The following article is from our February 2005 issue.

Seven Feet of Würzburg. A seven-foot tall kid from a small German town is living the American Dream. By Peter Köpf

Dirk Nowitzki left Würzburg to conquer America and the NBA. But when his playing days are over, he wants to come home.

A lot of famous people come from Würzburg: the medieval sculptor Tilman Riemen­schneider, the man who invented the X-ray, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, and others. Not everyone in this mid-sized town in southern Germany knows all the famous names, but everyone knows one: Dirk Nowitzki, the basketball player who set out from Würzburg to conquer the NBA and America. The unusually tall basketball player casts a long shadow over this small town - and not everyone is always happy about it. Nowitzki fever inspired the region's leading businesses and personalities to declare that the rest of the city was suffering from an image problem, and the local paper, Main-Post, complained that the town "has a lot more to offer. It's just that nobody knows it." When he's not home in Würzburg, Nowitzki is in Dallas, where he plays pro-basketball for the Dallas Mavericks. The U.S. media calls him "the best German import since the VW Beetle" and, after Larry Bird, "the finest white basketball player of all time." In 2001, he signed a contract that will earn him about 80 million dollars in six years. He has bought himself a house and now drives a Mercedes. He's the kid from Würzburg who came to live the American Dream. As a boy, Dirk Nowitzki did not want to become a basketball player. He thought the sport was a women's game, as his sister and his mother played it. Nor did Nowitzki want to become a handball player like his father.

Instead, he rather fancied the idea of imitating the young Wimbledon champion Boris Becker. He got himself a haircut like Boris, but at the Bavarian Youth Championships in Lindau he lost out. Something else embarrassed him, though: He was already towering over his competitors by at least a head. When he was twelve and the growth showed no signs of stopping, his mother Helga took him to see a doctor. The doctor measured Dirk's wrist and predicted two yards. It turned out to be seven feet. At this stage, Dirk had already made peace with his height. His teacher had lured him to basketball, and now each new inch was a gift. "They were all giants there, so he felt comfortable," remembered his father Jörg-Werner Nowitzki. "From the day he made the decision to play basketball, his height ceased to be a problem." To be able to fit into his first car, a red VW Rabbit, he had to extend the rails under the driver's seat.

At 14, Nowitzki adored the Dream Team, the American gold medal winners at the Barcelona Olympic Games: Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Larry Bird and Scottie Pippen. This was where Dirk also wanted to be.
When ex-German national team player Holger Geschwindner saw him in 1993, he asked Nowitzki if being a star in Germany would satisfy him, or whether he wanted to compete with the best in the world. Nowitzki took on the challenge. Geschwindner polished his raw diamond with a daily routine of jazz gymnastics and fingertip push-ups. But "Hodge," as Nowitzki calls his mentor, also awakened in his protégé an enthusiasm for playing the saxophone and for literature. "It's no use listening to rap all day," said Geschwindner. "These songs consist of 100 words, and 50 of those are 'fuck.' You can't solve problems with that kind of vocabulary." In the summer of 1998, his dream became reality: The coach of the Dallas Mavericks, Don Nelson, and the club's owner, Ross Perot jr., came to Würzburg. A few days later, in Dallas, the Mavericks presented their newest acquisition, the 19-year-old "German wunderkind." In February 1999, Nowitzki left Würzburg to live in America - full of expectations, but with a heavy heart. In America, he sometimes misses the "narrow alleyways" of Würzburg's Old Town, and "my mother's stuffed cabbage." He spends his summer vacation at home, mainly with his family, where, he says, he finds "tranquility." He often visits his old mates, who are known to postpone their weddings until the summers, so he can attend.

A large body like his, he says, needs "German food with its high nutritional value." Not to mention a large bed, which is why he always sleeps on the old futon in his childhood bedroom. Dirk Nowitzki knows what Würzburg is worth to him. When back home in Würzburg, he has a daily two-hour workout with Geschwindner, spends time on his home trainer in the afternoons and on a gymnastics unit in the evenings. German national basketball coach Dirk Bauermann called him a "gym rat," someone, "who is the first to arrive for training and the last one to leave and switch off the lights." Geschwindner praised him: "From the very beginning, Dirk saw his talent as an obligation and never lost sight of his goal." According to Nowitzki, this goal was never just to earn a lot of money. "I am a person who loves basketball," Nowitzki told his biographer Dino Reisner, "who went off to America because he wanted to play his sport there, and not because he wanted to earn a lot of money."

The most important thing for him, he said, was "being on a court with the best players in the world." He likes life in Dallas. He likes drifting around in the glittering metropolis, where it is possible for him to drop out of sight every once in a while.
In Würzburg he can't do that anymore: As soon as he appears, fans surround him.
"I can't take vacation here anymore," he admitted. "I'd have to take a plane to the Caribbean." He has never forgotten where he came from: "My true home is and remains Würzburg," he said. Once his playing days are over, he wants to return home.

- Peter Köpf is a Berlin-based journalist whose latest book, Die Mommsens, is a biography of the famous historian dynasty.