Dikembe Mutombo, shot-blocking NBA center and humanitarian, dies at 58

At 7-foot-2, with size 22 sneakers and a gravelly basso profundo voice, Mr. Mutombo was an outsized presence in the NBA for 18 seasons, scooping up rebounds, swatting away opponents' shots and taunting competitors with his signature finger, a mischievous, teacher-like gesture. Scolding the schoolboy.

At the time of his retirement in 2009, he had blocked 3,289 shots, second only to Hakeem Olajuwon in league history.

Describing Mr. Mutombo's impact around the basket in a 1994 interview with Sports Illustrated, Golden State Warriors coach Don Nelson said, “There's no one else in our league who has an intimidating presence. “He's one of a kind.”

Growing up in the Democratic Republic of Congo, then known as Zaire, Mr. Mutombo spoke nine languages, but barely understood English — or what Zone Defense was — when he came to the United States in 1987 to study at Georgetown University. He planned to pursue a career in medicine but instead took up basketball under Hoas coach John Thompson, who was known for cultivating tough, defense-minded big men like Patrick Ewing.

Mr. Mutombo developed into a top prospect, setting a Big East Conference record when he made 12 shots in a game. Selected by the Denver Nuggets with the fourth overall pick in the 1991 draft, he became one of the NBA's elite defenders for the Atlanta Hawks and Philadelphia 76ers, leading the league in rebounds in two seasons and blocks in three.

At his peak, he averaged 4.5 blocks a game. While flat-footed as opponents tried to net him, he would stretch his arms skyward — and perfectly time his jump — to tip the ball slightly away or send it flying into the stands.

“I would shake my head and tell people, 'People can't fly to Mutombo's house,'” he told GQ after retiring as a player. “I felt like I was a chief, I was the boss, and no one could come into the paint” — the area below the basket — “unless they knocked on the door and asked permission to come in.”

Unlike centers Shaquille O'Neal and David Robinson, with whom he competed for All-NBA honors, Mr. Mutombo was never a prolific scorer. He averaged 16.6 points a game in his best offensive season, as a rookie. Critics also noted that intentionally or not, he had a claw in the mouth for elbowing opponents, leaving stitches and broken bones in his wake.

“I think he's a dangerous player,” Olajuwon said in 1999, after Mr. Mutombo broke two players' noses in two nights.

Mr. Mutombo insisted the injuries were accidental: critics wanted him to play as if he were 6 feet tall, he said, with his arms at his sides rather than up in the air. O'Neal seems to agree, telling Sports Illustrated, “He's pretty clear. He's just long.”

Along with Rudy Gobert and Mr. Mutombo's rival Ben Wallace, Mr. Mutombo was one of only three players to win the NBA Defensive Player of the Year honor four times. He was selected to eight All-Star teams, reached the NBA Finals twice and averaged 9.8 points and 10.3 rebounds a game for his career, statistics that helped him enter the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2015.

By then, he was widely known for his activism away from the court. The only two-time recipient of the NBA's J. Walter Kennedy Citizenship Award for Community Service, he served as a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations, was a member of the Special Olympics Board of Directors, and made public service announcements on behalf of polio vaccinations, frequent trips to the Congo.

When she was a player, she returned to her home country in the offseason to lead basketball clinics and pay for the national women's basketball team to travel to the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Through his foundation, he led the construction of a 300-bed hospital in the Congolese capital Kinshasa in 2007. The hospital was named in honor of his mother, who died of a stroke 10 years ago because she was unable to seek treatment. Please help due to citywide curfew.

Mr. Mutombo spent a decade financing and building the $29 million hospital, personally donating $15 million to the project and soliciting funds from fellow NBA players. The Congolese ambassador at the time, Faida Mitifu, told USA Today that the hospital was “a godsend” for the city, and President George W. Bush praised Mr. Mutombo as an example in his State of the Union address in 2007. “Heroic generosity, courage and self-sacrifice.”

In part, Mr. Mutombo said, it simply felt good to give back and be recognized. “I love to love; I love to love others,” she told the New York Times. He often quotes what he describes as an African proverb: “When you take the elevator up to reach the top, please don't forget to send the elevator down again, so that someone else can take it to the top.”

Some coaches said his off-season activities were hurting his career, distracting him from developing his hook shot or working on his ball handling. But Mr Mutombo suggested his critics had it backwards: basketball, he said, was only “a vehicle that would have taken me where I was going.”

“I'm not trying to be American, because [in] When you succeed in American society, you succeed for yourself,” he once told the Rocky Mountain News. “But in African society you are successful for your family. People helped me when I was growing up. I can't stop helping people now.

Dikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean Jacque (sometimes spelled Jean-Jacques) Wamutombo was born on June 25, 1966 in Kinshasa. Some of his names came from family members, he said, including an uncle who noticed that Mr. Mutombo was vulnerable as a child. And can be “broken like a banana”. This comment inspired the addition of his first name, which means banana in Congo, according to Mr Mutombo.

His father was a teacher and school administrator, and his mother was a housewife who sold Coke bottles at the Kinshasa stadium where Muhammad Ali knocked out George Foreman in the 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle.” “He made a lot of money that night,” Mr Mutombo recalled.

Deke, friends called him, was attracted not to basketball, but to football and martial arts. But an elder brother courted him at the age of 17, when he was already nearly 7 feet tall. It was an inauspicious start: He slipped during a drill, sprained his chin and upset his mother. He quit for a while, but resumed playing on concrete outdoor courts while attending Jesuit High School.

His play attracted the attention of an official from the US Agency for International Development, who sent Thompson a videotape of Mr. Mutombo. “The boy had a rag tied around his head, was playing on what looked like grass, and was blocking all kinds of shots,” Thompson wrote in his 2020 autobiography, “I came as a shadow.”

Mr. Mutombo, then about 21, was soon on a plane to Washington, where he spent his first year at Georgetown learning English and playing intramural basketball. He joined Thompson's team as a sophomore, playing alongside fellow big man Alonzo Mooring, another future Hall of Famer. Together they've blocked so many shots that fans set up a cheering section, “Rejection Row,” for each SWAT celebration.

On and off the court, Mr Mutombo was a quick study. He majored in linguistics and diplomacy, was accepted to the NBA the same year, and interned at Congress and the World Bank. He was unsure about entering the NBA until Thompson introduced him to Bill Russell, who won 11 championships with the Boston Celtics and “made me believe I could play,” Mr. Mutombo said.

Mr. Mutombo found early success with the Nuggets, who upset the Seattle SuperSonics in the first round of the 1994 playoffs and became the first No. 8 seed to beat the No. 1 seed. He later partnered with high-scoring guard Allen Iverson. Philadelphia reached the NBA Finals in 2001 but lost to the Los Angeles Lakers in five games. He returned to the Finals two years later, coming off the bench during an injury-plagued season with the New Jersey Nets, who lost the series 4–2 against the San Antonio Spurs.

After spending a year with the New York Knicks, he retired as a Houston Rocket at age 42, long after many of his peers had left the league.

In part, he has continued playing so long because he has an extended family to support. “I can't stop playing basketball,” he told The Times in 2003, “because I've got a thousand people who are alive because of me.”

According to a Washington Post report, Mr. Mutombo made headlines in 1994 when he called off his engagement the day before the wedding when his fiancée refused to sign a prenuptial agreement. Two years later, he married Rose, now known as Rose Mutombo Kiss, who became a Congolese lawyer and politician.

They had seven children, including four nieces and nephews whom they adopted. One son, Ryan, played college basketball, transferring to Georgia Tech this year after three seasons at Georgetown. Information on survivors was not immediately available.

Mr Mutombo started a company to sell coffee produced by women-led farms in the Congo, but had mixed success in the business.

According to a 2011 report published by the United Nations, he and a partner tried to buy $30 million worth of gold from Kenyan dealers, but they discovered that the gold — much of it later suspected to be fake — was controlled by Congolese warlord Bosco Ntaganda. Ntaganda profited from the deal and was later convicted of war crimes. An article in the Atlantic said that Mr Mutombo and his business partner, Case Lawal, had shown an “almost complete lack of due diligence” in the case.

Long after he left the basketball court, the NBA remained a home for Mr. Mutombo, who promoted basketball abroad while serving as the league's first global ambassador. He joked that he was looking for the next Mutombo.

Mr. Mutombo is often asked about his trademark finger wag, which he used to comedic effect when appearing in a Zeco commercial and in a cameo appearance in the Eddie Murphy film “Coming 2 America.”

Although league officials grew weary of the taunts in the late 1990s, when they increasingly called Mr. Mutombo technical fouls for unsportsmanlike conduct, he found a loophole: Instead of looking at opponents while waving, he looked at the crowd.

Still, he said he “lost a lot of money on that finger snap” because of the fine.

“Now that I'm working for the NBA,” he told GQ with a laugh, “it's amazing how much I've contributed to the organization with all my fines.”