Sports
Sportsmen

Detlef Schrempf: Working/Playing a Long Way from Leverkusen (1989)

On the Dallas Mavericks professional basketball team, the five players beginning the game are mile-high, statuesque black men with Anglo-Saxon names like Donaldson, Perkins, Harper and Blackman; but once one of them gets tired and comes out of the game, onto the floor arrives a blond-haired blue-eyed slender white man who is introduced as Detlef Schrempf. Detlef Schrempf, he with the Teutonic name, is 2.08 meters tall and, surprise, from Leverkusen. He is by common consent the best German professional basketball player in America, where German-born athletes are almost as rare as native Americans in the (soccer) Bundesleague. Two things distinguishing Schrempf from the other European-born top-league basketball players are, first, that he is smaller (than, say, his teammate Uwe Blab, who is 2.20) and, second, that he plays with the spectacular flash that we come to associate with black American basketball.

Just as black jazzman play differently from whites, so black basketballers have forged a unique performance style. To draw extreme distinctions, black players move faster and leap higher than white players; they tend to score more points. They especially like to fly above the basket and propel the ball down into the hoop (in what is called "a dunk"), ideally with some acrobatic moves. White players, by contrast, work for the clever pass, the outside shot; they are better on defense and better at making freethrows. Of course, no player is purely one or the other, as even some famous black basketballers play like whites; but thanks to a vertical leap of 95 cm and unusual offensive dexterity, Schrempf's play is clearly more black than white.

Born January 21, 1963, in Leverkusen, Schrempf didn't see a basketball until he was thirteen and didn't play it seriously until he was sixteen and joined Tus 04 Leverkusen, which played other clubs in his home state of North-Rhine Westphalia. By the following year he left his local gymnasium (school) to become an exchange high school student in Centralia, Washington, a town of twenty thousand some two hours south of Seattle; Centralia's principal claim to international fame is that the choreographer Merce Cunningham came from there.

Schrempf went to America first to play basketball and incidentally to learn English. He chose Centralia because a player on his Leverkusen team had gone there as an exchange student several years before and recommended its basketball program. Schrempf even wrote a letter introducing himself to the Centralia coach prior to his arrival. Going out for the high school team (called the "Tigers"), he starred at center, taking the team to the state championship. He remembers his first days in America as difficult, because in Leverkusen, you see, he learned a British English that was quite different from the slang he now heard about him. "It was kind of tough to get used to the American accent. I understood it after a few weeks, but learning how to use it was difficult."

Over a relaxed lunch in a New York City hotel, dressed in sweatshirt and sweatpants, he continued, chuckling to himself as he talked, "I remember the first week I was there. I was seventeen years old. I wanted a beer. I went into a store where they asked for identification and said you had to be twenty-one. 'You gotta to be crazy,' I told them, because in Germany you could get beer at sixteen. It turned the clock back a few years; I felt like I was fourteen again."

Thanks to an American high school diploma, he went following year to the state University of Washington, one of those gigantic American academic factories with 35,000 students learning everything and anything that its 12,000 teachers and teaching assistants can teach, in addition to teams playing nearly all the sports known to man. As his academic classes weren't hard, Schrempf's initial year was spent mostly learning basketball, not only for a few hours in school each day but during a few more hours outside it--off-campus, as they say. He went into the inner city of Seattle, at night as well as day, for continuous playground "pick-up games," where those on hand divide themselves into two teams and play as hard as they can, often on only half a court. "I was a basketball addict in college; I played all the time, everywhere."

As he tells it, at school he learned "the fundamentals--how to move your left leg, move your right leg," but out in the playgrounds where most players are black and unschooled he learned not only to improvise as they do but to talk as they do. "You had to," he told me, "otherwise you'd never get the ball back if they fouled you." Schrempf now speaks perfectly understandable American English with accents less German than black-American, in contrast, say, to the soccer star Franz Breckenbauer, who during his years here often used English words in ways that could not be understood. Not unlike other Germans who mostly learned to speak English among Americans, Schrempf sometimes doesn't know the German word for something learned in English, and vice versa.

By the second of his four college years, Schrempf was known as a good player. "I then made a decision that everything will be second to basketball. I realized I could be a pro, and I started working toward that." After his third year, he joined Blab, who went to Indiana University, in playing on the 1984 West German Olympic team. (Teammates now, they speak English together; but when the two of them recently met the tennis star Boris Becker in Dallas, everyone spoke German.) By his last year, Schrempf was thought to be among the best college (amateur) players in the nation. He was chosen "Player of the Year" in his ten-school league and "Most Valuable Player" in a college all-star tournament in Hawaii. While home in 1983, he appeared on the ARD Sportstudio show where another guest was Marianne Wagner, the German track star, who in 1987 became his wife. Among Americans, he pronounces her name as though it were English, Maryann for the first part and the second with a well-formed W. "She looks more American than I do, being darker in complexion; she lost her accent quite quickly."

Thanks to endless practice, Schrempf became proficient at a wide variety of basketball stunts. He can leap well above the rim, dunking the ball with ease; and he can spin in midair with a grace befitting a ballet dancer. He can move his head in one direction while his feet go in another. He can dribble the basketball behind his back or between his legs without breaking stride. He also mastered the three-point shot, which earns an extra point from being taken from behind a semi-circular line further away from the basket than a comparable European line. In a nationally televised 1987 contest for three-point shots, open to all professional players, Schrempf scored second to the legendary Larry Bird. This past year he came in fourth, which still isn't bad for a tall kid from across the ocean.

In truth, Schrempf's three-year professional basketball career has not been what was expected. Just before college players graduate, they are chosen by one or another professional team and customarily belong to that team. Though he was selected in the first round, as befits a college player of his stature, the team picking him, Dallas, already had three people proficient at the three general positions (other than center, the tallest man, or point guard, customarily the smallest); thus, Schrempf was relegated to being a principal substitute, a versatile "sixth man" who customarily plays about one-third of the game. European or not, he is finally a very good white player in a league that is eighty percent black.

Nonetheless, a 1987 basketball guidebook characterizes him as "a rising star [who] can play three different positions and will blossom whenever he is finally turned loose. All he needs is a chance." Near the end of the recent season the veteran player-coach-announcer Tommy Heinsohn identified Schrempf as "a potential superstar." That sentiment is widely shared. From time to time there are rumors that he will be traded to another team, exchanged for a player of comparable worth; but this hasn't happened yet. As he signed a four-year contract with Dallas when he began there in 1985, this coming season [1988-89] will be crucial for him. If he does well, he is likely to earn a better contract, as well as one of the five starting positions and thus more playing time, probably with another team. "If things get real bad," he added over desert, "I could always go back to Europe and play there."

While he keeps an apartment in Dallas, he and his wife have a two-story, four-bedroom house in suburban Seattle, which he describes as "my home town. I went to school there. It's where I work out in the summer. I know I can always go back there, but I don't know if I'm going to stay in Dallas. The whole northwest is very friendly. The climate is similar to Germany. It has everything I like--mountains, lakes, forest and all that. It's beautiful." In addition to exercising daily with other professional athletes residing in Seattle, he also likes to return to those off-campus playgrounds where he developed his skills.

Initially majoring in international business, but still shy of completing his college degree, Schrempf has recently been thinking about preparing for a career as a basketball coach, whether in Germany or America he cannot yet say. He remembers coaching his Leverkusen club team of 13-14 years olds during his last year in Germany. "I do a lot of teaching camps in the summertime. I enjoy teaching kids; I relate to kids." Would you like to coach the German national team? "Maybe; I don't know."

For his third professional season Schrempf earned three hundred fifty thousand dollars (plus incentives), most of which he saves, well aware that too many other highly paid athletes have squandered their fresh fortunes. He told me over lunch that he and his wife have purchased a house, a car and annuity-type life insurance. Some dollars went back home to retire his mother, who had been working in an old folks home; his father still works as a construction foreman in Leverkusen. His teammates call him "Det."

There is no question that Schrempf works hard for his money; he brings to his job a German work-ethic. The professional basketball season starts in November and continues through May, with eighty-two games at roughly three per week. If a team does well, there are post-season games that can stretch well into June; and there as also a month of "training camp" in October before the season begins. "Pro-basketball is a year-round job. As the roster of each team is limited to twelve, there are only 276 jobs for all the kids who play basketball. On our team thirty people show up in October to compete for those twelve jobs. Not everybody is secure."

As successive games are always held in different places and days between games are spent traveling, there isn't much time to do anything else. "All we usually see is the hotel, a coffee shop, a bus on the way to the arena and the arena itself." Since the team's daily practice is customarily in the morning, Schrempf's afternoons are spent napping or watching television or reading (mostly biographies of black athletes and celebrities). "After the game, we go back to the hotel and go the sleep," he told me in New York, his voice sounding older than his years. The team's trainer always insists upon hotel rooms with "king-sized" beds. "Most of the guys stretch out diagonally. Tomorrow morning we fly out; there is a game in Atlanta tomorrow night. Later this week, for the first time in almost three years, I have two days free in Washington. I hope to see the White House." Whenever you see at an American airport a group of young men, mostly black, who average two meters in height, you know that a basketball team has crossed your path.

One thing that he learned to treasure about America was food stores that stayed open late. On American television a few years ago, he was asked what he liked best about America. "7-11," he replied curtly, referring to a chain of small grocery stores that, as their name suggests, stay open to 23:00. Americans, accustomed as they are to such privileges, probably missed the significance of this remark. "If you don't grow up with it, you know how to appreciate it," he added over lunch. "Being able to get food late at night made life easier in college. You couldn't do that at home."

One reason why he has survived in professional American sports is that he began his serious sports career in the USA. From time to time, basketball players already established in Europe come to play professionally in America, but they quickly go home. "The pressure here is too much for them," he explains thoughtfully. "They can't handle the stress of 82 games and the travel and the press. You have to come here early to get used to the life style and the people. It's a lot different over here." He defends the American custom of requiring players to go to college for four years of "amateur" play on the grounds that a professional sports life is too hazardous for an eighteen-year-old.

Though he was been home for only four days since beginning his professional basketball career, he still thinks of himself as German. He and Marianne speak German together; they favor German foods that are found in specialty shops in both Dallas and Seattle. Neither plans to change citizenship. They telephone their parents at least once a week and write less regularly. Their next extended vacation will be a month-long tour of Germany, "to see Germany as a tourist. When you grow up there, you never appreciate the old castles and all that; but when you've been away for a while, you want to see it again."

"I'm proud of having grown up in Germany. There are things you learn in Germany that you don't learn here. Germans are always skeptical; they criticize things. I don't have any loose friendships; people are either my friend or someone I know. You have a different attitude to work and money. Germans are hard-working people; they don't spend their money as much. They don't buy on credit. That at least is how my family was. I brought that with me. I try to be conservative with my money, and most athletes are not like that."

From time to time he sees European football on American television, but confesses himself unable to watch it for more than fifteen minutes. "It's weird. I used to love soccer," he remarked, using the English word for it; "I played it for several years as a kid, mostly as a defender; but now it's boring. In basketball, you need to score every minute; something's happening all the time. When you go back to soccer, where they kick the ball around, and it's not happening as much as basketball."

True to his esthetic, he even likes, heresies of heresies, the American invention of indoor soccer that is played in rinks otherwise used for ice hockey. "It has a lot more action. I go to the games of the Dallas Sidekicks [the local team]. I know some of the players; we do charity benefits together. It's more interesting to me than the regular outdoor ninety-minute soccer game."

Black American culture had always had a special attraction for certain Europeans. The first to hit the continent, just after WWI, was jazz and then came rhythm and blues. Thousands of Europeans have tried to play music as blacks do, honoring the models through their efforts but always failing to equal them. Then came black-American social dancing which certain Europeans tried to adopt as well, without really succeeding.

Later, after WWII, came basketball in which, like jazz, blacks would always dominate, inventing the performance styles that others would try to imitate; but no European has succeeded as well at playing their game as Detlef Schrempf, the tall blonde kid from Leverkusen, who, having learned to play all the riffs, has sat in with the best bands and thus lived a black-American athletic life as no other European has, first on the playgrounds of Seattle and now as a professional basketball player.