As a basketball player, Dirk Nowitzki (45) was a superstar – a status he was never comfortable with off the court. On Saturday he will be inducted into the Hall of Fame.
He once again used his 45th birthday in June this year to “draw attention to the situation of children worldwide. So many of them lack things that most take for granted: clean water, enough to eat, a school where you learn something,” said Dirk Nowitzki. The native of Würzburg is a phenomenon. One who never wanted to be one and that is precisely why he is so phenomenal and fascinating.
Nowitzki would prefer to be a normal father of three who can enjoy his life undisturbed. On the one hand. On the other hand, of course, he wouldn’t want to miss his spectacular career in the jersey of the Dallas Mavericks and the German national team. Not because it brought him popularity, attention and wealth as a globally acclaimed superstar. But because in 21 years as a professional he was allowed to do what he loved: compete with the best basketball players on the planet.
Fame and limelight were side effects that were not part of his drive, that he was not always comfortable with. He did not wallow in the great interest in his person, but handled public enquiries and appearances professionally and confidently, and increasingly loosely and with humour over the years. Nowitzki has remained grounded, modest, informal and has used his reach for years for important and exemplary projects and actions. Like his commitment to children’s rights, which he has also pursued as a UNICEF ambassador for ten years. Or when he recently supported athletes with intellectual disabilities at the Special Olympics in Berlin.
This is one of the reasons why Dirk Nowitzki is a household name even for people who have no idea whatsoever about the world of sport in general and basketball in particular. At the end of 2019, Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier honoured the 2.13-metre man with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for his extensive social commitment, to which he has dedicated himself above all with his foundations.
Nowitzki: The Revolution and the “Flamingo Throw “
Next Saturday, however, the focus will once again be on the exceptional athlete Nowitzki and his sporting legacy: he will be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. At the earliest possible time, in the fourth year after the end of his career. There has long been no doubt that he will get his place in the NBA’s famous Hall of Fame, named after basketball inventor James Naismith. The traces left by the “German wunderkind” in the world’s best league are too striking and significant.
Selected in the 1998 draft, the US talent exchange, Nowitzki has changed his sport permanently. Talented pitchers among the physically longest players, he paved the way for a more variable game. They used to be condemned to infight under the baskets, nowadays they widen the field as a matter of course, taking and hitting distance shots.
Nowitzki’s unique detailed work, also based on physical calculations, with his mentor and individual coach, former national basketball team captain Holger Geschwindner, has incidentally also created his own throw that is almost unblockable for defenders: the one-legged “flamingo throw” after a turn in a backward trap with a high trajectory – since then copied many times successfully. And Nowitzki crowned his career in 2011 when he almost single-handedly led the underdog Dallas Mavericks to the NBA championship – the Texans’ only title to date.
League of Legends
This was both a culmination and a redemption, as Nowitzki was already highly regarded as an exceptional individual performer by this point, documented in part by the MVP (Most Valuable Player) award of the 2007 regular season, but the stigma of titlelessness still clung to him after the narrow 2006 Finals loss to the Miami Heat. Thanks to the successful revenge five years later against the favoured Miami ensemble around superstars LeBron James and Dwyane Wade, Nowitzki – as Finals MVP, of course – had finally joined the phalanx of legends.
Where exactly he ranks among them is left to subjective perception. Even if he himself is in a league of his own among legends, so to speak. There is no bad word, no criticism, no polarisation, only undivided appreciation and extraordinary respect for Nowitzki from the best who have played the sport so far. On his farewell in April 2019 alone, five poster heroes of his childhood and youth – Charles Barkley, Scottie Pippen, Larry Bird, Shawn Kemp and Detlef Schrempf – outdid themselves with superlatives and tributes on the floor. The opposing, highly decorated coach Doc Rivers had interrupted a must-win game weeks earlier especially to urge the Los Angeles Clippers’ audience to applaud “one of the greatest of all time”.
Looking at the ranking of the NBA’s best point scorers, Nowitzki’s exceptional position also becomes unmistakably clear. Currently, only LeBron James, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Karl Malone, Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan have scored more points. The next European, Spaniard Pau Gasol, follows far behind (20 894 points) in 42nd place.
While the tireless James, another almost unbelievable basketball phenomenon, can continue to build on his leading position as a still active player, the four others have long since been immortalised in the Hall of Fame. The last of the top quartet to be inducted posthumously was Bryant in 2020, a few months after his tragic accidental death. Now it is Nowitzki’s turn. Together with Gasol, 2011 Finals opponent Wade, Frenchman Tony Parker and coaching legend Gregg Popovich, all of whom helped shape Nowitzki’s era in the NBA, as well as Becky Hammon, who made her mark on the Women’s NBA over the years, the former power forward will be formally inducted – as the first German.
From stuffy Würzburg gymnasiums to the NBA
He has chosen 2018 Hall-of-Famer and former post players Steve Nash and Jason Kidd as his laudators. Nowitzki remains close friends with Nash, having played with the Canadian in Dallas for the first six years of his career. He won the championship in 2011 alongside Kidd, the current head coach of the Mavericks. When his honour was announced back in April, team player Nowitzki responded in typical fashion on his Twitter channel. He highlighted the value of the group – “a great year” – and felt “honoured and humbled” to be a part of it.
If you ever make a pilgrimage to the sacred halls in Springfield, Massachusetts, you will find a jersey in the ball-shaped dome among all the pioneers, luminaries, exceptional athletes, heroes and idols of the man who once swore off tennis and handball to shoot his first baskets in the stuffy gymnasiums of Würzburg. Years later, an audience of millions watched him do it. In Germany, sports fans of all ages regularly got up at night to watch his games – just like Muhammad Ali’s boxing matches in the past.
In Dallas, where Nowitzki and his family still mainly live and he supports his club as a consultant, they have put a statue of him in front of the arena, named a street after him and honourably retired his jersey under the hall ceiling. His number 41 will never be issued again by the Mavs.
Nowitzki: Honours en masse – and always true to himself
The German Basketball Federation did the same with Nowitzki’s number 14 at the start of the home European Championships 2022. Despite exhausting NBA seasons, the tall blond has also put his bones on the line for the national team almost every summer, a total of 153 times, and has also achieved remarkable things: World Cup bronze in 2002, European Championship silver in 2005 and Olympic participation in 2008, when he was allowed to lead the German athletes as a flag bearer in Beijing. An impressive experience, for him the greatest next to the NBA triumph.
Honours and awards galore for someone who has always remained true to himself without airs and graces and, despite all his exceptional talent, has always trained hard and sacrificially for success. In essence, Nowitzki has nothing to regret, except perhaps the last two years of his career, as he once admitted, because he can no longer run without pain and play football with the kids in the garden.
He has retained his sense of reality and ability to change perspective despite his long time in the glitzy, over-the-top US professional circuit. “I think it’s crazy: I can put a ball in a basket relatively well because I’m 2.80 metres tall. But there are probably thousands of other people who are just as good at their job as I am, but no one knows them,” says Nowitzki in the 2014 documentary “The Perfect Throw”.
There won’t be another like Nowitzki. But at least the chances are not bad that he will fulfil Geschwindner’s only wish for him: to help develop new talents as an individual coach and mentor and to impart his values to them.