At least once every year NBA legend and former Dallas Mavericks Superstar Dirk Nowitzki doesn’t need to announce whenever he is around because this is a second home for him and the children.
The towering US athlete, originally from Germany, is without a doubt one of the greatest “power forwards” of all time.
He is the Mavericks’ all-time leading scorer and has won Most Valuable Player several times and International Basketball Federation Europe Player of the Year.
The star who knows a few words like niaje, nyama choma, poa kabisa and Cucu on Monday shared a photo of himself feeding a giraffe at the popular Nairobi attraction, The Giraffe Manor.
The 7 feet tall basketball giant who won an NBA championship in 2022 shared a photograph of him feeding a giraffe and cheekily captioning it; “Finally I got to ask the worst question ever: “How’s the air up there?”
Nowitzki, is married to Kenyan-born Jessica Olsson — the daughter of a Kenyan mother and Swedish father.
Though she was raised in Sweden, she keeps her Kenyan identity and even made headlines when she decided to bring her superstar husband to Kenya for “ruracio” (traditional Kikuyu dowry payment) in July 2012.
In 2017, Nowitzki told American sports website The Undefeated: “It was awesome. They took my wife away. They brought five or six girls out and they were all covered. The first thing I had to do was find my wife. So, I’m walking around and looking at how tall they are.
“I guess it’s one of the traditions. If you get it wrong, you got to pay the parents a goat or something. I was lucky I smelled her to find the right one. But that was just an experience that I’ll never forget.”
Jesicca was born in 1982 in Gavle, Sweden and the couple met at a charity event in 2010 that had been organised for sports.
At the time, she worked at the Dallas Art Gallery and Nowitzki was flying high in his basketball career.
The couple tied the knot in 2012. First, in a traditional ceremony at Nanyuki, and a formal wedding at the family’s home in Dallas, Texas.
Nowitzki, visits Kenya at least once every year and doesn’t need to announce whenever he is around because this is a second home for him and the children.
“We came to Kenya to see cucu,” he said in 2017. “We just came straight from Kenya, my wife has a lot of family from there, uncles, aunts… we were there for over a week travelling… I love the diverse nature that is in Kenya, be it in Nairobi or the Mount Kenya region which is very cold right now,” he says.
Nowitzki said then that he did not get a chance to travel as much as he had hoped because of the short time they were in Kenya, but he tries to do as much sight-seeing as he can whenever he brings his family over.
Often, his visits are low-key, despite being one of the biggest names in basketball with a huge fan base across the world built over his remarkable two-decade professional career.