The finger wag. The enormous smile. The unmistakable voice. Dikembe Mutombo played defense at a level and with a flair that few others in basketball history ever possessed, all among the many reasons why he’s immortalized in the Hall of Fame.
On the court, he stopped people.
Off the court, he helped people.
In simplest terms, that is the legacy of Mutombo, the 7-foot-2 mountain of a center who died Monday, about two years after his family revealed that he was dealing with brain cancer. The tributes started when the news broke and never stopped. Current and former players. Team and league executives. Even world leaders; Barack Obama, who hosted Mutombo at the White House more than once, weighed in as did Felix Tshisekedi, the president of Congo, Mutombo’s homeland.
They all said the same thing in different ways. Mutombo touched lives, one way or another.
“Dikembe Mutombo was an incredible basketball player — one of the best shot blockers and defensive players of all time,” Obama wrote on social media Monday. “But he also inspired a generation of young people across Africa, and his work as the NBA’s first global ambassador changed the way athletes think about their impact off the court.”
When Mutombo wanted something done, it got done. He built a hospital in the Congo and that facility - named for his mother - has now treated about 200,000 people. He worked tirelessly on behalf of the Special Olympics, on behalf of UNICEF, on behalf of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. He traveled the world, he encouraged NBA leaders to visit Africa, he fought for change. He was the first, and still is the only, person to win the NBA’s J. Walter Kennedy Citizenship Award twice.
“His legacy of things that he did off of the court are going to long outlive the things he did on the court,” one of his former coaches, fellow Hall of Famer Dan Issel, said Monday.
Issel coached Mutombo in Denver, where they were part of the first 8-seed-beats-1-seed upset in NBA playoff history, the one where the Nuggets ousted Seattle in 1994 in a best-of-5 series and Mutombo ended up on the floor when it was over, flat on his back, holding the ball over his head with absolute joy on his face.
That was an iconic moment. But Mutombo’s iconic move was the finger wag - which he broke out after blocking a shot, his index finger going back and forth as if to say “no, no, no” to shooters who he had just rejected. It is legendary. It didn’t start that way.
“He got called for a technical, I think, the first time he did it,” Issel said. “And so the NBA made a rule that they liked it so much, they just didn’t want him doing it in somebody’s face. So, after that, they said, ‘Hey, if you turn to the crowd and do the finger waggle, you’ll be OK. Just don’t do it in the player’s face that you just blocked.’”
Mutombo spent 18 seasons in the NBA, playing for Denver, Atlanta, Houston, Philadelphia, New York and the then-New Jersey Nets. The 7-foot-2 center out of Georgetown was an eight-time All-Star, four-time defensive player of the year three-time All-NBA selection and went into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2015 after averaging 9.8 points and 10.3 rebounds per game for his career.
His speech in Springfield, Massachusetts on the night of his induction lasted about 9 minutes. And probably 8 1/2 of those minutes were him talking about everyone else, instead of talking about his own accomplishments. He had John Thompson, his Georgetown coach, and then-former NBA Commissioner David Stern on the stage with him as his Hall of Fame presenters. From Thompson, he learned basketball and how to look at the world. From Stern, he got the opportunity to use the NBA platform to help change the world. He could not have thanked either of them enough.
“The spirit of Dikembe Mutombo is never going to be forgotten,” said Philadelphia guard Kyle Lowry, who was a Mutombo teammate in the center’s final NBA season - with Houston in 2008-09. “I think everyone that’s ever been around, ever been a part of, whoever met him, knows how great of a man he was. He’s got a great family, great children. It’s a big loss for our league, our world.”
There will be no more finger wags. That voice - it was compared to the Cookie Monster, and Mutombo always saw the humor in that - has been silenced. Mutombo is gone. The legacy is not. It never will be.
And if someone had to sum up Mutombo’s remarkable life in one sentence, there might be no better choice than the one he himself used to wrap up his Hall of Fame speech.
“I may not have won the championship,” he said that night, “but I’m a champion to so many people.”
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