Big John seemed to speak Dikembe Mutombo into existence.
This was 1988. I was covering John Thompson — not the Georgetown Hoyas, the team he coached. As with almost everyone else who wrote about college hoops at the time, if you were writing about or covering the Hoyas, as I was at the time for the Washington Post, you were really covering Thompson, more than the players — who were essentially off-limits to you, anyway. He and Bobby Knight were the show in college basketball at the time. In an era full of legendary coaches, from Dean Smith, Denny Crum and Lou Carnesecca to John Chaney, Dale Brown and Larry Brown, Thompson and Knight stood atop the coaching firmament, from far different viewpoints and for far different reasons.
People thought Big John hated the media. That wasn’t true. Like Knight, he loved to argue with the media, and, also like Knight, sometimes did so profanely. But he didn’t hate writers, at all. He actually had a soft spot for many of them. So when he started talking about this “big African” that was coming to play for him the following season, he did so with a twinkle in his eye.
“Y’all are gonna love him,” Thompson said. “Kid speaks four languages.”
It was more than that. At the time, Dikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean-Jacques Wamutombo was just starting to master English, joining his fluency in French, Spanish, Portuguese and five African tribal dialects. He was going to be a pre-med major at Georgetown, where he was already taking classes after coming over from the Boboto Institute in what was then known as Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. His cousin, whose career he hoped to emulate, was a cardiovascular and thoracic surgeon at the nearby Washington Hospital Center. This was not your typical incoming player, and that was aside from the fact that he stood 7-foot-2.
My God. He was 22 years old then.
And thus, it is deflating, an emptying of one’s capacities, to write about Dikembe Mutombo dying from brain cancer, at 58, a professional athlete of significance and a towering human being of far greater substance.
GO DEEPER
Hall of Famer Mutombo, 58, dies of brain cancer
Mutombo’s vision met his height somewhere above most of us. His resonant, gravelly voice made hiding impossible. Not that he was shy. During his 18 seasons with the Nuggets, Hawks, 76ers, Nets, Knicks and Rockets, 10 of which produced All-Star appearances, Mutombo never ducked. Even as the Lakers’ Shaquille O’Neal bludgeoned Mutombo during a five-game pounding of the 76ers in the 2001 NBA Finals, Mutombo didn’t back down.
But no one in the game was bigger, or better, at getting people to think about others beyond themselves.
Mutombo’s was among the most persistent in getting the league to begin what is now the Basketball Africa League. He became a regular on the NBA’s Basketball Without Borders Africa tours and clinics, showing his NBA brethren around in country after country, pointing out not just what needed fixing, but what was being done right by local citizens. He hated the stereotyping so many people would default to when discussing the continent’s problems, but was no less fierce in decrying the lack of urgency by local and national politicians in addressing those problems.
Even his Mutombo Coffee business had a give-back, a “Women in Coffee” initiative in which proceeds from the sale of his coffees went back to female farmers from Africa and Latin America.
“He was a humanitarian at his core,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said in a statement released Monday. “He loved what the game of basketball could do to make a positive impact on communities, especially in his native Democratic Republic of the Congo and across the continent of Africa. I had the privilege of traveling the world with Dikembe and seeing first-hand how his generosity and compassion uplifted people.”
He was known, of course, for the finger wag, which he broke out early in his NBA career as a playful admonition to anyone who had the temerity to try to shoot over him. It served multiple purposes; it was a non-verbal reminder of his incredible anticipation and length, as well as a way to make the blocked shot something sexy, something that might make a highlight or two. Or a commercial.
Mutombo was not perfect. He had foibles. And fierce pride. But he transcended them, so very often, to do things that re-centered us, from individual achievement to what was best for the most people. So his obituary should not lead with his Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame induction, in 2015, or his four NBA Defensive Player of the Year awards, or his 3,289 career blocked shots, second only to Hakeem Olajuwon. The iconic, incredible moment in 1994, when Mutombo helped lead his eighth-seeded Denver Nuggets to a first-round upset of the top-seeded Seattle SuperSonics? Historic, but secondary.
Dikembe Mutombo, more than anything, carried himself with a seriousness, a sobriety, that belied his years, just as the other big men Thompson recruited to the Hilltop during that era carried themselves.
Patrick Ewing had come from Jamaica as a child to settle with his family in Cambridge, Mass., and had to listen to racist taunts in high school and college when he had the audacity to pick the Hoyas. Alonzo Mourning stared down his circumstances in Chesapeake, Va., playing defense with a fierceness that bordered on rage. Craig (Big Sky) Shelton was from D.C.; Othella Harrington starred in Jackson, Miss. In the summers, most would return to Georgetown’s campus to engage in fierce competition with one another, a Finishing School for Big Men, with Thompson often watching.
Mutombo wanted, desperately, to be like Bill Russell, Thompson’s teammate in Boston during his two-year stint in the NBA as a player, whose greatness as a player, similarly, finished second to his standing as a man. Russell, too, destroyed opponents’ game plans from the inside out.
“If I want the 11 rings for the 10 fingers like Mr. Russell, I have to play defense,” Mutombo said.
He didn’t get a ring from either of his NBA Finals appearances. But he broke Mourning’s Georgetown record for blocked shots in a game – six weeks after Mourning set it – in 1989.
And Mutombo always understood that basketball was but a vehicle for more important ideas, even ones that seemed impossible.
In 1997, his mother, Marie, suffered a stroke. His father tried to take her to the one hospital near the family’s home, but there was a curfew in place, and he couldn’t leave their house with her. She died there. So Mutombo simply decided that this shouldn’t happen to anyone else, and decided to build a hospital in Kinshasa. Pro athletes donate to hospitals; they don’t build them. Nonetheless, he began what he thought would be a quick round of fundraising among his NBA brethren. The rough estimate to build the hospital was $29 million. So he started asking around.
His Georgetown brothers, Ewing and Mourning, gave money. Gary Payton, who’d been vanquished in that Denver upset of the Sonics, gave money. Thompson gave money. And that was … about all. Very few of Mutombo’s NBA brethren came out of pocket to help. It was a wound that Mutombo didn’t talk about much afterward, but never forgot; in the end, he donated $15 million himself to ensure the construction of the 300-bed Biamba Marie Mutombo Hospital and Research Center, which opened in 2007.
“What I’m doing, is just setting an example, for Africa,” he said amid his fundraising efforts.
His example, though, was not just for his homeland. And his size was fitting for the oversized impact he had while he was here.
(Photo of Dikembe Mutombo: Nathaniel S. Butler / NBAE via Getty Images)
