Tales From "Crocodile Nowitzki": A True Story Of A Tall German Child And His Road To Redemption

From: "Crocodile Nowitzki," a 2007 story by Jesse Hyde in the Dallas Observer:

Dirk Nowitzki was lost. And he was starting to stink.
He had come this far, deep into the Australian Outback, and now that it was dark, he didn't know where he was. Not exactly, anyway. He'd ended up on a patch of wind-swept dirt, surrounded by sagebrush and stiff yellow grass, a place to park the Jeep and build a campfire.
The closest town of any significance was Alice Springs, or the Alice, as the locals called it. It was once a telegraph station so remote it had to be stocked by camel train. Aborigines could still be seen at times on its outskirts, wading shirtless in the muddy Todd River. But that was 250 miles away. Other than the wind, which blew softly through camp, the night was silent.
Nowitzki sat in front of the fire, strumming his guitar and sipping his whiskey straight from the bottle. He had stopped shaving days ago and didn't know when he would bathe next. He had been in Australia for a week and a half, even though it was May, and by all accounts he should have been somewhere else. He should've been on a basketball court, leading the Dallas Mavericks deep into the NBA Playoffs. He should've been winning a championship. But for the second year in a row, the season had ended in disappointment. Once again people were questioning his mental toughness.
He had but one traveling companion on this trip, his mentor Holger Geschwinder, a mostly bald 62-year-old German with puffy bags under his eyes and a big Roman nose that looked like it had been broken in a fistfight, or several fistfights over the years. In the light of the fire, his features looked sharp, as if his head had been cut from granite.
Nowitzki had come to Australia because he didn't want to be recognized. He didn't want to be reminded of his failures, of the places he should have been.
In his haste to leave Dallas, he had failed to consider one thing-it was winter in Australia, meaning darkness would fall early each night of his trip. At the present moment, sitting in front of the fire, there was nothing to do but sit and think, or talk to Geschwinder.
"Why me?" Nowitzki wondered, gazing into the glowing embers. "Why is this happening to me?"
He had just a few weeks to find the answer.

Crocodile Nowitzki. Just kind of rolls of the tongue doesn't it. Croc Nowitzki for short. Sheeeee-it, might have to make a shirt right thurrr. Reading this excerpt from the Dallas Observer and this Deadspin article has convinced me that Dirk "Croc" Nowitzki is now my number one athlete that I wish I could personaly hang out with or know. Nolan, Troy, Dion, Irving, Emmitt, are up there for sure, but I can't tell you what I'd do to jam the fuck out with Dirk in Australia while drinking whiskey straight from the bottle. If the make a wish foundation did charidy for 20 something year old bloggers who were diagnosed as terminally ill, I would poison myself until I got something just so that wish could come true. Is saying that I would die for Dirk a little extreme? No. Because I would.