When his dream comes true, it feels like a nightmare for long weeks and months.
On June 24, 1998, at the draft, the central talent exchange, the Dallas Mavericks put everything on a 20-year-old who, even in the distant basketball diaspora of Germany, only plays in the second division. Dirk Nowitzki himself is not even present at the major sporting event in Vancouver, Canada, but is sleeping with his mentor Holger Geschwindner in Peulendorf near Bamberg. When the well-wishers call in the middle of the night, Geschwindner rips the phone out of the socket: Preparations for the U22 European Championship are on the agenda. Richie Whitt, columnist for the local daily newspaper “Fort Worth Star-Telegram”, is appalled that Dallas is backing Nowitzki: It’s the stupidest decision he’s ever heard of.
Apart from a strong performance in a world selection against the best US talents three months earlier, Nowitzki actually had very little to show for it back then: A (very close) choice for Germany’s basketball player of the year, a few international matches, a contract for an annual salary of 18,000 marks at his hometown club Würzburg, with whom he reached a cup quarter-final and just promoted to the first division. “Maybe I’ll play here next season,” says Nowitzki after the promotion game. “Money isn’t everything.”
It seems more realistic that he goes to a top European club; to Barcelona and Bologna. Alternatively, he’s considering getting used to US basketball at a college, like Stanford, for a year or two. Instead, he plucked up courage and signed with NBA basement team Dallas. Then nothing happens for months. In those weeks, a bitter labor dispute raged: As long as the players and the billionaire team owners don’t come to an agreement, the 1998/99 NBA season won’t start, in case of doubt the entire season will fall through the cracks. So Nowitzki stays in his home country. He celebrates New Year’s Eve in the confidence that he will be able to develop in peace for a while, away from the cameras.
On the morning of January 5, he reads that the collective bargaining dispute is over. His first reaction? “‘Oh my god, I really have to go over there now!’ I was actually hoping they would cancel the entire season.” In the book “Nowitzki” his quote is: “My world in Würzburg collapsed with this news. I was dazed, paralyzed.”
The 13 games that he has also played in the Bundesliga in the meantime are waste: By far the best league in the world is calling, and under difficult circumstances – in order to save as much turnover as possible, the season is played as condensed as possible. His American adventure begins with a weekend full of cautionary tales about – to quote Nowitzki – “fame and fortune, investments, women and venereal diseases”.
The training camp is radically shortened to about a week and a half, followed by 50 games in just two and a half months. Between all the flights across North America, there is practically no time for team training. “It was utter madness,” Nowitzki recalls. “And extremely hard for me.” According to the book “German Wunderkind” he said at the time: “There is nothing left in my body.”
Looking back, Nowitzki describes those first games as “completely surreal. I played against the idols of my youth, Charles Barkely and Scottie Pippen – and that first year was a crazy ride.”
The culture shock is enormous: Dallas, which he thinks he knows from the western series of the same name as a cozy little town similar to his home town of Würzburg, turns out to be a metropolis full of skyscrapers. Nowitzki is overwhelmed by the language barrier and life as an adult with household chores, laundry, food and bills. Away from the pitch, Nowitzki found support relatively quickly: The slightly older playmaker Steve Nash, who came from Canada and was also heavily criticized by US sports journalists, became his best friend, the team employee Lisa Tyner, a kind of adoptive mother, and also a team psychologist – at the time an exception – helps. Slowly but surely it will.
But it is crucial on the pitch, and Nowitzki is having a hard time there. The game is faster and at the same time much more physical than usual; the skinny German is pushed around under the baskets.
His self-confidence dwindles, malice grows. Under the weight of the pressure of expectation built up by Geschwindner (“Detlef Schrempf was the Volkswagen, Dirk is the Porsche”) he is in danger of collapsing. Then-assistant coach Donnie Nelson says, “Dirk felt like a baby that had been abandoned in the woods.” Head coach Don Nelson recalled, “About mid-season he came up to me and said, ‘I want to go home .'”
The trainers – father and son Nelson, but above all Geschwindner – forbid him to give up and sneak away. They don’t allow him to fail, they challenge and encourage him more than ever.
This enables a sports fairy tale that is not accidentally kitschy: Nowitzki’s career follows the original myth of the “hero’s journey” just like Homer’s “Odyssey” or “Star Wars”: Nowitzki fails again and again, but thanks to his mentor he improves year after year Year after year, earns the respect of teammates, opponents and referees.
In 2006, he led his Mavericks into the NBA Finals series against Miami, where star and team imploded spectacularly. The following year, Dallas dominated the regular season, and Nowitzki received a well-deserved award as the best player in the league – but by the time the trophy was awarded, Dallas had already left the playoffs in a highly embarrassing way.
Privately, Nowitzki struggled for a long time against the loneliness of the multi-million dollar professional athlete – and then against the shock of having eaten a hair of the marriage swindler Crystal Taylor, who was arrested in his villa shortly before the planned wedding for fraud and forgery in early 2009. Nowitzki is on the ground, especially since despite all the individual bests, the professional criticism of him is getting louder: Although he is an excellent thrower and great sportsman, everyone agrees, but he lacks what Oliver Kahn calls “balls” and the Americans martial “killer mentality”.
The successes to which he grinds the national team, which would not be competitive without him during his summer breaks, which are actually urgently needed for regeneration – bronze in the 2002 World Cup, silver in the 2005 European Championships and qualification for the 2008 Olympic Games – do not count.
In the spring of 2011, however, he suddenly played like he was unleashed and led Dallas to the longed-for first championship in revenge against the oh-so-overpowering team from Miami – as the dominant leader of a whole team full of players who were said to be too old or simply too bad. The fact that he met his future wife last year could also be a coincidence, but it’s probably not.
The entire sports world bows – and does so again when Dirk Werner Nowitzki ended his career in April 2019.
If he had stayed on for nine months, he would have been the first player to appear in four different decades. He heartily didn’t care, especially since he’s fielded dozens of others, including one for Forever: 21 seasons with the same team. All the games, hard training sessions and travel of those years ruined his joints, which in turn spoiled the fun of the game.
Today he is a private owner, husband of the Swedish-Kenyan gallery owner Jessica Olsson, proud father of their three children Malaika, Max and Morris. He remains connected to basketball as a fan and World Cup ambassador. After a unique career with sporting spirit and style, in which he remained true to himself and achieved success with talent, diligence and discipline. He earned around 250 million dollars – and voluntarily waived another almost 200 million. It is the value Nowitzki places on the loyalty shown to him when he was willing to disappear into anonymity amid derision and ridicule.
When his story almost ended before it began.
2023-06-23 14:29:00
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