Mavs' Nowitzki popular in native Germany despite his sport

BERLIN — Germans love the Dirk Nowitzki story: the young local man who travels halfway around the world to play among giants, in a city known mainly as a nighttime TV soap opera, to conquer in a game few Germans care about.

Although he's the NBA's returning most valuable player, the Dallas Mavericks' 7-foot forward remains a story Germans don't really understand.

"To understand Nowitzki's profile here, you have to understand that he is probably the single most popular athlete still active in Germany, but that very few people see him play," said Marcus Nick, the editor of Basket Magazine, Germany's most popular basketball publication. "Nowitzki is basketball in Germany, but the three most popular sports are soccer, soccer and soccer."

Still, the Nowitzki story has great appeal.

"He makes his way in America, becomes a star at their own game, then returns here and is unchanged, a typical German who lives in the bedroom he grew up in and loves his mother," said Christoph Bertling, a sports researcher at the German Sport University in Cologne.

He's not the only German sports star these days, though most of the biggest names have retired, including former Formula One champion Michael Schumacher, former tennis stars Steffi Graf and Boris Becker and the great German soccer player Franz Beckenbauer.

But he's the most likable.

Friends, coaches and media watchers note that while he earns $14 million a year, he doesn't travel with an entourage, insist on special foods or complain about being paired with a roommate while playing with the German National Team, which he does every summer after the long NBA season.

He's known for being soft-spoken, for helping children and for understanding the obligation to society that Germans think athletes owe. In German, he's "bodenstaendig," or down-to-earth. And, especially coming from the often flamboyant NBA, it's the key to his popularity.

"He could earn much more money as a spokesman, but his appeal here is that he doesn't," Bertling said.

Nowitzki isn't a constant presence in German society — athletes aren't. Film actors are preferred as spokespeople. In a recent poll, no more than 8 percent of Germans associated any active player with the product he or she advertised, though Nowitzki was at the top of the list.

The Mavericks and the NBA are barely an afterthought on the German sports scene, featured on the satellite Premiere system, which has an estimated 4.5 million subscribers (for movies, sports, news and children's programming), in this nation of 82 million.

A Premiere spokesman said the company doesn't disclose viewer numbers but said that it's happy with NBA viewership. NBA games often are broadcast in the early hours of the morning (7:30 p.m. in Dallas is 1:30 a.m. in Berlin). When those games are on, they feature Dallas more often than not.

Dirk Bauermann, the coach of the German national team and nine-time coaching champion of the German Basketball League, said that millions tune in whenever Nowitzki is playing for Germany. In contrast, the German league isn't televised here.

There have been German NBA players before: Uwe Blab and Detlef Schrempf, though neither had near Nowitzki's popularity, and neither won the NBA's Most Valuable Player Award.

"At this point in his career, after long, draining seasons, maybe the best thing for him would be to rest over the summers," Bauermann said. "But he knows how important he is to the sport in Germany, so he's always here, always ready to help, to play, to give us as much time as he has."

Nowitzki is a constant nominee for German Sportsman of the Year, an award he's expected to win this December, which would make him the first basketball player to win the honor.

"You cannot overstate his importance in Germany," said German Basketball Federation spokesman Christoph Bueker. "He's a star here despite the sport he plays."