Editor's note: This story originally published on April 3, 2019. On Saturday, Nowitzki will be enshrined in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.
Before stepping foot on American soil, 19-year-old Dirk Nowitzki played on a second-division team in his German hometown of Wurzburg that occasionally canceled practices to work on a farm owned by a teammate.
Sure, Nowitzki had managed to play his way onto the radar of some NBA teams and college programs. But he was far from a phenom.
That all changed during the 1998 Nike Hoop Summit in San Antonio's Freeman Coliseum, when the lanky kid, who was so unheralded that his surname was misspelled "Nowitzski" repeatedly on the ESPN broadcast, blew up for 33 points and 14 rebounds to lead the World team to an upset over the U.