A Soviet Hoopster In the Promised Land

Sarunas Marciulionis, the first Soviet ever signed to a National Basketball Association contract, is lying face down across a trainer's table in the basement of the New England College gym in Henniker, N.H. It's late summer, the beginning of preseason rookie camp for Marciulionis's new team, the Golden State Warriors, and, after a workout, he is being treated for a strained lower back. As electrical impulses fire into the muscles, he has to twist his head, with its prominent cheekbones and deep-set eyes, to speak. With emphatic gesticulations of his huge hands, he spews a torrent of sibilant Lithuanian at Rimas Kalvaitis, the translator hired by the team.

''The boy who has killed the dragon enters the dragon's cave and finds that it is filled with great wealth and all the things the boy has ever wanted,'' Kalvaitis reports. ''But one day, after only a short time in the cave, the boy picks up a gold plate and is startled by his own reflection. His face has grown ugly. He is starting to look like the dragon.''

Sarunas Marciulionis (pronounced Sha-ROO-nis Marshall-OH-nis), the N.B.A.'s newest exotic, sees himself as the boy in that cave. A brooding Eastern European personality, hardened by a childhood of poverty and possessing a degree in journalism, he is a willfully independent thinker - ''Everyone thinks one thing,'' Aleksandr Volkov, his teammate on the Soviet national team, says, ''Sarunas thinks the other.'' He never saw his relatively cozy life as an elite Soviet athlete as anything more than that of a privileged inmate. ''To have others - this 'they' you don't even know - make you into what they need or want you to be at that time,'' Marciulionis says, ''is very painful to me.''

Now he has somehow slain the dragon of Sovintersport and made it to the N.B.A. And even if he can't keep every cent of his $1.3 million a year contract, he can certainly afford anything he has ever wanted. But it is his nature to be wary. Asked if he would go out of his way to form friendships with his new teammates, he replies: ''I believe friendship is born in moments of victory and defeat. They are not made.''

AS THE 1989-90 N.B.A. SEASON OPENS THIS WEEKEND, Volkov, a Ukrainian, is on the roster of the Atlanta Hawks; there are Yugoslavs under contract with the Los Angeles Lakers, San Antonio Spurs and (Continued on Page 68) Portland Trail Blazers, and the Lithuanian Marciulionis is playing for Golden State.

The influx of Eastern Europeans was pushed along from the other side of the Iron Curtain by perestroika and glasnost, as well as by the magnanimous wake of the Soviets' Olympic gold medal in Seoul a year ago. But the most important factor was the ruling last April by the International Basketball Federation, the sport's governing body for international competition, that made professional basketball players eligible to play in the Olympics, and thus allowed the Soviet Union and its satellites to retain the services of Marciulionis and the others for future Olympics.

The barrier in the United States was prejudice, not necessarily in the public at large, but among the N.B.A.'s general managers and coaches. The thought of traveling to the Eastern European leagues, where the overall play is a notch below the American game in skills and strategy, in the hope of discovering a talented young Serbian or Croatian wasn't that alluring. But Alvin Attles, the assistant general manager of the Warriors, points out how short-sighted that kind of thinking is: ''If you decide that players from a certain area can't play in the N.B.A., whether it's Europe or the Big Ten, you've arbitrarily cut yourself off from a great potential source of talent.''

This puts Marciulionis, the consensus choice as the best prospect among the group, in a position analogous, in some regards, to that occupied years ago by Jackie Robinson, the first black player in major league baseball. If he makes it, many more Eastern Europeans will follow, until the next N.B.A. star may be as likely to emerge from Budapest as from Detroit.

As it is, the best European players are already obsessed with the N.B.A. As teammates, Volkov and Marciulionis talked about the N.B.A. constantly and watched taped games in the same excited way that the first generation of European jazzmen listened to the recordings of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington.

In the Soviet Union, basketball has become almost the same unlikely vehicle for escaping poverty as it is in black America. ''I would be lucky if I could get a job paying 200 rubles a month,'' (roughly $320) says Marciulionis about his prospects as a nonathlete, even with his college degree. ''On the black market, a pair of Nikes cost 250 rubles.''

All of which bodes well for the Soviet Union as a pipeline for N.B.A. talent. Ghettos have long supplied many of its best players, and in the Soviet Union, scouts may have tapped the most sprawling basketball-playing ghetto of them all.

YOU GOT TO LOVE the body,'' says Garry St. Jean, the Warriors' assistant coach. ''It's an N.B.A. body.'' Indeed, Marciulionis's physique is so perfectly engineered for basketball he looks as if he might be the creation of some off-limits Soviet sports lab -RoboGuard. He stands 193 millimeters (6 feet 5 inches) and weighs 94 extremely muscular kilograms (208 pounds), combining massive thighs and calves with less bulky but no less rippled chest and arms.

It isn't likely Marciulionis will displace either of the Warriors' starting guards, Mitch Richmond, last year's rookie of the year, and Winston Garland. But he passes well off the drive and is a good left-handed shooter; he was three for three from 3-point range in the Soviets' victory over the Americans in Seoul. Because of his versatility, he will be capable of filling in either at point guard, largely a ball-handling role, or shooting guard, a scorer's slot. Don Nelson, the Warriors' coach and general manager, has lately revised downward his prediction that Marciulionis will play 30 minutes a game. ''But I believe Sarunas will be an impact player right away,'' he says.

The most conspicuous quality of his game is his bruising combativeness. Marciulionis carries a palpable presence onto the court. Whether slashing to the basket or jumping in another player's path to play defense, he almost seems to seek out contact, a quality that has ingratiated him with his new teammates.

''Being hard-nosed and playing with heart commands respect,'' says Tellis Frank, the Warriors' 6-foot-10-inch forward. ''I know he doesn't understand English, but even if he could I don't think he'd back down.''

Marciulionis also has very quick, strong hands. On the beach in Oakland last month, he placed three small stones on the back of his hand and flung them upward, and with three darting downward snatches was able to pull all three out of the air. Try it; it's tough.

The combination of aggressiveness and hand speed is most lethal in a scramble for a loose ball - where his movements and success rate recall those Sunday afternoon kill scenes on ''Wild Kingdom.''

Which is a little bit of the way Rich Morton, a 6-foot, 4-inch unsigned free agent, felt after being matched up against Marciulionis during the first week in New Hampshire. ''To be honest, he's fouling all the time out there,'' said Morton, whose left wrist was taped after Marciulionis had all but tackled him, he said, the day before.

''Until he learns to play within our rules, he's going to get into foul trouble a lot,'' admits Nelson, his coach. In fact, a lot of the instruction at the camp was intended to initiate the new player into the subtext of N.B.A. officiating by which the most violent assaults are condoned at certain times and in certain places, while the merest touch gets whistled in others.

Marciulionis's most evident shortcoming is his ignorance of the sophisticated team defenses employed by N.B.A. teams. A tenacious one-on-one defender against a man with the ball, he gets burned often by players cutting to the basket without the ball. ''His weakside defense is terrible,'' says Nelson.

But through coaching and practice, the flaws, Nelson says, are curable; so is the substantial language problem. In the meantime, Nelson says, ''We've got to be more visual. Use more gestures.''

In New Hampshire, there was also a problem hearing Marciulionis on the court. During the course of a game there are many situations in which a player has to shout out instructions to his teammates - a choice of a play, a switch in defensive assignments - but because of his self-consciousness about his accent, Marciulionis had been calling out these plays so softly they were inaudible.

A breakthrough was achieved one afternoon during a fast-break drill, when Marciulionis, as the trailing player on the break, was supposed to shout ''Go through,'' a message to the player ahead of him that he's clogging up the play and should pick up the pace. An assistant coach pushed him to yell louder and louder until finally Marciulionis clenched his fists and eyes and filled the gym with a heavily accented scream: ''Go through!''

Fortunately for Marciulionis, the most crucial level of basketball literacy has very little to do with language, but is based instead on the ability to see and understand the patterns by which five sizable people can run around a small space without smashing into each other.

One morning Nelson had his players run through the variations of two of the Warriors' most frequently used offensive series. Marciulionis, barely acknowledging the translations of Kalvaitis, didn't appear to be at all non-plussed. Later, as kind of a spot quiz, a reporter asked Marciulionis to explain the plays. He immediately reached for a piece of scrap paper and drew a bewildering series of O's, an act that clarified not only the court tactics, but an observation that had been made earlier by his coach.

''I'd much rather coach someone who understands basketball and not English than someone who understands English and not basketball,'' Nelson had said. WHEN DON NELSON talks about Marciulionis's competitive spirit, it comes out in cliches: ''He plays for all the right reasons''; ''He doesn't play for women and nightclubs, he plays to win''; ''His whole life is dedicated to basketball.'' Nelson is, of course, citing the advantages employers have always seen in hiring first-generation immigrants - they work harder and with less complaint, never call in sick and don't use a lot of towels.

It's naive, perhaps, but in the case of Marciulionis, the wary boy in the dragon's cave, not entirely inaccurate. The translator Kalvaitis, a Lithuanian-born business professor and himself a remarkable character who habitually throws his two cents worth of exegesis into translations, provides his own illustration of Marciulionis's character.

''In the training room, when the trainer was giving him therapy for his lower back,'' Kalvaitis says, ''he asked Marciulionis if it was O.K., and Marciulionis said 'Fine, O.K.' But then later when the trainer noticed he was wincing he asked if it wasn't in fact hurting him, and Marciulionis replied that yes, it was hurting. But he thought it was supposed to.''

Perhaps Marciulionis understands the dangers facing the boy in the cave because hard times and misfortune have served him so well. ''I've known poverty, and I've endured a lot of pain as an adult,'' he says. ''And now that it has made me what I am, I don't want to change.''

In the bureaucracy of Soviet basketball, where scholastic sports are no big deal, players are grouped by the year of their birth, rather than their last year of college eligibility. Born in Kaunas, Marciulionis is part of what Russian sportswriters have been calling the team of '64, a year that yielded a bumper crop of talent, including several Olympians, Volkov and Arvidas Sabonis, who is now playing professionally in Spain, among them, Marciulionis's father still works as a civil engineer. His mother was a school teacher. ''My parents' choice of professions,'' he says, ''meant that the family had to live on 2 :83,4:83>their salaries.'' Meaning, Kalvaitis quickly explains, that the only viable ways of making money - collecting bribes, stealing or dealing in the black market - were not available to them. Along with his older sister, the family lived in a two-room apartment and on weekends worked at a farming collective where they were paid in apples, pears and vegetables. ''I was not a spoiled child,'' says Marciulionis.

As a toddler Marciulionis was so elusive, his parents nicknamed him Quicksilver. He was also completely ambidextrous and taught himself to play tennis using two forehands well enough to be the Lithuanian age-group champion as a 7-, 8- and 9-year-old. His victories brought an invitation to a regional tournament where Soviet authorities, for the first of many times, assessed his athletic value to the state. Despite winning his matches, Marciulionis was told that his technique was inappropriate, removed from the draw and sent home.

He soon gravitated toward basketball, almost inevitable in Kaunas, which has been a serious basketball town ever since a team of Lithuanian-American ringers brought the briefly independent country the European championships in 1937 and 1939. From Lithuania's population of only 3.6 million came three starters on last year's gold-medal squad.

Even with oversized feet and hands that the rest of him hadn't caught up with, Marciulionis was soon attracting the attention of talent scouts, and in his last year of high school was transferred to a special sports school, where, after playing a 100-game schedule, his team won the Soviet high school championship.

His play, and to some degree his reporting on the team for a Kaunas paper, earned him a place at the University of Vilnius, where he recalls arriving ''with one bag containing a very small amount of clothes, and another full of apples, the only thing my parents could afford to give me.''

There are two levels in Soviet basketball, the higher being the national team that represents Russia in international competition. Below it is a league of major-city club teams. As a native of Kaunas, Marciulionis might have been expected to play for Kaunas, the dynasty of Soviet basketball. But while he was in Vilnius, the only team to recruit him was the local Statyba team, and although Kaunas sought him after he emerged as a star, Marciulionis has, till now, played his entire career with Statyba. ''It would be wrong to betray the team where I was born as a player,'' he says.

It turned out to be a very good career decision. Kaunas already had stars like Sabonis and Rimas Kourtinaitis. But on the mediocre Statyba, he had to play hard every night just to keep his team in the games, which helped him develop the appetite for sustained hard play that so impressed N.B.A. scouts.

''European players don't get the quality of play night after night,'' says Don Nelson. ''And so the most talented players learn they can coast.''

In 1982 and 1983, Marciulionis played sparingly on the national junior team, but then for three years in a row was the last man cut from the senior national squad - the 13th man. His troubles coincided with those of Aleksandr Gomelsky, the brilliant coach ousted from the top job for two years, allegedly for being a Jew. Gomelsky's replacement simply didn't appreciate Marciulionis's talents.

''I was very worried about him,'' says his wife, Inga. ''I thought it might break him.'' But typically, Marciulionis embraced his defeat and wore it like a hairshirt. ''This number 13 is always in the back of my mind,'' he says now. Born on the 13th of June, he began to see that number as crucial to his destiny. He took 13 as his number at Statyba; he will also wear it at Golden State.

Gomelsky took over the team again in 1987 and made Marciulionis a starter, and in the European championship that year, Marciulionis emerged as a star. Suddenly he was moved to the front of the list for a new Lada 2107 automobile; he got a two-bedroom apartment. With his bonus money, he bought a little cottage in the Lithuanian lake country.

Marciulionis gives Gomelsky much of the credit for the Soviets' 82-76 upset of the Americans in the Olympic semifinals. Gomelsky knew that his whole team was afraid of the Americans, Marciulonis says, and spent three days doing nothing but going from one player to another, talking them out of it.

''He told us that the American players are emotional, but also very fragile,'' Marciulionis says. ''We must try to (Continued on Page 108) stop their fast break, but at all cost not let them finish it with a dunk. Because when they start dunking, they play as if they have wings instead of arms.''

The entire Soviet team played brilliantly in the game, and the most impressive player on the court was Marciulionis. He scored 18 points, led the break, fired no-look passes, went down the lane for a dunk. It was the first time many Americans had seen a European player whose movements didn't have that slightly stiff, book-taught, ersatz quality, but looked in all respects like the real thing.

HOW SARUNAS MARCIULIO-nis safely reached the shores of the N.B.A. from Seoul is a story full of false climaxes with the uncertainties of perestroika providing the historical backdrop. But the reason he ended up with the Warriors is a 27-year-old, $25,000-a-year scout, who also happens to be the coach's son.

Seeing Don Nelson alongside his son Donnie, one is struck first by the physical resemblance, then by the fact that the usual generational progression has been inverted. Both Nelsons are big men, with the father, at 6 feet 6 inches, about two inches taller. Their calm, wide features are similar, their exaggeratedly plodding gaits identical, and they share a deliberate manner.

But while the father has let his gray hair grow rakishly long, and often sports a couple of days' growth of silvery stubble, the son wears a buzz cut. And while the elder cultivates a lascivious charm, exchanging obscene anecdotes with beat reporters, and, in New Hampshire, anyway, hanging out every night in the town's most popular college pub, the son is a born-again Christian.

Part of the reason for this divergence is that while the older Nelson has had a life of almost uninterrupted success - 13 years and five championships as a player with the Boston Celtics; as a coach, first with the Milwaukee Bucks and now Golden State, he won 500 games faster than any other coach in league history - the son has had to deal with a series of near misses.

A broken ankle in high school cost him a chance to play big-time college basketball, and although he was a Division III All-America at Wheaton College, he pointedly told his father -who had left the family four years earlier - not to make any calls that might get him a pro tryout. ''If there's one phrase I'm sick of,'' says Donnie Nelson, ''it's 'son of.' ''

But like his old man, Donnie Nelson has an eye for basketball talent. In the summer of 1985, the Athletes in Action team, a Christian group with whom he was touring Eastern Europe, stopped in Vilnius to play an exhibition, and Nelson was matched one on one against Marciulionis. A year later, after a return match in California, Nelson alerted the Warriors to a 22-year-old Lithuanian who was an ''excellent athlete, very tough and very strong, with a tremendous desire to win.''

In 1987, the Warriors drafted Marciulionis in the sixth round of the annual N.B.A. draft; but league rules state European players are eligible for the draft only during the year they are 22, and the pick was voided after Stan Kasten, president and general manager of the Atlanta Hawks, who also sought Marciulionis, notified the league that Marciulionis's passport indicated he was eight days past his 23d birthday.

For the next year or so, Atlanta, taking advantage of connections in Moscow made by the team owner Ted Turner, who was involved in staging the Goodwill Games, led the N.B.A.'s pursuit of Marciulionis. The Hawks invited him, and other top Soviet players, to their training camp in the summer of 1987. The following year the Hawks traveled to the Soviet Union to play a three-game series against the national team. Despite the rumors that Soviet players might be released after the Olympics, the Hawks were considered to be in such a dominant position no other teams got actively involved.

In fact, the day after the Soviet team won the gold medal, Marciulionis signed a standard N.B.A. contract to play with the Hawks. But because he had signed it hours after hearing that the Soviets would not permit him to leave, the Hawks, fearing dire consequences for Marciulionis if they attempted to enforce it, never submitted the document to the league office within the mandatory 48 hours.

Today neither Marciulionis nor the Hawks will discuss that near agreement. Marciulionis is embarrassed because he signed in the first place; reportedly that first contract was for $250,000, and according to Marciulionis, none of the money was guaranteed.

For Donnie Nelson, who had rushed to Seoul with the purpose of beseeching Marciulionis not to sign anything with the Hawks until he had given the Warriors a chance to top it, the signing was his worst nightmare. But given a reprieve, he got so thoroughly on the case that the Hawks never got any closer than they were that day.

Feeling the nationalist fervor sweeping through Lithuania and the other Baltic republics, and recognizing that Atlanta's directing all its efforts through Moscow was a sore point with Marciulionis, Nelson offered to come to Vilnius. Arriving last February, he staged five basketball clinics and stayed three weeks, spending many of those nights on the couch in the Marciulionis apartment.

Over the next three months, Donnie Nelson made five trips to Vilnius -all, ostensibly, for the purpose of securing permission for Marciulionis just to play in the N.B.A., not necessarily for the Warriors. He concentrated his efforts on the local Lithuanian authorities, a fortuitous strategy because his big push was occurring just as reforms were siphoning power away from Moscow and directing it to the individual republics.

One would hardly suspect that Nelson, who looks and carries himself like a good old boy, and doesn't speak a word of Lithuanian, would be capable of such delicate international diplomacy. But his patient, unthreatening persistence was ideal for the countless visits to local officials he made with Marciulionis. Starting with the coaches and general managers of Statyba, they worked up until they had an audience with the vice president of Lithuania. ''No one would ever say yes or no,'' says Nelson. ''They would just listen to our proposal, say, 'Thank you very much' and leave.''

In fact, Nelson and Marciulionis might still be cooling their heels in some civil servant's antechamber if the world chess champion Gary Kasparov hadn't volunteered to apply his strategic genius and nerve to the cause of Marciulionis and other top Soviet athletes.

On June 20, Kasparov scheduled a press conference in Moscow and arranged for several of the Soviet Union's top international athletes to attend, including the tennis player Andrei Chesnokov, as well as representives of top sports marketers, International Management Group and ProServ. Donnie Nelson represented Marciulionis, who was playing the European championships in Yugoslavia.

Kasparov, recalls Nelson, opened by launching a bold attack on Sovintersport, the agency that deals with the international affairs of Soviet athletes. He said that everyone has known for years that it has exploited Soviet athletes for its own profit. Then he produced a lawyer who explained that under the new reforms, players were totally within their rights to sign contracts on their own. However, Kasparov said that in keeping with the spirit of Communism, these athletes had all decided to donate a significant percentage of their new salaries to Raisa Gorbachev's children's fund.

The three-pronged offensive shamed Sovintersport into watching helplessly as some of its most marketable athletes traipsed across the border.

The same day, Marciulionis signed a three-year $3.8 million contract, completely guaranteed. According to his agent, Marc Fleisher at I.M.G., Marciulionis gets to keep far more than half of it.

IT IS ABOUT 9 O'CLOCK on a Saturday night in the Oakland suburb of Alameda. Marciulionis's 2-year old daughter, Krista, is asleep upstairs; Inga is in the kitchen, and in the darkened living room, Marciulionis is just settling into the second half of a video double feature that began with ''Beverly Hills Cop II,'' followed, after no more than a 10-second intermission, by ''The Dogs of War.'' Marciulionis's taste in American movies runs to violence and slapstick. (The next day, shades drawn on a perfect California afternoon, he takes in ''Coming to America'' and ''Police Academy 6.'') Speaking now without a translator, he expresses himself surprisingly well, but his English is still not good enough to get most verbal jokes, and every now and then, he turns to request an explanation of something on the screen.

Since arriving in Alameda two weeks earlier, the Marciulionis family has moved out of the two-bedroom townhouse the Warriors had found for them and into this spacious house on a golf-course development, and has been on a spending spree: three color televisions, a video camera and an enormous remote-control home-entertainment system that rises against one wall like a small city. He has bought a Mercedes-Benz 300E.

Not that this behavior is anything but reasonable for a man who is making more than $1 million a year. It is, however, a change in attitude from the one he espoused in New Hampshire. In Henniker he seemed so much older than his actual age. In Alameda, maybe for the first time in his life, he was acting his age. The same man whose motto, he said weeks earlier, is ''suffer and die'' is now explaining his spending habits by saying, ''You know, there is only one life,'' as if the dragon's cave weren't such a treacherous place after all.