2023-08-05 05:00:13
Kaunas is a strange city. A mix of Art Deco buildings, pretty cobbled streets, church busts and strip clubs. Santakos Park, to the west of the city – the second largest in Lithuania, with 300,000 inhabitants – hosts games for children and couples in search of tranquility, under the gaze of a statue of Pope John Paul II. Not far from there, on rubber grounds, basketball games are improvised, in these first beautiful days of May.
Donatas Kosiuba, 35, is sweating profusely. This construction worker, dry as a marathon runner, takes advantage of his lunch break to face a friend in one on one. “Basketball is our second religion”, he gasps. Everyone, or almost, practices this sport in this country of 2.8 million inhabitants. Or, at the very least, has an opinion to give on the matter.
The 30-something points to a building behind his shoulder: “It’s the basketball history museum. It was founded by Arvydas Sabonis, our legend. » The most famous man in Lithuania, without a doubt. A 2.21 meter giant, with fairy hands and clay tendons, who, in the 1980s, made the heyday of his club, Žalgiris Kaunas, the city’s flagship institution.
Arvydas Sabonis and his teammates, cheerful
Considered at the time as the best player in the world outside the United States, “Sabas” – that’s his nickname – deployed his talents in Spain, then, once Lithuania was freed from Soviet control, in the NBA. . Even today, signs bearing his image, on which he wears his jersey of the Portland Trail Blazers, an NBA franchise in the northwestern United States, adorn the facades of restaurants in Kaunas.
The museum he founded retraces the epic of local basketball, from its introduction in this small Baltic state in 1922 to the title of European champion obtained by the national team in 2003. Trophies, medals… Nothing is more boring than a sports museum. A photo stands out, however, among the images of players in jerseys.
We see Arvydas Sabonis and his teammates, hilarious, dressed in a rock t-shirt in the yellow green red colors of the Lithuanian flag, on which is represented a skeleton in the process of dunking (marking by clinging to the basket with the hand) . A sentence crosses the photo: « Better dead than red » (“rather dead than red”). It dates from 1992. The memory of an episode that forever links Lithuania to the United States in general, and to the NBA in particular.
Sarūnas Marčiulionis, un monument
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