A basketball star with a defended heart

last updated 8 January 2015

Dirk Nowitzki was suckered, says Allison Glock in ESPN the Magazine. The star forward for the Dallas Mavericks was consciously seeking a wife and a family last year when his phone rang and a woman named Cristal Taylor struck up a conversation. They met, began seeing each other, and soon he proposed. Friends suspected she was after his money, but Nowitzki wouldn’t hear of it, until an old mentor from his native Germany did a background check. Taylor was unmasked as a career felon with multiple aliases and a trail of check forgery and credit card fraud. For a while, Nowitzki was so shaken he refused to discuss her arrest with anyone. “If I don’t talk about it, I don’t have to think about it,” he says. “I’m one of those. I always come across that everything is fine. And”—he stops for a moment to chew his lower lip—“sometimes it might not be.” He wound up telling his family back in Germany everything—“I had to spill my whole heart out’’—but has become a cipher again. “I still don’t share my inner feelings. And I am okay with that. With not being seen. Most of the time, I’m really happy. I’m not lonely. Am I?”