Crocodile Nowitzki

Nowitzki was from Warzburg, an idyllic Bavarian town surrounded by forests and medieval castles. Nowitzki's father, a house painter, had been an elite handball player, and Nowitzki had followed in his footsteps, playing tennis and handball. Because his mother and older sister played basketball, Nowitzki considered it women's sport and showed no interest in basketball until at the age of 13 he attended a cousin's practice and fell in love with the game.

Geschwinder told Nowitzki that he could achieve his dream of playing in the NBA, but it would take a lot of hard work and dedication. He came up with a five-year plan. He believed that the game of basketball was changing, and that if Nowitzki was going to compete in the NBA he would have to become a player who could play any position. So instead of putting him under the basket and teaching him the dunk and the sky hook, the traditional moves of men his size, he dragged him out to the 3-point line and taught him how to shoot.

Geschwinder approached basketball with the frenzy of a mad scientist. Using calculus and physics and factoring in Nowitzki's height, he calculated the "optimal angle" Nowitzki should shoot the ball from, encouraging him to shoot a high-arching rainbow shot, releasing the ball high above his head. Every morning before school, Nowitzki would take 500 of these shots. He also made him do his push-ups from the tips of his fingers so the ball would leave his hands at "sub-optimal" velocity.

A basketball team was like a good jazz band, he told Nowitzki. Some players were virtuosos, and others were specialists, but to make good music they all had to know their parts and play them well. Sooner or later, everyone would have to step up and play a solo, and the others would fade into the background. He had Nowitzki learn to play the saxophone to reinforce this principle.

At times Geschwinder's training methods seemed bizarre, rooted in a bygone era, and in the same way that the Daniel LaRusso character questioned his mentor, Mr. Miyagi, in the 1984 movie The Karate Kid, Nowitzki sometimes was left scratching his head at the drills his coach came up with. To teach Nowitzki balance, for example, Geschwinder had him do walking handstands or ran him around like a wheelbarrow, with his hands on Nowitzki's ankles. To teach defense, he got a former fencing champion to demonstrate to Nowitzki that in fencing, as in all sports, good offense flows out of good defense. Over the years, his training regimen would include rowing, ballet, rollerblading and guitar lessons. To prepare Nowitzki for the added weight his frame would acquire, he made him wear a 22-pound vest as he practiced.

In the years since, Nowitzki's life had been consumed by basketball. As a player, he was nearly fully formed. But there was one final stage of development he had yet to complete. This was stage seven, as Geschwinder called it. It included "emotional intelligence" and "broadband literacy." And just as he had used jazz to teach the concept of teamwork and fencing to teach the importance of defense, he had come to Australia to teach his pupil this final lesson.

Like nomads they roamed, across the flat and arid plains of the Central Basin, which extended from the Great Dividing Range to the Western Plateau. As they traveled they talked. In Geschwinder's mind, many of the so-called truths of America's sports culture were "bullshit." Take positive thinking, for example. "If you put a tightrope over a chasm and ask a man to walk across it who has never done it before, it doesn't matter how much positive thinking he does, he's going to fall."