The plane was late again. But the cause wasn’t mechanical. It was political. In the Congolese capital of Kinshasa, the parliament session was running late. And, as often happens, the lawmakers representing the city of Mbuji-Mayi held up the daily flight home until the meeting ended and they could board.
On this summer day in 2021, the delay at the airport maddened the travelers at the gate. But a strikingly tall man in the boarding area shrugged it off.
Dikembe Mutombo knew, perhaps better than anyone, the quirks and customs of his home country. When the flight was held up, he turned to the other members in his traveling delegation and, in his famously thrumming bass voice, explained the situation. He laughed his familiar laugh, which originated deep within his belly. “Then,” recalls Masai Ujiri, the Nigerian-raised Raptors president, traveling with Mutombo that week, “Dikembe said we had to get lunch.”
The party headed to a restaurant alongside a river. The joint was closed. Mutombo laughed again, made a phone call, and a few minutes later the staff came and prepared an elaborate feast. Mid-meal, Mutombo got a call. The plane was ready to board. They headed back to the Kinshasa airport. Mutombo folded his 7' 2" frame into his seat on a commercial aircraft without business class, and flew to Mbuji-Mayi, where they were greeted by the governor upon landing. They talked about politics and economics. Then Mutombo and his fellow travelers headed to a basketball court he had constructed, where, the following morning, he would host a clinic for dozens of local girls and boys.
To the delegation—a mix of NBA employees and international aid workers—it made for an exhilarating, exhausting day. It also made for a snapshot, a typifying glimpse, into Dikembe Mutombo’s life after basketball.
Bringing with him a mix of mission and passion … of pragmatism and charm … a knowledge of local power players and the realpolitik … a sense of what inefficiencies could be improved and which were simply baked into national and local cultures. Since retiring from the NBA in 2009, Mutombo had made countless trips like this, as often as once a month. “With Dikembe,” says NBA commissioner Adam Silver, “every day was a back-to-back.”
Some visits were official. Some were made on his own time and dime. Some were basketball-related. Some had nothing to do with hoops. Some were a mix. “Always it was the same goal,” says Ujiri. “Improving the lives of the people of Africa. That was how, where and what Dikembe dedicated his life to doing.”
When he was 8, Mutombo snuck into the Rumble in the Jungle in Kinshasa to watch Muhammad Ali flatten George Foreman. Now, 50 years later, his dedication to the ideals embodied by The Greatest make Mutombo the deserving recipient of the Sports Illustrated Muhammad Ali Legacy Award.
“Late bloomer” doesn’t quite paint the picture of how long it took Dikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean-Jacques Wamutombo to come to basketball. It wasn’t that he was lacking the physique. As a boy, he eclipsed seven feet in height in his early teens. And it’s not that he didn’t have an interest in sports. In addition to sneaking into the Ali fight—which was held not far from the home Biamba Marie and Samuel Mutombo, a Sunday school teacher and district superintendent, built for their 10 kids—Mutombo was a soccer player throughout high school.
No, it’s that he possessed an agile mind and sweeping ambitions. There were so many concepts to grasp, languages to learn, events to study, people to help. Who had time to obsess over kicking a ball through a rectangular net or shooting a ball through a cylindrical one?
Mutombo was 21 when he won an international science competition. He was a senior in high school and received a United States Agency for International Development academic scholarship to Georgetown. Though he didn’t speak English until arriving in the U.S.—supposedly, he picked up the language in a matter of weeks—he had designs of becoming a doctor. His father was educated at the Sorbonne in Paris but returned to Congo, rejecting a cozy life in Europe in order to help his people. Dikembe figured he’d trace the same path.
As a freshman he played basketball recreationally. Word of Mutombo laying waste to Georgetown’s intramural league rocketed around campus, and Mutombo met with the school’s venerable coach, John Thompson, who found a roster spot for the ringer. As Thompson put it to The Washington Post at the time: “Basketball-wise, he’s just a babe in the woods. He hasn’t been brought up being given things and being told how great he is, and he wants to get better.”
Then, Georgetown was not only positioned among the most gilded college hoops programs, but Thompson—who stood 6' 10" and had played in the NBA—had a reputation as a “center whisperer,” having minted Patrick Ewing and Alonzo Mourning. Immediately a defensive menace by the sheer virtue of his height and reach, Mutombo added some offensive moves like a baby hook and worked on footwork during summer sessions with Ewing and Mourning. In three seasons, he went from serviceable player to good player to an NBA-bound star.
If Georgetown was the ideal school for his flourishing hoops, so too was it the ideal training ground for his ambitions beyond basketball. Though Mutombo had to abandon his med school track to accommodate the demands of big-time college basketball, he studied—not exactly jock majors here—diplomacy and linguistics, becoming fluent in English, Spanish and Portuguese, to go along with the French and assorted African languages and dialects he spoke in his home country. And at Georgetown, a school known for its international relations program and proximity to D.C.’s power corridors, Mutombo learned how to cut through bureaucratic snarl, navigate global networks and build contacts in the international aid community.
Taken by the Nuggets with the fourth pick in the 1991 NBA draft, Mutombo adjusted seamlessly to the pros. By 1994—seven years removed from Georgetown intramurals!—he was the centerpiece of a Denver team that upset the top-seeded SuperSonics in the playoffs, the first time a No. 8 team ever beat the No. 1 team. The series provided the iconic tableau of Mutombo, flat on his back after the final buzzer, gripping the ball and laughing (crying?) deliriously.
The other signature image of Mutombo is, of course, his finger wag, an admonishment not to attack the rim. The warning applied to smaller opponents. (“It was like Mom saying, ‘Don’t even think about it,’ ” says Allen Iverson, who followed Mutombo at Georgetown and played alongside him in Philadelphia.) It applied as well to other centers, including Shaquille O’Neal, whom Mutombo once memorably described guarding as “a walk in the cake.” Michael Jordan once joked that one of his proudest NBA moments came when he scaled Mt. Mutombo and dunked over him, celebrating with a wag of his own finger.
Even during the teeth of his NBA seasons—and with remarkably little fanfare—Mutombo acted, essentially, as an international humanitarian aid worker. Initially, he focused his efforts on Congo, where the life expectancy when he started his pro career was just 48. As Mutombo explained to SI in 2006, he watched one day as the local hospital declined to release 10 new mothers until they came up with the $25 fee for their delivery charges. (Mutombo quickly handed over $250).
Then he expanded his efforts to sub-Saharan Africa, then to all of the continent. In his second offseason, he visited Somali refugee camps in northern Kenya as a spokesperson for an international relief agency. When the NBA began its outreach program to Africa, Mutombo figured prominently.
Mutombo spoke often about his good fortune and the inequality of it all. Never mind his NBA salary that often exceeded $10 million annually. His NBA per diem was enough to feed a family in Africa for a month. His way of reconciling this inequity was simple. “A hardwood Robin Hood,” as SI’s Steve Rushin called him, Mutombo gave most of his wealth back to Africa. (Mutombo rejected praise for his generosity, much as he would a weak floater in the lane. “One lesson my mother taught me was, The more you give, the more blessings you receive.”)
“One lesson my mother taught me was, The more you give, the more blessings you receive.”Mutombo
While playing for the Hawks, he established an eponymous Atlanta-based foundation to serve Africa. Teammates recall Mutombo in the locker room, holding an early-days cell phone to his ear and, in a variety of tongues, talking earnestly with folks oceans away. One day, he might be arranging to buy school buses. Another, he would be negotiating the installation of water filtration systems. Yao Ming tells the story of sitting across from Mutombo when both were on the Rockets. While other teammates were playing poker and video games, Mutombo unfurled spreadsheets, assessing staffing and supplies needed for hospitals.
In 1998, when Mutombo was in his eighth NBA season, he received word from Congo that his mother had suffered a stroke. Prevented from getting to a hospital because of a government-imposed curfew, she died at home. In his grief and fury, Mutombo held a dinner in Washington, inviting the business and political elite to raise funds for a hospital that would serve the poor.
While many of his NBA cohorts—Ewing and Mourning among them—stepped up, the invited self-styled power brokers largely did not. In the end, Mutombo personally donated more than half of the $29 million needed to build the hospital. So be it. The Biamba Marie Mutombo Hospital opened in December 2007. More than a million patients have passed through its doors; more than half arrived on foot.
In total, Mutombo played 18 seasons in the NBA. He played in eight All-Star Games and in the NBA Finals in 2001, with the 76ers, and two years later with the Nets. A four-time Defensive Player of the Year, he retired with the second-highest blocked shot total in NBA history. In 2015, Mutombo was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
Basketball, though, was always but a sliver of his identity. The absence of the game simply meant more time to devote to what he called “my calling.” He could now arrange for malaria nets and microloans all day, not just squeezing in the work between games and practices.
Among his most ambitious projects, Mutombo’s foundation funded the construction of a school named in honor of his father in the village of Tshibombo. The Samuel Mutombo Institute of Science & Entrepreneurship provides tuition-free education for more than 400 elementary and middle school students each year.
Basketball also figured prominently in his philanthropy. While careful to position the sport as a means—“Basketball,” Mutombo told SI in 2022, “was a vehicle that I used to get me where I’m going”—and not an end, Mutombo was critical to spreading the Gospel of Hoops in Africa.
In 1996, for instance, he paid out of pocket for the Congolese women’s national basketball team to travel to the Atlanta Olympics. David Stern named Mutombo as the NBA’s first global ambassador and, immediately, he was christening courts in Africa, and showing up to arenas in India, and connecting prospects with college recruiters he trusted. (If they ended up at Georgetown, so much the better.)
The success of Joel Embiid and Pascal Siakam (Cameroonians, both) and the other 16 players from African nations on NBA rosters at the start of this season? You can draw a straight line from Mutombo. “With [Dikembe], two numbers come to mind,” says Silver. “The first is four. The second is 54. Four African players that were in the league when he joined in 1991. Fifty-four is the number of players today who were either born in Africa or one of their parents was born in Africa. You wouldn’t have seen basketball developed the way it has in Africa, but for Dikembe Mutombo.”
Silver recalls that Mutombo would leave for international trips, pockets stuffed with business cards. “He’d begin with his NBA ambassador card. He’d hand over his UNICEF card. In another pocket, he’d hand over his Special Olympics card. He had his Georgetown card. He had his own Dikembe Mutombo Foundation card. He was doing work on behalf of Atlanta, his adopted hometown. He was quite remarkable.”
During the pandemic, Mutombo worked with medical experts, promoting vaccines in Africa and North America. In July 2022, SI caught up with Mutombo, as he was preparing for one of his five COVID-era trips to Africa after buying $20,000 in supplies from an Atlanta Home Depot. Just another day on the job.
A few months later, Mutombo was diagnosed with brain cancer. On Sept. 30, 2024, Mutombo died in Atlanta at age 58, leaving behind his wife, Rose, and their seven children, four of whom the Mutombos adopted when Rose’s brother died.
Later that same day, Pete Rose passed away. Two very different legends dying within a few hours of each other offered a reminder that sports can accommodate so many diffuse backstories, body types and personalities. But it also meant that the sports media—traditional and social—gave far more attention to the passing of baseball’s controversial Hit King than the NBA’s Humanitarian King.
Mutombo, though, transcended sports. And the tributes from the world at large came fierce. There were vigils throughout Africa. In China, Yao Ming noted that Mutombo had inspired him to set up schools in the country. In the U.S., former presidents spoke about the good he had done. The National Archives displayed photographs of Mutombo at White House visits. The National Constitution Center quoted Mutombo’s lines from a naturalization ceremony where he’d spoken to new citizens: “The freedom that comes with being an American allowed me to move freely around the world and to extend a helping hand to people in need, not only here in America but also in other lands.”
It all highlighted another irony: Mutombo may have been known for a menacing, finger-wagging gesture that, in basketball-speak, translated to not in my house. But, in the real world? Away from the theater of basketball? Here was the ultimate global citizen, a towering figure who’d devoted his life, too brief as it was, to smudging borders, welcoming all, and, at once, making the world smaller and bigger.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Dikembe Mutombo Honored with SI’s 2024 Muhammad Ali Legacy Award.