No Drilling, No Scanning, No Excerebration
Posted by Rob Mahoney on September 29, 2009 under Commentary | 
Unless your mind’s eye can pierce flesh, defense mechanisms, and falsehoods, you probably don’t know what Dirk Nowitzki is thinking. Unless of course, you’re Dirk to Nowitzki, to whom I would say: What up?
That’s why every bit of conjecture concerning Dirk’s mental state this summer has irked me a bit. It doesn’t exactly keep me up nights, but it certainly leaves a bad taste in my mouth when others conclusively deem how this summer’s off-court events will affect Dirk’s life. Do we have any reason to believe that a rattled Dirk would perform any differently on the floor? A stellar performance against the Nuggets would seemingly speak to the contrary. That’s about as far as the guesswork goes, in my mind, unless you’ve got some tremendous insight into the life of Dirk that goes far beyond his public life.
Of course, there is a bit of a fast track into the mind and life of Dirk: ask him yourself. I wouldn’t expect Dirk to open up on the subject without some serious prodding, but Media Day offered an excellent opportunity to really dive into Nowitzki’s head, even if he had to be tied down to a podium first.
Marc Stein got the ball rolling on Media Day Eve with a survey of relevant Nowitzki matters. Chief among them was the summer goings-on of Dirk world, with special attention paid to the particularly odd personal issues in Nowitzki’s life:
“But I think everybody who’s seen me recently knows I’m doing fine and knows that I had a pretty decent summer,” Nowitzki told ESPN.com. “I did some fun things, did a little traveling. It was not as bad as I thought. And I’m actually excited about camp, which the last 10-11 years I haven’t been because I always played [for Germany] in the summer.
“When it all first happened during the playoffs, I thought I would really be thinking about it all the time, all day, every day. But I came home [in late May] and took a great vacation [to Crete, Greece] with my family. In tough times, I think my family has always been there for me and they were again this year. They took my mind off all this stuff. I got to enjoy [sister Silke's two] kids and I was already doing a lot better after that. It just got better and better and got to the point where I didn’t even think about [the situation] for long periods of time.”
Those are hardly the words of a man tormented by off-court demons. But it does sound like the same in control, focused Dirk we’ve seen return from every off-season. This is the way of the world: the Sun rises every morning, the Earth rotates upon its axis, and Dirk comes back ready to go to work. It’s as simple as intergalactic clockwork.