The key to the gym is kept at a bakery shop on the corner. When Dirk Nowitzki pulls up, the three old ladies inside hurry from behind the counter. One holds open the door, another does the face-clapped-in-joy move, the third throws her arms up for a hug until the logistics of a five-foot Oma embracing a shaggy-haired seven-foot hoopstah dawn on her and she simply claps her hands. Inside the tiny shop there’s a new strip of red carpet and three tables, one bearing Dirk’s autograph. The carpet leads to the wall of fame -- Dirk’s fame -- with a collage of photos, newspaper clips and Dallas Mavericks paraphernalia, including a sign in German that reads, “We love with all our hearts our NBA Star, Diiiiirk Noowitzkiiiii!”

“I haven’t been here in about a month,” Dirk says, which makes you wonder what the welcome home after an eight-month NBA season was like.

The gym is empty but equally quaint. Blue linoleum floor. Stationary rings on the ceiling. Wooden backboards with bolted rims. Climbing poles on one wall, climbing rungs on another. No AC, no ventilation. Two threadbare Mikasa basketballs. Dirk calls it the summer gym, because that’s when he spends time here with his personal coach and mentor, Holger Geschwindner, who puts him through drills as archaic as the facilities.

The bakery and the gym are in Rattelsdorf, a tiny town about 80 minutes outside of Würzburg. This is where the hammer was forged that shattered the long-held belief that foreigners in general and Western Europeans in particular are all too Uwe Blab-ish. Soft, not particularly motivated, slow to adjust. No one has altered that view more than the German-born-and-basketball-bred Nowitzki. Detlef Schrempf was considered a rare exception, but even he spent four years as a Washington Husky and took seven years to develop into an All-Star-caliber pro. Spain’s Pau Gasol went third in this year’s draft in large part because the Grizzlies didn’t want to risk passing on the next Dirk.

That would mean passing on a near-miss All-Star who, in only his third season, averaged 21.8 points and 9.2 rebounds. By improving his rebounding average by nearly three every season, and running off the court to spit out a loose front tooth before running right back in during last season’s playoffs, Nowitzki proved Western Europeans aren’t all recalcitrant softies. “He’s opening a lot of minds,” says Mavs teammate Steve Nash. “He’s showing that Americans aren’t always right the way they teach the game and non-Americans aren’t always wrong.”

The quaint surroundings that spawned Dirk don’t exist anymore in the U.S. If this were Inglewood or Pompano Beach or Coney Island, there’d be autograph seekers and homeys and street agents and shoe salesmen and out-of-work relatives looking for a piece of the action. Dirk has only Holger, who serves as a one-man posse -- agent, personal coach, chess partner, hiking companion, mentor and spiritual adviser -- and his family. Father Joerg still runs the family painting business he inherited from Dirk’s grandfather. Mother Helga, a national team hoopstah in her day, takes care of the house. Sister Silke lives in New Jersey and works for the NBA international TV department. That’s the extent of the inner circle.

Dirk’s dream of playing in the NBA wasn’t exactly a family obsession. His sister didn’t learn about it until the night of the 1998 draft, when he was selected ninth by the Bucks and immediately dealt to Dallas. His father wanted him to play handball and take over the painting business. “When I said I didn’t want to play,” Dirk says, “he quit coaching it. But he got over it.”

Nowitzki spends most of his off-season in Würzburg, living in the same basement bedroom of his parents’ house where he slept as a teenager, working out with Holger in the morning, crashing on the family couch in the afternoon, playing with the Würzburg pro team at night. Anything outside of that routine is uncharted territory. When he had to drive the city’s narrow, winding streets to meet a reporter at the Schloss Steinburg Hotel, a hard-to-miss converted castle that overlooks downtown Würzburg and the Main River, he arrived clutching his head in mock agony. The ring on his cell phone is the jingle from a popular German TV commercial, but he knows this only because someone told him. In September, he learned he’d received an extension worth more than $90 million the same way you did, courtesy of news reports quoting Mavs owner Mark Cuban. “Dallas is sweet,” he said, using one of his favorite expressions, “but I haven’t signed anything.” (He signed the six-year deal on Oct. 23.)

Not that the new contract is likely to affect his lifestyle. His rookie deal was $6.9 million for four years, but that first season he rented a midsize car and still lives in the same two-bedroom apartment in the middle of Dallas. He owns a two-year-old E420 Benz now, but Nash, his best friend, won’t let him forget the rental. “That car was terrible,” Nash says. “It was an Olds.” Cutlass Supreme? “Just a Cutlass. There was nothing supreme about it.”

Dirk makes the Würzburg-to-Rattelsdorf commute six days a week in a loaner Audi Quattro. NBA players, notorious preeners, generally groom their rides as they do themselves, which may explain why the Quattro has muddy cat paw tracks on the trunk and bags of ripped-open candy in the door-panel pockets. All that’s missing are a couple of empties clanking in the trunk. “When he joined the NBA I was worried he would change,” Silke says. “He hasn’t changed at all.”

The Quattro can move, and Dirk takes full advantage of the no-speed-limit Autobahn. Approaching an 80 kph (50 mph) construction zone, he downshifts to 100 kph (62 mph), but not soon (or low) enough to keep from triggering a roadside camera that IDs the car. “Did you see that flash?” he says. “We just got a ticket.” Most NBA players wouldn’t worry about such a trifle. But Dirk morosely notes on the return trip that the camera is no longer there: “They got their one idiot and went home.”

As unconventional basketball minds go, Mavs coach-GM Don Nelson has nothing on Holger. Captain of Germany’s ’72 Olympic team, Holger played in the German first division until he was 42, then dropped down to the third division and played until he was 50, working all the while as a systems analyst in a self-run project management company. “You want to know how to grow strawberries in Antarctica,” he says, “we’re the company.”

Dirk began training with the Holger-coached Würzburg X-Rays (named for native son Wilhelm Roentgen, who discovered X rays in 1895) when he was 16. A typical session combines conditioning exercises as old as Dirk’s faded, dark-blue cotton warm-ups with unorthodox drills Holger’s devised and refined over the years. One minute Holger’s holding Dirk’s ankles, pushing him around like a wheelbarrow, the next he’s having him make a pivot move so exaggerated that Dirk’s pivot knee nearly touches the ground. Dirk does handstands, then gets pulled backward over Holger’s back. Next Dirk straddles a wooden bench, then hops onto it, ball held overhead, cocked to shoot.

“The first thing you have to learn is to handle your body like a sensitive instrument,” Holger says. “We don’t set a time or specific routine. Some days we’ll go 2 1/2 hours. Some days I can tell he’s not feeling right, and we’ll go play chess.”

Holger’s mad science also has the righthanded Dirk shooting nearly as many free throws and jumpers with his left hand. “The brain learns better when you do something with your weak side,” Holger says. “It feels awkward at first, but a scientist will tell you it’s the best way to learn.”

Back in the U.S., Holger’s principal ally is Nash, who came to Dallas from Phoenix the same year Dirk was drafted. They lived in the same apartment complex until Nash bought a townhouse last season and they still car-pool to practice. Nash has a guitar, and the two have jammed.

He’s still a little gym rat who doesn’t question anything but his jump shot. He comes over and wants to watch NBA.com TV. But I’m having an effect. I’ll tell him you should check out this musician, and he’ll say he’s no good. Then three weeks later I’ll hear him singing the guy’s music in the car.”

Holger says the processes for a musician and an athlete are the same, which is why he bought Dirk an alto saxophone for Christmas. First, learn the basics -- fingering, scales and chord progressions, the equivalent of ballhandling, shooting and footwork. Next, apply technique to standard compositions or set plays. When all this becomes instinctual, the performer can create on the fly while staying within the right key -- the team concept. (Unfortunately, the sax had to be replaced by a guitar after Dirk’s neighbors complained about the noise. New instrument, same idea.)

“The biggest challenge for an NBA player is maximizing his downtime,” Holger says. “That’s the problem with a high school kid coming to the NBA. He’s not educated, which means you don’t have a complete person.” And to Holger, that limits him from being a complete player.

Holger had to persuade Nowitzki he was ready for the NBA. He did it by taking Dirk to the Grand Canyon. “I told him to look down at the Colorado River, only 2,000 meters away,” Holger says. “Then we went down and hiked back up. It’s 40 kilometers. You look up and it does not end. I wanted to show him what it was going to be like in the NBA. I knew he had the ability, but he had to believe he did. When he did that hike and didn’t ask to stop, that’s when I knew he would make it.”

Nash, born in South Africa and raised in Canada, appreciates better than most players what Nowitzki has accomplished in fighting stereotypes. “Dirk’s a freak,” Nash says. “How many guys that size have his coordination and hands, and his shooting ability from so many different places on the floor? He’s not athletic in terms of speed or jumping, but he’s a special athlete.”

Nowitzki has the best shooting form in the league, sticking 46% the past three seasons even though nearly a third of his shots were three-pointers. But filling it up is considered a Euro staple. Dirk’s quick development around the boards is what truly sets him apart. “He’s the only player I’ve ever had who became a rebounder,” Nelson says. “He wasn’t a rebounder when I got him.”

Nowitzki is shy in front of cameras, shielding the public from a guy who is the team clown. He also has a vocabulary that is part MTV, part BET -- and all NBA. Says Nash: “It’s only when he does interviews that the accent comes back.”

The bakery ladies insist that Dirk take some pastries with him and refuse his five-mark piece in payment. As he climbs into the Audi, it’s pointed out that he’s a pretty big deal in Rattelsdorf. Dirk nods and smiles: “I own Rattelsdorf.”

And, considering where the thousands of hours he spent there have taken him, he owes it, too.

This article appears in the November 12 issue of ESPN The Magazine.