How the Ball brothers ended up un Lithuania
PRIENAI, Lithuania — It was only fitting, perhaps, that an intercontinental escapade exhibiting the awesome power of the present day sports-celebrity-industrial complex began with a late-night direct message on Twitter.
At around 1:30 a.m. on Dec. 6, Erikas Kirvelaitis, a 21-year-old basketball journalist in Lithuania, sent an unsolicited question via Twitter to Harrison Gaines, a sports agent in Los Angeles with two semifamous teenage clients: Would LiAngelo and LaMelo Ball, by any chance, be interested in playing professional basketball in Prienai?
Kirvelaitis had been hired only a few months earlier to do part-time communications work for Prienai-Birstonas Vytautas, a small club here in the Lithuanian basketball league. His bosses did not know at first about his Twitter gambit. It was a shot in the dark, anyway.
But to Kirvelaitis’ amazement, Gaines wrote back asking for more information. And less than a week later, the young Americans were signing contracts to begin their professional careers in this unassuming town nearly 6,000 miles from home.
“It was like a dream, crazy, a miracle, for our club to even have contact with them,” Kirvelaitis said. “But I’m someone who believes anything can be done if you try.”
People in Lithuania sensed immediately that something big had happened, even if they did
not quite know who the boys were. This is a basketball-mad country, and the eyes of the sport had suddenly turned its way.
Over the next few days, Lithuanians learned the basic facts: LiAngelo, 19, and LaMelo, 16, are the younger brothers of Lonzo, the star rookie point guard for the Los Angeles Lakers. The boys’ father, LaVar, has become famous in his own right over the past year, most recently entering the news cycle for goading the president of the United States into a Twitter feud.
“It is the talk of the country,” said Althea Cawley-Murphree, an official at the U.S. Embassy in Vilnius.
The teenagers, for now, may
be more fame-adjacent than truly famous, and scouts have doubts about their realistic prospects in the game. But for Vytautas, a financially struggling club looking for ways to raise its profile for sponsors and sell more tickets, that was enough.
“One of the brothers on Instagram has as many followers as Lithuania does people,” said Adomas Kubilius, the director of the club. “At the beginning, it seemed almost like a joke, just something for fun.” He paused for a second and shrugged. “And then it got serious.”
The impending arrival of the Ball brothers — they are scheduled to come to Lithuania on Jan. 4 and could play their first game five days later — has sent a jolt through Prienai, a small town on the banks of the Neman River with a population of around 9,000 people.
On Saturday, the team’s arena — a drab, boxy building on a sprawling plot of land — filled nearly to its capacity of 1,500 for a game against Zalgiris Kaunas, the league’s first-place team. The concessions consisted of a single table of snacks — including wedges of bread fried to a crisp and seasoned with garlic. On the opposite side of the hallway, a woman served generous bowls of stewed grains from an enormous steel vat.
Many people in Prienai are self-deprecating about their stature relative to the rest of the world. Still, some said they were bruised by the more condescending characterizations of their humble town.
“For me, it’s already tiring, this attention,” said Alvydas Vaicekauskas, the mayor of Preinai. “There’s been a lot of ironical information about Prienai, and people might get the feeling that it’s on the outskirts of the world.”
Americans last week, for example, seemed to particularly fall in love with a factoid that Billy Baron, an American who briefly played in Lithuania, had relayed to a number of news media outlets in the United States: that Virginijus Seskus, the coach of Vytautas, sold meat out of the back of his car after practice.
Seskus, 50, is a fixture of Lithuanian basketball, known for his intensity on the sideline and droll manner away from the court. He insisted the language barrier with the Balls would not be so difficult to overcome and that his English was not as poor as people seemed to think.
“I won’t be able to tell my Lithuanian jokes,” he said in Lithuanian, before switching to English and adding, “But I have two weeks.”
During the game — in which Vytautas got manhandled — Seskus stalked the sideline and yelled with the force of his entire body, displeasure animating his extremities. He spent the entire second half in a heated argument with Eigirdas Zukauskas, the team’s captain, often screaming inches away from his face.
Stricken by injuries, Vytautas had dressed only eight players. Seskus later joked that the brothers had missed an opportunity for some playing time. He said he was interested to meet the boys’ father despite his reputation back home for clashing with his sons’ coaches.
Many American sports fans first heard of LaVar Ball, 50, earlier this year when he surprisingly claimed that he could have beaten Michael Jordan in a game of one-on-one basketball. Since then, he has developed a reality show and shoe brand for himself and his sons. Last month, after LiAngelo Ball and two UCLA teammates were accused of shoplifting from a Louis Vuitton store in Hangzhou, China, President Donald Trump scolded the elder Ball on Twitter for failing to thank him for his supposed help in resolving the situation.
For Vytautas, these were all appealing things. “I think he’s the perfect businessman,” Kubilius said of LaVar Ball. “He managed, in a country where it’s very difficult to surprise someone, to achieve such a level of publicity and a brand that is popular.”