Basketball Hall of Famer Dikembe Mutombo, who died of brain cancer on Sept. 30 at 58, was quite simply one of the finest human beings ever to don an NBA uniform. Every young sports fan should strive to emulate him.
Mutombo’s on-court legacy itself is impressive: Four times the NBA Defensive Player of the Year, three-time shot-blocking champion, two-time rebounding champ, eight-time All-Star, and second all-time leader in career shots blocked.
Still, Mutombo’s legacy is far more defined by his fierce intelligence and his humanitarian work, about which, more in a moment, but only after a story about his rough start in the United States.
Mutombo, at 7 feet, 2 inches, came from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to play basketball for the Georgetown Hoyas of legendary coach John Thompson. At one point a wannabe medical student with a gift for languages (he eventually spoke English, three European languages, and five Central African languages), he was an excellent pupil. One day, though, he missed a class without properly telling Thompson. The coach was a stickler for his players going to class, so when Mutombo showed up the next day, Thompson immediately kicked him out of practice.
“In his locker,” Thompson wrote in his memoirs, “was [what appeared to be] a one-way airplane ticket back to the Congo. The flight was leaving that night. … Dikembe pleaded for forgiveness, saying he’d had a bad toothache and gone to the dentist, [but] I said if he wasn’t going to follow the rules, he could go back to the Congo and fight in Mobutu’s army. Poor Dikembe was scared out of his mind.”
Lesson learned: “Dikembe never missed another class at Georgetown.”
Mutombo used his education and then his basketball earnings for great things. He started the Dikembe Mutombo Foundation to improve conditions in his native land, where he famously built from scratch a 300-bed hospital and research center, donating more than half the funds himself; did yeoman’s work with the CARE relief agency and the CDC Foundation; served on the board of directors of the Special Olympics; spearheaded anti-polio and anti-malaria work around the world; and had his foundation build a pre-K through sixth-grade school as well.
The immigrant to these shores also loved his adopted country, and he served on the board of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
“When you take the elevator to the top,” Mutombo said, “please don’t forget to send it down, so that someone else can take it to the top [as well].”
Because he sent so many elevators back down, to lift so many others up to new heights, Dikembe Mutombo was one of the leading humanitarians of our time, all while never losing his common touch.
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“He loved others with every ounce of his being,” his son Ryan wrote upon his death. “That’s what made him so accessible. That’s what made him real.”
That’s the sort of reality all of us should work to foster.