So he left the scene of his greatest triumph before a single teammate or coach could grab him for a hug, faster than he has ever hurdled a scorer's table to bolt off the floor, all to sneak back to the visitors' locker room.
To cry alone.
"I could already feel the tears coming," Nowitzki said. "I had to recover, bro."
- Marc Stein, ESPN.COM
As utterly satisfying the combined delight of Dirk Nowitzki’s first championship and the 2010-2011 Miami Heat’s comeuppance was, I would be lying if I said I knew this was going to happen. Prior to the 2011 NBA Finals, I was convinced that the Miami Heat would end up defeating the Dallas Mavericks for the following reasons, ranging from reasonable to unreasonable:
REASONABLE: In their playoff series against the Chicago Bulls, Miami displayed the fastest, most anime-like defense I can even remember. Sure, the Mavs were headed into the Finals armed with the best ball movement in the 2011 Playoffs, but I thought it was reasonable to think that Miami’s super athletes could trump the Mavs semi and ex athletes. They had a number of options to put on Nowitzki (Haslem, Bosh, Anthony), whereas the Mavs had one option on LeBron James (a past-his-prime Shawn Marion) and zero options on Dwyane Wade (I didn’t think Jason Kidd could guard Wade; and he couldn’t).
SEMI-REASONABLE: The argument for the Mavs winning was that they were a disciplined, veteran group that can outsmart the Heat’s uber-athletes. The problem with this argument was that I heard it twice before: in 1997 and 1998. Stockton and Malone’s Utah Jazz were smart enough, tough enough, and experienced enough to outlast the Chicago Bulls’ thoroughbreds. Guess how that panned out.
UNREASONABLE: The Dallas Mavericks were the complete antithesis of the Miami Heat. They were led by a humble superstar who stayed with his team through all the playoff disappointments and failures. Their one star is surrounded by a bunch of has-beens and rejects. Their players were slow and didn’t soar above the rim. They were the good to Miami’s evil, the Jedi to their Sith, the Daniel Larusso to their Cobra Kai. Outside of Steve Nash, no one in the NBA was more deserving of a championship than Dirk Nowitzki – a perennial loser who constantly worked hard to get better and produced consistently good numbers throughout his career. Beating the Miami Heat – the team that started his downward spiral in 2006 – would be poetic justice. And precisely because it made perfect karmic sense for the Mavericks to win, I expected them to lose.
My last reason didn’t really seem unreasonable to me at the time. I have been following the NBA closely since my early high school years and have vague recollections of those Celtics, Lakers, and Pistons championship teams during the late 80s. In the same manner in which I have developed a rhythmic familiarity with the seasons – from the cold early months of the year, to summer, to the typhoon-filled BER-months, to the cold late months of the year – I somehow grew up developing a keen sense of what happens in the NBA and in sports in general.
My first few years of sports fandom were filled with a lot of disappointment and confusion. For instance, I couldn’t get why Michael Jordan’s Bulls kept winning championships when the three-star template had already been set by Magic’s Lakers and Bird’s Celtics and the multi-pronged attack was already established by Isaiah’s Pistons. I couldn’t get over my beloved New York Knicks losing in the Finals after having two important pre-requisites for a championship team: inside scoring and an NBA-best defense.
Looking back, I now know where that confusion came from: I was confusing sports from fiction. As a kid I was equally a huge fan of music, film, and literature as I was of basketball. And in (non-postmodern) art, the good guy often won in the end. When the good guy doesn’t win, he still “wins” through some sort of “redemption” that is internal in nature. But the guys in the NBA who always seemed to deserve a championship – the Barkleys, the Ewings, the Stocktons, the Malones, the Nashes – always lost. And there was always absolutely nothing redemptive about the way they lost.
I was confused about this throughout my puberty, adolescence, and into my early 20s. Through the long process of getting older, through all the personal striving and failing, through all the regrets and traumas, I finally became more equipped to understand the realities of sports better: it’s not about who deserves to win; it’s about playing the game.
Two NBA superstars helped me understand this: Steve Nash and Dirk Nowitzki.
As teammates in Dallas, they were billed as the next-big-thing, the run-and-gun update of Stockton and Malone. After a number of playoff disappointments, Nash moved to the Phoenix Suns where he led perhaps the most entertaining and most likeable NBA team of the last 20 years. Now in separate teams, Nowitzki and Nash were nonetheless linked in failure. They both went on to win MVPs (twice for Nash, once for Nowitzki) and led their teams to 50-win seasons (5 for Nash’s Suns; 7 for Nowitzki’s Mavs). But what always stood out in the end was their string of bad luck (a broken nose and a dwindling supporting cast for Nash; a broken foot and crucial missed shots for Nowitzki) that led to disappointing playoff losses year after year.
In the realm of pure bad luck and drama, no NBA player trumps Steve Nash. But I always saw Nowitzki in the same light: an unselfish, humble all-star who always worked hard but could never get over the hump. What made these two players similar in my mind wasn’t just the fact that their seasons always seemed to end in bitter disappointment; it’s how they dealt with the disappointment.
Over the last 14 or so months, we just witnessed LeBron James handle adversity by blaming his teammates and abandoning them (2010), and then attacking his critics (this month). In two separate cases, Nash and Nowitzki had chances to leave their respective teams in free agency. They both chose to stay instead of diminishing their greatness by riding on another superstar’s greatness. In Nowitzki’s case (unlike Nash), it was almost always his fault why his teams lost every year. Instead of whining in press conferences, he kept all the hurt to himself. He spent off-seasons traveling the world, soul searching, and developing his game.
In each of those playoff exits from 2006 to 2010, Nowitzki’s game got better. And in this season, it all added up. He had a stronger post-up game. He developed an insane wrinkle to his already deadly fadeaway: the one-legged-off-the-wrong-foot fadeaway. He improved his dribble-penetration. He improved his reads and became a better passer. It even came to a point this season where – not only did he know where the double team was coming from with his back turned to the weak side – he knew where the defense thought he would rotate the ball to, and then passed to a different teammate.
To me, Dirk Nowitzki’s legacy will never be the championship he won earlier this week. I have seen more than 20 NBA champions in my lifetime; I have never seen a loser quite like Nowitzki. All the losing, all the pain, all those disappointing seasons that made basketball Sisyphean in its impossibility, like the damned Greek king cursed for eternity to push a boulder up a mountain only to watch it roll back down again, never broke him. It never did.
It made him stronger. It made him better.
LeBron James hinted in his bitter postgame rant that most of us sports fans are losers. He is right. We worship at the altar of all the great winners of sports – Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Tom Brady, Manny Pacquiao – but at the end of the day, to paraphrase LeBron: “we have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that we had before we woke up today…have the same personal problems we had today.” Everywhere in the world, everyday, people lose. They lose money, lose friends, lose respect, self-worth. They get fired, they get stuck in jobs, they get rejected, they fail at their dreams. And in this world filled with losers, no superstar is more important than Dirk Nowitzki.
I expected the Mavs to lose to the Heat and I was prepared for that possibility. That’s just what happens when you become an older, wiser, more scarred sports fan. You learn to appreciate older, wiser, and more scarred superstars like Nowitzki and trust that, when they lose, it will hurt them but it will not break them. You can see it in the way they seem unimpressed with every big shot they make, the way they seem unperturbed when an opponent makes a big shot of their own. You know they’ve seen everything. You know they’ve been through a lot. You know that failure no longer scares them. You know that winning isn’t the only reason why they play the game; they play the game because they love the game.
I think Nowitzki cried his heart out in the locker room on Monday because he literally was unprepared for success. That prospect had long been an alien idea to him. It wasn’t part of the plan anymore. You lose long enough, you get hurt long enough, it ceases to become about winning. All you have left, the one thing you still know you can give, is your best. Everyday. Knowing you could fail over and over again.
On Monday, Dirk Nowitzki finally won the championship he longed “deserved”. And I feel happy for him.
But I will forever respect and remember him for being the inspiring loser that he was.
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