I cannot imagine that a single Lithuanian-American was not jealous that it was some other team that managed to tally that first victory. And this year, we saw the debacle start early in preliminary matches. Suddenly the game of being impressed by surpassing lowered expectations, a staple of the Bush campaign, became the pundit approach to the US. “Don’t expect gold.” “The team is not as good as it could be.” And on and on.

A win is a win, though, and Lithuania won despite both playing absolutely terribly for the first half and having the US team assemble something resembling a perimeter game for the first time of the Olympics in the second half. Had Larry Brown left in the “speed” line featuring the rookies, perhaps Lithuania would never have pulled it off. But they did, and, in perhaps the sweetest turn of this long story, it came at the hands of a man my age who had played in the US since he was in high school, �aras, fresh off a championship season with Macabi Tel Aviv. In July, Marc Stein wrote:

Yet one of the best point guards on the free-agent market is no longer totally free, and I’m struggling to understand why NBA teams didn’t make a harder push for this guy.

Sarunas Jasikevicius is the best point guard in Europe. He’s the Maryland alumnus who gave Team USA beaucoup problems at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney and who’ll be confronting the Yanks again next month in Athens where Lithuania, the reigning European champions, figures to be Team USA’s toughest competition along with Serbia and Montenegro. And since he already has experience playing in the States, Jasikevicius figures to adjust faster to the NBA game than his Euro point predecessors who struggled, namely Sergei Bazarevich and Aleksandr Djordjevic.

It appears, though, that Jasikevicius will not be seen on these shores next season. A clause in his contract that permitted the Lithuanian to jump to the NBA — without compensation to his current club, Euroleague winners Maccabi Tel-Aviv — expired this week. If an NBA team pursued Jasikevicius now, Maccabi would be entitled to a buyout of at least $1 million, with NBA clubs restricted by league rules from chipping in more than $350,000.

San Antonio wanted him last summer but couldn’t pry loose Jasikevicius — a clutch shot-maker with “big cojones,” in the words on one NBA personnel man — from his Maccabi contract. The concerns about Jasikevicius are his athleticism, defensive shortcomings and an occasional problem with turnovers, in addition to the standard fears about a foreigner coming to America at a position where he has to tell teammates what to do. Yet this is the zone era, when it’s easier than ever to cover up for a bad defender. And while I might be a tad biased, I still rate Jasikevicius better than a lot of backup points in this league, pointing out again that he does have a better handle on the American hoops culture than Bazarevich, Djordjevic or even Tony Parker did when they first came over.

And now, after �aro fourth quarter against the US, it seems like there might be some disappointment among the NBA offices, too, something that Jasikevičius seems to relish, as one can see from this excerpt:

“It’s a disappointing loss to say the least, but we are getting better,” US coach Larry Brown said. “We got our open shots. I just hope sometime our guys remember that they hit them in the NBA.”

Jasikevicius hits them in the European league because no NBA team has been willing to offer him even a minimal contract.

“I guess I’m a slow, fat, white guy.” he said. “It has sunk in with me I’m probably not the kind of player who can play in the NBA. If 30 teams think I can’t play, I can’t play. I’m at peace with how my career has gone.

“I can’t take my stuff into a locker room and say, ‘Hey guys, here I am.’”

I’m hardly a basketball scout, but the juxtaposition of these two quotes really jars me. �aras plays like Jon Caplan used to play in grade school—he just totally runs the offense. Everything goes through him, so much so that you can feel, even if you’re not a huge fan, when he’s not on the court. This sort of play can obviously be bad, as it sets up (as Aidas told me) Kobe/MJ level of arrogance, which is not necessarily earned or justified. Yet �aras made his case rather confidently on Saturday, demonstrating that the offense would click precisely while he was in charge of it. In an eerie if it weren’t predictable piece for Page 2, the Sports Guy sums up precisely what would undo the US at the hands of the Lithuanians, after having seen the Puerto Ricans destroy the Dream Team:

1. Arroyo destroyed Marbury and Iverson. Murdered them. He controlled every aspect of the game, made every big play when they needed him — it was one of those virtuoso performances straight out of the Cheeks-Isiah-Stockton Era of the �80s. (For some reason, the NBC announcers were surprised by this, including Mike Breen, who dropped “the game of his life” phrase more than once. Before he injured an ankle last season, Arroyo was playing like that every night for the Jazz. Whatever.) More importantly, there isn’t an American point guard under the age of 30 — with the possible exception of Wake Forest’s Chris Paul — who could dream of controlling a game that way.

So why is that? What happened to the point guard position? Why are the best ones (like Arroyo and Tony Parker) coming from other countries? Why do we keep producing dominant, shoot-first point guards who can’t create for teammates in the open floor (Marbury, Baron Davis, Steve Francis, etc.)? Have we really failed that much? Is this the main reason why I’m constantly watching classic games from the ’80s on NBA-TV and ESPN Classic, because those games represent the way basketball should look (everyone running the floor, people making the right decisions, guys using their teammates)? I wrote about the death of the point guard position three years ago, but things are even more depressing now.

And that’s true. No one plays in the NBA like we used to play on in the Rothwell Gymnasium at Friends Academy. It’s just not the American style of play, I suppose, and, as a result, proven players (what is this “can’t communicate” shit? �aras clearly speaks English well enough to run an offense) play in Europe, piling on resentment with every shot made. I’m certain that after the snub the NBA gave him this year (and has been giving, in some way, since his time as a Terp), Jasikevičius wanted nothing more than to put on a show against the US, the NBA strawman at Athens. Meanwhile, the NBA becomes unwatchable, as the focus players end up being players other than the point guard, which makes no basketball sense, to me. I always liked the playmaker, the guy who starts the ball rolling, the #10, the whatever. The NBA, I suppose, hates that player.

The focus here is drifting a bit, sorry. What this tangent about Jasikevičius is supposed to show, though, is that that goal of respect for the mouse that roars may still be long in coming. (Yes, you knew eventually “hegemony” would get used, and, well, here goes…) Barcelona was special because Lithuanians were able to show off that their country was good for something—that they, despite being occupied and forced into who knows what kinds of Soviet traumas, could still come out and not only hoop it up, but hoop it up as one of the top nations in the whole world—including against teams that spent far more money, and had such things as capitalism on their side. Or, in fact, that glory could only come once capitalism was within their grasp. Once they could emulate the US, they could compete in a US sport (which, we’ll easily forget, the US lost in just four years earlier precisely to the communists).

But where has that respect taken Lithuania? Does it even exist? Barcelona, the US press indicated in the lead up to Atlanta, was an unexpected result. And now that Lithuania has emerged uniquely dominant in international basketball, the asterisks will come out, I’m certain. And so will Lithuania be marginalised again, their players left on the bench in the NBA or under silent approval in Europe, only to return four years later, emerging from under a new shadow of excuses proffered by USA Basketball about why they can’t compete. But who knows what kind of player Jasikevičius would make in the NBA, especially considering he plays a position that could be considered extinct or antiquated, but we’ll probably never know now.

In preparing for Kongresas last summer, I was asked to write a small essay about stereotypes about Lithuanians in the US. I was completely thrown. I have no idea on earth what the stereotype would be—Lithuania hardly ever makes the news, and whoever hears the name will probably just bunch Lithuanians in with Slavs, a mistake made so often I don’t even notice it. And then, every four years, people are reminded that Lithuania is like Indiana in more than landscape. But that’s ok. Part of self-identifying as ethnic is immediately creating a minority status for yourself (when I was younger, this rationale caused me to always mark “other” under racial classifications, even though I already “qualify” from my father’s side. Self-identifying as non-American made me immediately nonwhite, and, hence, I couldn’t, in good faith, call myself legally white. I still can’t, which might strike one as odd), and that means being in shadows, being cloistered and forgotten. Lithuanians get all wound up in “Lithuanian stuff” precisely because it’s an unnoticeably small group of people who are “allowed” to do that, and that makes one feel special. Sadly, though, it depends on the position of a hegemonic force externally enforcing minority status to the ethnicity. This could either be the majority (“whites,” “Americans”) or it could be an indication of true multiculturalism, as ludicrous as that is. But in hoop (or “ka�ė” as the Lithuanians call it), there has to be a center and a margin, a winner and a loser. so it cannot be reduced to the “I’m ok, you’re ok” relativism of multiculturalism. If the US wins, it’s because they are the best. They understand hoop the best. They are the power, the center, the force.

No, I’m not suggesting that Lithuania’s victory on Saturday will start chiseling at US imperialist policy. But I worry about how it might give the impression that it might help—after all, the efforts of the Bush administration to portray their foreign policy as multilateral and multi-statist are falling under criticsm. Should Lithuania move on and win the gold, I’ll be cheering as loud as anyone in my apartment at the time, of course, for totally irrational (and problematic, assuming ethnic identification as politically troubling/distracting) reasons. People will be happy, and proud, and street dancing will be totally justified. Yet even if the win comes against the US (for the first time in Olympic history, the Lithuanians will not draw the US until the final), it will ultimately not signify quite the toppling of the giant, of the regime, that we’d like to imagine, capitalism. A victory for an ethnicity, remember, comes at the cost of a victory for a class. Lithuania’s gold won’t give the ethnos social mobility, for example. And it will give bad advice for how the US can be defeated. Still, I might have to start cheering against the US in every event, something made easier now that dreamy Michael Phelps won’t be competing anymore.