Dikembe Mutombo, a towering NBA presence, dies at 58

ATLANTA – Dikembe Mutombo, who arrived at Georgetown University as an international student with aspirations of being a doctor but who instead became a towering presence in professional basketball and a dedicated humanitarian in his native Congo, died Monday in Atlanta. He was 58.

The cause was brain cancer, according to a statement by the National Basketball Association (NBA) of the United States. His family announced in 2022 that he was undergoing treatment for a brain tumour in Atlanta.

Mutombo did not play basketball until mid-adolescence, having preferred soccer as a child. An older brother, Ilo, and his father, Samuel, encouraged him to try the sport in which his outsize frame, which ultimately stretched to 7 feet 2 inches, combined with his athletic agility, could be of greater benefit.

He wound up playing 18 seasons in the NBA for six teams, retiring with the second-most blocked shots in league history behind Hakeem Olajuwon, another African-born centre. Mutombo was known for his trademark finger wag, a provocative pose he used to dissuade shooters from challenging him at the rim.

At 21, Mutombo enrolled at Georgetown in 1987 on an academic scholarship after Herman Henning, an administrator at the US Embassy in Kinshasa, Congo’s capital, and a former high school basketball coach, sent word of him to John Thompson, coach of the vaunted Georgetown program.

After playing only intramural basketball during freshman year while gaining fluency in English, Mutombo abandoned pre-med courses, a concession to the demands of major college basketball. He switched to a double major in linguistics and diplomacy. He spoke French, English, Spanish, Portuguese and five African dialects.

Though his basketball skills were initially raw, Mutombo trained during summers with Patrick Ewing, a Georgetown alumnus and NBA All Star centre, and a teammate, Alonzo Mourning, another centre and budding NBA star. By his senior season, Mutombo averaged 15.2 points, 12.2 rebounds and 4.7 blocked shots per game.

“Basketball-wise, he’s just a babe in the woods,” Thompson told the Washington Post in 1991. “He hasn’t been brought up being given things and being told how great he is, and he wants to get better.”

Selected fourth in the 1991 NBA draft by the Denver Nuggets, Mutombo was immediately intimidating on defence. Though awkward-looking, he had an effective hook shot, which helped him average what would be a career-high in points, 16.6. He made the first of eight All-Star Game appearances.

The highlight of Mutombo’s five years in Denver came when he anchored the Nuggets’ upset of the Seattle SuperSonics in the first round of the Western Conference playoffs in 1994. In the decisive fifth game, after grabbing the final rebound in overtime, he was memorably photographed prone on the court holding the ball aloft, celebrating the first-ever defeat of a first-seeded team by one seeded eighth. (The Nuggets were eliminated in the second round by the Utah Jazz.)

Mutombo moved on from Denver in 1996, signing a five-year, US$55 million contract with the Atlanta Hawks. Pete Babcock, the Hawks’ general manager, said in a 2022 interview for this obituary that Mutombo had been intrigued by Atlanta as a base for a foundation that he envisioned establishing for the benefit of his home country, then colloquially known as Zaire. He started the foundation in 1997.

“When we recruited Dikembe, we tried to impress upon him how diverse Atlanta was, how important the African American community was compared to most large American cities,” Babcock said. “That first summer we signed him, he was buying school buses and shipping them to Congo, and talking about how unstable the country was due to civil strife, especially the medical facilities.”

Mutombo’s mother, Biamba Marie, died at home in 1998 after having a stroke; he had been unable to get hospital care for her due to a government-enforced curfew. That year, he invited business and political insiders to a dinner in Washington to announce a fundraising campaign for a hospital in Kinshasa to provide treatment for the poor. Over the next several years, he struggled to raise money, even from people within the NBA, two notable exceptions being Ewing and Mourning.

“I thought it would be easy, that I would call up all the rich people I knew from being a basketball player and the whole thing would take nine months,” he told The New York Times weeks before the 300-bed hospital, named for his mother, opened in September 2006, on land donated by the government. He said that he had to pay squatters to vacate the property and that he had donated roughly $15 million to the project.

“This is going to be the proudest day of my life,” he said during the ceremonial opening.

As a basketball player, Mutombo could be idiosyncratic, even churlish, especially when compared to his Georgetown brethren Ewing and Mourning. Though he was voted Defensive Player of the Year four times by the news media, he at times complained of being underappreciated.

“Wanting people to recognise his accomplishments, in a sense, is a certain type of pride that’s part cultural,” Mutombo’s cousin Dr Louis Kanda, a Washington surgeon whose career path Mutombo initially hoped to follow, told The Washington Post in 1995.

His finger wag popularised him, along with his gravelly voiced, thickly accented proclamations, typically followed by deep-throated laughter. Reporters delighted in his misadventures with Americanised expressions — he once described Shaquille O’Neal’s playoff opposition as “a walk in the cake.”

Former Los Angeles Lakers’ Shaquille O’Neal gestures as he speaks during a ceremony to retire jersey #34 in honour of O’Neal during halftime of the NBA basketball game against the Dallas Mavericks in Los Angeles, on April 2, 2013.  (Photo: Reuters)

The finger wag became an irritant to his coaches and teammates, who believed he was incentivising opponents to play harder. Many implored him to stop, as did David Stern, the league’s commissioner, in a personally delivered appeal. Mutombo believed that the more attention he drew, the better it was for his fundraising.

“Eventually, we told him he could do the finger wag but only to the crowd,” Babcock said.

That strategy backfired in a playoff game in Atlanta in 1997, when Mutombo blocked a shot by the Chicago Bulls’ Brian Williams, turned his back to finger-wag the crowd but neglected to notice the ball still inbounds. Much to the ire of his coach, Lenny Wilkens, it was promptly dunked by the Bulls’ Scottie Pippen.

Mutombo often joked about how much in fines his showmanship had cost him under the league’s no-taunting rule. But four years into retirement he received ample payback, starring in an acclaimed Geico commercial created for the 2013 Super Bowl. In that 30-second spot, in full uniform, he wagged his famous finger at people in various everyday activities.

He told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the commercial had reestablished recognition “for me and for my foundation. I thank God for it.”

Dikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean Jacque Wamutombo was born June 25, 1966, in Kinshasa. He was the seventh of 10 children of Samuel Mutombo, a school principal and district superintendent who studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. His mother taught Sunday school.

The family had a modest home in downtown Kinshasa and observed Luba tribal custom, which directs the eldest or wealthiest son to care for children of siblings. Mutombo and his wife, Rose — a Congolese woman he married in 1996, two years after cancelling a wedding to an American-born medical student over a prenuptial dispute — adopted four children of two deceased brothers and a sister: Reagan, Nancy, Pearia and Harouna.

The couple had three children, Jean Jacques, Carrie and Ryan Mutombo, a 7-foot-2 centre who joined the Georgetown basketball team, coached by Ewing, in 2021. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.

Dikembe Mutombo with his wife, Rose Mutombo, at the Unicef 75 celebration in Manhattan, on Nov 30, 2021. (Photo: New York Times)

Traded by Atlanta to the Philadelphia 76ers in 2000, Mutombo was a vital contributor to a team that lost to the Los Angeles Lakers in the 2001 NBA Finals. He was a New Jersey Nets reserve when they lost the 2003 finals to the San Antonio Spurs. He then played one season with the New York Knicks and five with the Houston Rockets. He finished his career with game averages of 9.8 points, 10.3 rebounds and 2.8 blocked shots and was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2015.

Though he occasionally expressed weariness with fundraising, Mutombo continued his philanthropic work in retirement. He was a spokesperson for CARE, sat on several corporate boards and was the NBA’s first designated global ambassador, assisting in the formation of a professional league in Africa.

He became an American citizen in 2006. The next year, he attended the State of the Union address given at the Capitol by President George W. Bush, who recognised him in the gallery, saying, “Dikembe became a star in the NBA and a citizen of the United States, but he never forgot the land of his birth, or his duty to share his blessings with others.”

During the Covid-19 pandemic years, Mutombo worked with medical experts, including Dr Anthony Fauci, to promote vaccines in Africa and North America. In 2020, his foundation funded construction of a $4 million school in Tshibombo village, near where his parents had grown up. The school, named for his father, was tuition-free for its 420 elementary and middle-school students.

“Basketball was a vehicle that I used to get me where I’m going,” Mutombo told Sports Illustrated in 2022. “My inspiration in life is to improve the living condition of my people.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.