Dikembe Mutombo, a towering NBA presence, dies at 58

Dikembe Mutombo, who came to Georgetown University as an international student with aspirations of becoming a doctor but who instead became a huge presence in professional basketball and a dedicated humanitarian in the Democratic Republic of Congo, died Monday in Atlanta. He was 58.

The cause was brain cancer, according to a statement from the National Basketball Association. His family announced in 2022 that he was undergoing treatment for a brain tumor in Atlanta.

Mutombo did not play basketball until middle age, preferring soccer as a child. An older brother, Elo, and his father, Samuel, encouraged him to try the sport so that his outsized frame, which eventually stretched to 7 feet 2 inches, combined with his athletic prowess could be of greater use.

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

At age 21, Mutombo enrolled at Georgetown on an academic scholarship in 1987, after Hermann Henning, an administrator at the United States Embassy in Kinshasa, the capital of the Republic of Congo, and a former high school basketball coach, referred him to coach John Thompson. of the vaunted Georgetown program.

After playing only intramural basketball through 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 languages.

Although his basketball skills were initially raw, Mutombo spent the summer training with Patrick Ewing, a Georgetown alumnus and NBA All-Star center, and a teammate, Alonzo Moring, another center and budding NBA star. In his senior season, Mutombo averaged 15.2 points, 12.2 rebounds and 4.7 blocked shots per game.

“Basketball-wise, he's just a kid in the woods,” Thompson told The Washington Post in 1991.

Selected fourth overall in the 1991 NBA draft by the Denver Nuggets, Mutombo was an immediate terror on defense. Although awkward, he had an effective hook shot, which helped him average a career-high 16.6 points. He made his 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 final fifth game, after grabbing the final rebound in overtime, he was memorably photographed. Holding the ball high and prone on the court, the eighth seed celebrated a first defeat to a first seeded team. (The Nuggets were eliminated in the second round by the Utah Jazz.)

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

“When we hired DeKembe, we tried to impress upon him how diverse Atlanta was, how important the African-American community was compared to the biggest American cities,” Babcock said. “That first summer we signed him, he was buying school buses and sending them to Congo, and talking about how unstable the country was because of the civil war, especially the medical facilities.”

Mutombo's mother, Biamba Marie, died at home after suffering a stroke in 1998; He was unable to seek hospital care for her due to the government-imposed 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 treat the poor. Over the next several years, he struggled to raise money, even from people in the NBA, with the two notable exceptions being Ewing and Schock.

“I thought it would be easy, that I'd call all the richest people known to be basketball players and the whole thing would take nine months,” he told The New York Times a few weeks before the 300-bed hospital was named. His mother, opened in September 2006 on land donated by the government. He said he had to pay squatters to vacate the property and that he donated about $15 million to the project.

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

As a basketball player, Mutombo could be silly, even shocking, especially when compared to his Georgetown brothers Ewing and Shock. Although he was named Defensive Player of the Year four times by the media, he has sometimes complained of being underrated.

“People want to recognize his achievements, in a sense, a certain kind of glory that is part of the culture,” Mutombo's cousin Dr. Louis Kanda, a Washington surgeon whose career path Mutombo had originally hoped to follow, told The Washington Post in 1995.

His finger movements made him popular, along with his voice, thickly enunciated declarations, usually followed by a deep throaty laugh. Reporters delighted in his adventure with Americanized expressions—he once described Shaquille O'Neal's playoff opposition as a “cake walk.”

The finger snapping became annoying to his coaches and teammates, who believed he was encouraging opponents to play harder. Many, including league commissioner David Stern, urged him to stop in personally delivered petitions. Mutombo believed that the more attention he attracted, the better it would be for his fundraising.

“Finally, we told him he could do the finger movements but only for the crowd,” Babcock said.

That strategy backfired in a 1997 playoff game in Atlanta, when Mutombo blocked a shot by the Chicago Bulls' Brian Williams, turned his back to wave at the crowd but still neglected to aim the ball inbounds. To the fury of his coach Lenny Wilkens, it was promptly dropped by the Bulls' Scottie Pippen.

Mutombo often joked about how much the league's no-taunting rule cost him for his showmanship. But four years after retirement he got paid big by starring in an acclaimed Zico commercial for the 2013 Super Bowl. In that 30-second spot, in full uniform, he wags his famous finger at people in various everyday tasks.

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

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

The family had a modest home in downtown Kinshasa and practiced Luba tribal custom, which mandates the eldest or wealthiest son to care for siblings' children. Mutombo and his wife, Rose — a Congolese woman he married in 1996, two years after annulling his marriage to an American-born medical student due to prenuptial disputes — adopted four children from two deceased brothers and a sister: Reagan, Nancy, Peria and don't lose

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

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

Although he sometimes expressed fatigue 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, helping to form a professional league in Africa.

He became an American citizen in 2006. The following year, he attended the State of the Union address given at the Capitol by President George W. Bush, who recognized him in the gallery, saying, “DeKambé became a star in the NBA and a United States citizen, but he never shared his homeland or his blessings with others. Don't forget the responsibility of sharing.”

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

“Basketball was the vehicle that took me where I was going,” Mutombo told Sports Illustrated in 2022. “My motivation in life is to improve the living conditions of my people.”