The birth of a
8 years ago a mathematician and former basketball player Holger Geschwindner started a project: He chose a small talented boy named Dirk Werner Nowitzki to form the world's greatest basketball player - the result is almost perfect.
His business card: A small piece of paper, untidily cut and furnished with bad print of a photo form Albert Einstein. To the left name and adresse of Holger Geschwindner, Altes Schloß, 96110 Peulendorf, telephone number, fax, e-mail. And above all a headline, the company-name:
Institute for Practical Monkey Business.
This piece of paper tells a lot about Holger Geschwindner. His critics say he's a crackpot and that he suffers from megalomania.
Holger Geschwindner 57, is the personal adviser of Dirk Nowitzki, the best white basketball player in the world. Since 5 years the 25 year old is under contract in the north American Pro-league the NBA, he's the star of the Dallas Mavericks, who is celebrated in the USA as "the German Wunderkind", the best German export since the Volkswagen.
In the running season Nowitzki took a time to find back to old strength because an ankle injury threw him back in the first part of the season.
Now he has found back to old strength and he was voted for the "All-star-Game" in February.
Geschwindner was once captain of the German Olympia - Basketball team in 1972 and played with a senior team in Würzburg where he met Dirk Nowitzki, a tall, talented, blonde boy, who played an outstanding game. He slid through the opponents defence with an unbelievable artistic body control for a 2 meter tall player.
Geschwindner noticed that and started a new project to make Dirk Nowitzki the world's greatest basketball player. So Geschwindner and the 16 year old Dirk started to train twice a week, he gets private lessons in a school gym in Rattelsdorf near Bamberg.
The training lessons are strenuous, the boy had to do things he never did before: to walk in a handstand from the free-throw to the middle line, to jump up the stairs with one leg, to make the splits like a ballet-dancer. Also his shot was created new, Geschwindner trains special hand-movements with dirk to improve his shot. Geschwindner developed a perfect shot at his desk through different physical and mathematical calculations. He changes Dirk shot-angle and flight-curve of the ball.
Geschwindner came to the conclusion that the ball has to have at least an angle of incidence of about 32 degrees to have the highest possibility of scoring.
Many mathematicians don't believe Geschwindners theoretical nonsense, instead the say that it will only ruin the boy's talent.
That's the image which was applied to Geschwindner all those years. Ever since, it was his pleasure to behave like a rebel. Matthias Strauß, was a team-partner of Geschwindner in the 70ts, they played for the national basketball team. He remembers a typical scene: "I think it was against Czechoslovakia.
Holger got to the ball and goes alone to the basket, no defensive player near him. Suddenly he stopped, turned around to the trainer and said: It's too easy! He goes two steps back and throws the ball from seven or eight metres into the basket. As a punishment the trainer immediately took him off the field."
A barrier is there to be broken by someone and it is something which makes a task more attractive. It's the same with Geschwindners working life. After his sport-career he studied Mathematics and Science and then worked at the Max-Planck-Institute in Munich.
Soon his side jobs start to interest him more than his actual work the research. Geschwindner calls himself trouble-shooter, he is a fireman in the economy business.
In Colombo, Mississippi, he once took care of a huge farm, which was nearly financially ruined. He commanded 80 workers, created new markets and structured new estates, he let his workers built new streets and when he left the farm after a few months it made profit.
"That is the exciting side of life," says Geschwindner. You put a problem into several pieces.
Then you repair them and put them back together. Because, that's when you did something great.
That's the way Geschwindner works in his project-management company: He tries to solve problems of others, analyses them, and somehow finds a solution for every problem. Whether it is his task to make an unknown company successful, or to turn a blonde boy from Würzburg into a NBA-star player who is second best-earning athlete of Germany behind Michael Schumacher. With an income of about 100 million dollars in 6 years.
When Geschwindner started to work with Dirk 8 years ago, he developed a seven-stage plan.
In summer 2003 Dirk reached stage 6. "That boy", Geschwindner says," is now able to beat any player in the world. We reached that goal. But now comes stage 7 and the question how to not only beat my opponent but the whole team?" An answer to the question was already inside Geschwindners head, when he made the plan: Nowitzki should become a player who can play all 5 positions. That would make it hard for the defender because he would never know where to find Nowitzki. At the age of 17 Dirk played in four teams on three different positions.
A perfect basketball player didn't ever exist in the NBA. Even Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson had a weak spot. But that can't confuse Geschwindner. "Who cares about the others? I know that Dirk has a natural talent. When he gives everything he's got, the he will bring basketball onto a new level.
But stage 7 isn't accomplished jet.
Because stage 7 is not only to be able to play on all positions. Stage 7 also means "emotional intelligence" and "higher education". Also that is part of Geschwindners job. He gave Nowitzki a saxophone and books like "die Geschichte der Natur" from Carl Friedrich Weizsäckers. "The boy has to be mobile in his head, that's the key to success. It won't do anything listening to rap the whole day.
Those songs consist of 100 words and 50 of them are fuck. With such a vocabulary you won't be able to fix any problems - that's monkey business." Or to say it in the words of Geschwindners business-card, bad practical monkey business.
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