[HiddenX]

Dirk Nowitzki leaps to the top of the list

By Jennifer Floyd Engel

jenfloyd@star-telegram.com

The last warble-y notes of We Are The Champions had barely escaped Dirk Nowitzki's lips, and we were trying to classify him.

Is he the greatest European-born player? Or was he already that long before? Did winning a championship cement his spot as "The next Larry Bird"? Or is Dirk, as Mavs coach Rick Carlisle has been arguing for a while, already a Top 10 player of all time, his name linked with Jordan and Russell and Bird, Wilt and Dr. J?

We love lists, and rankings. The World Wide Web is loaded with The Five Best Restaurants You Have Never Heard Of and The Best 20 Books For Summer and The Best NFL Players In History -- all based on criteria as subjective as whoever is making the list.

I say this only to note that I have no statistical basis for saying Dirk is the greatest local athlete of all time. I just know it to be true.

Yes, I am putting him ahead of Roger and Troy, Michael and Emmitt, and even Mo, which I realize is heresy to many of you. In fact, Mike Modano and Roger Staubach had flip-flopped for that No. 1 spot on my list until recently, like Game 6 in Miami when Dirk led the Mavs to an NBA Championship.

It is not simply the ring that catapulted Dirk in my mind. For greatness is not only rings or Cups or trophies, lest we confuse jewelry with legendary. Nor is it stats alone because, well, the history of sport is littered with guys with numbers but lacking in that ability to hoist a team onto his back and carry it to a championship. Reading an article on writing, of all things, I happened upon a quote by A.J. Liebling on what qualifies as great.

"The only way to write is well, and how you do it is your own damn business" it went.

This struck me as true about sports greatness as well, and Dirk in particular. The only way to be great is to be so, and how an athlete does it is his own damn business.

What Dirk did in the Finals was rewrite how we view greatness. Not that he was not great by typical standards, he was. The 2011 playoffs are full of big Dirk buckets, impressive fourth-quarter stats and flashes of what everybody agreed was leadership.

What elevated him in my mind was how he managed to rewrite his legacy while staying himself.

Turns out he didn't have to talk trash, or pad a dunk highlight reel, or sell Big Macs or Nikes, or do anything but be himself to be recognized for the genius basketball player he has always been in his time in a Mavs uniform. And by doing so changed his legacy.

After 13 years of doubts and questions and failing -- failing in spectacular fashion at the 2006 NBA Finals, Dirk changed not only who he fundamentally was but how we saw him.

And if there is anything we love more than lists, it is tales of redemption. We love the guy who bounces back from any of the recognized addictions, from injury, from his own stupidity, from an epic failure like, say, 2006.

So the story of Dirk as a changed man is being peddled. When in reality the beauty of the Dirk story is how he did it his way.

I am not saying Dirk has not changed at all; to pretend otherwise is to ignore fact. The Big German himself has talked about dialing up his defense and leadership and learning from 2006 and beyond. What has not changed, not really, was how he played the game -- the quirky one-legged jumper and the almost emotionless look on his face.

He tweaked his game. And he stayed the course.

He believed in Jason Terry, Jason Kidd, Rick Carlisle and Mark Cuban and mostly himself enough to re-sign last summer when nobody thought this team had any chance of winning anything beyond a first-round series -- and even that was dubious.

And that in my mind has cemented Dirk as the best athlete ever to don a Mavericks, Rangers, Cowboys or Stars jersey. He did what Staubach and Modano did before him, which was stay through all of the crud, fight through the doubt and finally do what many wondered was even possible.

It is hard to quantify what that does for a team or a legacy.

This is what I mean when I say I just know Dirk is the greatest local athlete of all time. What anybody who watched the Mavs over the past few months saw was a basketball player who embraced every part of the journey, the ups and downs, the criticisms and, ultimately, the moment.

He wanted the ball in his hands. He had prepared. And he delivered, not by being more like D-Wade or Kobe, but by being himself.

Of course, this is a subjective list. My criteria: The athlete had to have spent a decent amount of time playing here and had to have left a mark, by championship or otherwise, and had to have irrevocably changed the landscape.

And whoever comes next will be judged against Dirk, the best local athlete going at the moment.

Jennifer Floyd Engel