Super Bowl? Not for Lithuanians when they can shoot hoops

Reprinted by permission from the Waterbury Republican-American. This article appeared in the January 27, 2003 edition, written by Joe Palladino. Joe Palladino is a Waterbury Republican-American staff writer. He can be e-mailed at jpalladino@rep-am.com.

LITHUANIAN SPORTS CLUB

It is a cold, snowy evening on Super Sunday, and one of Waterbury's foremost hot spots this night also happens to be a school building that was all but boarded up a few months ago. The gymnasium at St. Joseph's Grammar School on John Street still survives to throw open its doors three nights a week for a group of men and women whose love and passion for basketball just might be unmatched.

"Look, look at all these people here playing basketball," said Laurynas Misevicius, president of the Lithuanian Sports Club of Connecticut. "The Super Bowl, we don't care about the Super Bowl. We love basketball."

A perfect example of that is 19-year-old Edvinas Inkrata, who emigrated to the U.S. just six months ago and lives just up the hill, off Congress Avenue. A high school star in Lithuania, Inkrata puts on a one-man slam dunk show three nights a week. Sunday night, he nearly brought an end to the three-month-old Sports Club when one of his jams severely bent one of the old rims bolted into the ancient wood backboards.

The incident led to the age-old question: How many Lithuanians does it take to straighten out a basketball rim? On this night it was about seven men who huddled on a folding table under the hoop. With a collective groan and push, the rim was like new and a new rule agreed upon: no dunking.

Dormant for 25 years, the Lithuanian Sports Club of Connecticut came back to life late last year, and it was basketball that got the club's heart beating again. A rag-tag team of basketball players from Connecticut put together a trip to compete in a tournament against Lithuanian clubs in Philadelphia. A trip to Baltimore followed, and the team's success prompted Misevicius, a Stamford banker who lives in Monroe, to call a meeting to re-establish the club. That was back on Nov. 1. Now as many as 50 men and women from around the state descend on St. Joe's to play the game that has become a national mania in Lithuania.

"In Lithuania, basketball is huge," reports Linas Balsys, a Naugatuck resident who is president of the Knights of Lithuania. "It is the No. 1 sport."

Throughout Europe, soccer reigns supreme. In many central European nations, ice hockey is also an all-consuming passion. So, how did basketball take root in Lithuania? Misevicius knows.

The first wave of Lithuanian immigrants brought the game back to the homeland sometime in the late 1920s, he said. The sport still needed a spark to set off the passion, and that came from the unlikeliest of sources, a pair of airplane pilots named Stepanos Darius and Stasys Girenas. The duo made a celebrated trans-Atlantic flight in 1933 that made them national heroes back home. When the co-pilots professed a love of the great American game of basketball, Lithuanians embraced the sport.

Fueled by European championships in 1937 and 1939, the game soon dominated Lithuanian sporting life. It still does, even in Connecticut. Basketball uniforms are on order from a manufacturer in Lithuania, navy blue, with green trim. The team name is Azuolai, which is oak in English.

"Call us the Connecticut Oaks," Misevicius said. "The oak tree is the national symbol of Lithuania. It signifies durability and strength."

And maybe obstinacy. With the nation coming to a virtual standstill for a football spectacular Sunday night, the Lithuanian Sports Club hooped it up in the Brooklyn section of Waterbury. They drove in from Hartford, New Haven, New Britain, Naugatuck, Bridgeport and Branford. Even Hamden's Nerijus Gelazauskas, a 6-foot-5, 260-pound offensive lineman last season for Western Connecticut State University, couldn't care less about the goings on in San Diego.

The game was yet again a one-sided, un-Super affair. The only ones who seemed to know that before hand was a bunch of basketball-crazy guys who came to Waterbury on a snowy Sunday evening to play, to them, the only game that matters.

Contact Laurynas Misevicius for more information on the Lithuanian Sports Club of Connecticut.

Back to top of page