For Dikembe Mutombo, basketball was just a tool for what was really important

Big John seemed to have brought Dikembe Mutombo into existence.

It was 1988. I was covering John Thompson, not the Georgetown Hoyas, the team he coached. Like almost everyone else who was writing about college hoops at the time, if you were writing about the Hoyas or covering them, as I was for the Washington Post at the time, you were really covering Thompson more than the players – who were essentially absent. -you have limits anyway. He and Bobby Knight were college basketball stars 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 atop the coaching firmament, representing very different perspectives and for very different reasons.

People thought Big John hated the media. It wasn’t true. Like Knight, he loved doing it to argue with the media and, like Knight, was sometimes vulgar. But he didn’t hate writers at all. In fact, he had a soft spot for many of them. So when he started talking about this “great African” who was going to play for him next season, he did it with a twinkle in his eye.

“You’re all going to love him,” Thompson said. “The child speaks four languages.”

It was more than that. At that time, Dikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean-Jacques Wamutombo was just beginning to master the English language, combining his fluency in French, Spanish, Portuguese and five African tribal dialects. He intended to study pre-medicine at Georgetown, where he had already taken classes after arriving from the Boboto Institute in what was then Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His cousin, whose career he hoped to emulate, was a cardiovascular and thoracic surgeon at nearby Washington Hospital Center. He wasn’t your typical new player, aside from the fact that he was 7-foot-2.

My god. He was 22 years old then.

Therefore, writing about Dikembe Mutombo dying of brain cancer at the age of 58, being a significant professional athlete and a powerful man of much greater value, is deflation, an emptying of one’s own possibilities.

GO DEEPER

Hall of Famer Mutombo, 58, dies of brain cancer

Mutombo’s vision reached its height somewhere above most of us. His loud, hoarse voice made it impossible to hide. 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 shied away. Even when the Lakers’ Shaquille O’Neal pummeled Mutombo during the 76ers’ five-game hitting streak in the 2001 NBA Finals, Mutombo didn’t budge.

But no one in the game was better or better at getting people to think about others, not just themselves.

Mutombo’s was one of the most persistent in the effort to start the league that is now called the Basketball Africa League. He became a regular on NBA Basketball Without Borders Africa tours and clinics, taking his NBA brethren around the country, pointing out not only what needed fixing, but also what local citizens had done right. He hated the stereotypes that so many people had become accustomed to when discussing the continent’s problems, but he was no less vehemently condemning the lack of urgency of local and national politicians to address these problems.

Even his company Mutombo Coffee benefited from the Women in Coffee initiative, which returned proceeds from the sale of his coffees to women farmers in 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 make a positive impact on communities, especially in his native Democratic Republic of the Congo and throughout the African continent. I had the honor of traveling the world with Dikembe and seeing firsthand how his generosity and compassion lifted people’s spirits.”

He was, of course, known for his finger wagging, which he broke out early in his NBA career as a playful admonishment to anyone who had the audacity to try to take a shot at him. It served many purposes; it was a nonverbal reminder of his incredible wait and length, and a way to make a blocked shot something sexy, something that could be a highlight or two. Or advertising.

Mutombo wasn’t perfect. He had weaknesses. And wild pride. But very often he crossed them to do things that re-centered us, from individual achievements to what was best for the most people. So his obituary shouldn’t begin with his 2015 induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, 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 the eighth-seeded Denver Nuggets to a first-round loss to the top-seeded Seattle SuperSonics? Historic, but secondary.

Dikembe Mutombo, above all, carried himself with a gravity and sobriety that belied his age, as did the other great men Thompson recruited to the Hilltop during that era.

Patrick Ewing came from Jamaica as a child to settle with his family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and when he had the audacity to choose the Hoyas, he had to listen to racist taunts throughout high school and college. Alonzo Mourning looked at his situation in Chesapeake, Virginia, playing defense with a tenacity bordering on fury. Craig (Big Sky) Shelton was from Washington; Othella Harrington starred in the film Jackson, Miss. During the summer, most returned to the Georgetown campus to take part in the fierce competition among themselves as part of the Big Men’s Finishing School, which Thompson often watched.

Mutombo desperately wanted to be like Bill Russell, Thompson’s Boston teammate during his two-year NBA career as a player whose greatness as a player came second to his stature as a man. Russell also destroyed his opponents’ plans from the inside.

“If I want 11 rings on 10 fingers like Mr. Russell, I have to play defense,” Mutombo said.

He didn’t get a ring for any 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 only a tool to implement more important ideas, even those 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 couldn’t leave the house with her. She died there. So Mutombo simply decided that something like this shouldn’t happen to anyone else and decided to build a hospital in Kinshasa. Professional athletes donate to hospitals; they don’t build them. Nevertheless, he launched what he considered a rapid fundraising round among his NBA brethren. The estimated cost of building the hospital was $29 million. So he started asking around.

His brothers from Georgetown, Ewing and Mourning contributed the money. Gary Payton, who was defeated in Denver in Denver, gave money. Thompson gave the money. And that was… pretty much everything. Very few of the NBA’s Mutombo brothers came out of their own pockets to help. It was a wound that Mutombo didn’t talk about much later, but which he never forgot; ultimately, he himself donated $15 million for 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 fundraising efforts.

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

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