<div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post">In Germany, soccer is king. Other sports fall into a tangle at the bottom of the closet. Basketball is consigned to that heap, alongside hockey, cycling, auto racing, field hockey, track and even handball. (Americans call it "team handball," which is the sport Mr. Nowitzki's father, Joerg, played.) Awareness of basketball does, at least, rise a bit in the more cosmopolitan areas. "I think basketball has more people who know about it in the big cities," said Gerd Zieger, who works in a hotel in Frankfurt, American Airlines' hub in Germany and the country's fourth-largest city. "I don't think too many people in smaller towns understand much about basketball. It is more of the younger kids who know about it." Mr. Zieger looks a little tired when he says he's all about soccer. He confesses that he was up late celebrating Germany's opening-match World Cup victory. Basketball awareness does climb somewhat once every two years during the European Championships, commonly known as Eurobasket. In the competition, which occurs during the NBA's off season, Germany finished second in Eurobasket 2005, and Mr. Nowitzki was named MVP. The only consistent presence of the sport is a German league that seems to dwell in a place similar to arena football in the United States. "Ask about a basketball player in the German league, and people will say, 'I don't know,' " says Kai-Uwe Hesse from the national newspaper Bild, with a circulation of 3.8 million. "But Dirk is a face that everybody knows." NBA games were once available to any German channel surfer, roughly until the end of the Michael Jordan era in the late 1990s. Then pay-per-view TV seized the NBA's German rights, and the game all but disappeared from mainstream consciousness. "That is a shame on TV," Mr. Mahnecke said. "Dirk plays so well, and no one can see it. We can look on NBA.com for results. But that is no comparison to seeing it on TV." Of course, it doesn't help that the games are played in the middle of the night in Germany. Game 3 tonight will start here around 3 a.m. Wednesday. Now, basketball fans and journalists say, the sport has a largely underground following. Mr. Hesse said he believes that the NBA Finals ? because Mr. Nowitzki and his Mavericks are involved ? might have enjoyed a little more coverage this time around but for coinciding with the World Cup. He says his newspaper will give soccer and the World Cup, "the first six, seven, eight pages. The NBA Finals might be on Page 9," he said. </div> Source
