For Dikembe Mutombo, basketball was just a means to what really matters

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 writing about college hoops at the time, if you wrote or covered the Hoyas, as I did for the Washington Post at the time, you actually had Thompson, more than the players — who were actually wrong. – Anyway, there are restrictions for you. He and Bobby Knight were the show in college basketball at the time. In an era filled with legendary coaches, from Dean Smith, Denny Crum and Lou Carnesecca to John Chaney, Dale Brown and Larry Brown, Thompson and Knight stood at the top of the coaching firmament, from very different vantage points and for very different reasons.

People thought Big John hated the media. That wasn’t true. Like Knight, he loved it argue with the media, and, like Knight, sometimes did so in a blasphemous manner. 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 ‘great African’ who would be coming to play for him the next season, he did so with a twinkle in his eye.

“You guys are going to love him,” Thompson said. “Child speaks four languages.”

It was more than that. At the time, Dikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean-Jacques Wamutombo was just beginning to master English, in addition to his fluent knowledge of French, Spanish, Portuguese and English. five African tribal dialects. He would go on to study medicine at Georgetown, where he was already taking classes after transferring 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 nearby Washington Hospital Center. This wasn’t your typical incoming player, not to mention the fact that he was 7 feet tall.

My God. He was 22 years old at the time.

And thus it is deflating, an emptying of one’s capabilities, to write about Dikembe Mutombo who died of brain cancer at the age of 58, a professional athlete of consequence and a towering human being of far greater substance.

GO DEEPER

Hall of Famer Mutombo, 58, dies of brain cancer

Mutombo’s vision reached its 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 included All-Star appearances, Mutombo never went into hiding. Even when the Lakers’ Shaquille O’Neal knocked Mutombo down during a five-game upset 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 than just themselves.

Mutombo’s was one of the most persistent attempts to get the competition started with what is now the Basketball Africa League. He became a regular on Basketball Without Borders Africa’s NBA tours and clinics, taking his NBA brethren around country after country, pointing out not only what needed to be fixed, but what the local citizens were doing right. He hated the stereotyping that so many people engage in when discussing the continent’s problems, but he no less vehemently denounced the lack of urgency shown by local and national politicians in tackling those problems.

Even his Mutombo Coffee company had a give-back, a ‘Women in Coffee’ initiative where proceeds from the sale of his coffee went back to women farmers from Africa and Latin America.

“He was a humanitarian at heart,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said in a statement released Monday. “He loved what the game of basketball could do to positively impact communities, especially in his native Democratic Republic of Congo and across the African continent. I had the privilege of traveling the world with Dikembe and seeing firsthand how his generosity and compassion uplifted people.”

He was, of course, known for his finger-wagging, which he broke out early in his NBA career as a playful warning to anyone who had the audacity to shoot over him. It served multiple purposes; it was a non-verbal reminder of his incredible anticipation and height, and also a way to turn the blocked shot into something sexy, something that could be a highlight or two. Or a commercial.

Mutombo wasn’t perfect. He had weaknesses. And fierce pride. But he very often transcends them to do things that refocus us, from individual achievement to what is best for the most people. So his obituary shouldn’t be the focus of his induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame 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 loss to the top-seeded Seattle SuperSonics? Historical, but secondary.

More than anything, Dikembe Mutombo carried himself with a seriousness and a level-headedness that belied his years, just as the other big men Thompson recruited to the Hilltop at that time carried themselves.

Patrick Ewing had come from Jamaica as a child to settle with his family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and had to listen to racist taunts in high school and college when he had the nerve to choose the Hoyas. Alonzo Mourning looked at his circumstances in Chesapeake, Virginia, and played defense with a ferocity that bordered on anger. Craig (Big Sky) Shelton was from DC; Othella Harrington played in Jackson, Miss. In the summer, most returned to the Georgetown campus to compete fiercely with each other, a Finishing School for Big Men, which Thompson often watched.

Mutombo desperately wanted to be like Bill Russell, Thompson’s teammate in Boston during his two-year stint as a player in the NBA, whose greatness as a player similarly took a back seat to his status as a man. Russell also destroyed his opponents’ game plans from within.

“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 his appearances in the NBA Finals. 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 just 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 only hospital near the family’s home, but there was a curfew and he could not leave the house with her. She died there. So Mutombo simply decided that this should not happen to anyone else, and decided to build a hospital in Kinshasa. Pro athletes donate to hospitals; they don’t build them. Nevertheless, he embarked on what he thought would be a rapid fundraising round 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 had been defeated in the Sonics’ upset in Denver, gave money. Thompson gave money. And that was… about all. Very few of Mutombo’s NBA brethren came out of their own pockets to help. It was a wound that Mutombo didn’t talk about much afterwards, but one he never forgot; Ultimately, he donated $15 million himself to underwrite 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 during his fundraiser.

However, his example did not only apply to his homeland. And his size matched the outsized impact he had while he was here.

(Photo of Dikembe Mutombo: Nathaniel S. Butler / NBAE via Getty Images)