There is not only one path up the mountain of sports greatness. While most athletes climb it through setting records, accumulating numbers, earning awards, and winning championships, others scale it through creating unforgettable moments and being unique “unicorn”-type players whom fans have never seen before and whom we realize we may never see again. Dikembe Mutombo, the Hall of Fame NBA center who died on Sept. 30 at 58, was in the latter category — though he was not without his own set of awards and impressive statistical achievements.
Mutombo played 18 seasons in the NBA, mostly for the Denver Nuggets and the Atlanta Hawks, won four Defensive Player of the Year awards, made eight All-Star teams, was named to six NBA All-Defensive teams, twice led the league in rebounds, and led the league in blocked shots for five straight seasons, finishing his career as the NBA’s second all-time leader in blocked shots. While it may have been these numbers that secured his spot in Springfield in 2015, his place in fans’ memories was assured by his inimitable post-blocked shot finger-wag — a gesture that literally cannot be duplicated because no NBA center has ever had a right index finger as long and as oddly nimble that his finger-wag verged on a finger-dance. And his place in basketball lore was guaranteed when, after his underdog Nuggets shocked the heavily favored No. 1 seed Seattle SuperSonics in the first round of the 1994 playoffs, the first No. 8 seed ever to defeat a No. 1 seed in the NBA playoffs, Mutombo fell to the floor and clasped the ball above his head as if overcome with religious ecstasy. Mutombo’s ball-clutching celebration has become one of the more iconic images in modern NBA history.
Dikembe Mutombo was born on June 25, 1966, in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the country that was known as Zaire until the late 1990s. Mutombo received an academic scholarship to study medicine at Georgetown University and enrolled in the school with plans of becoming a doctor. But when his athletic talent began to surpass his scholastic potential, he decided to focus full-time on basketball. As a 7-footer, Mutombo was in the right place. At Georgetown, he came under the tutelage of legendary coach John Thompson, a proven molder of centers who had helped develop Patrick Ewing and would soon do the same with Alonzo Mourning. Mutombo’s offensive gifts were more limited than Ewing’s and Mourning’s, but Thompson did help Mutombo develop enough moves around the basket that would allow him to become a respectable, if never spectacular, offensive center. It was as a defensive player, though, where Mutombo truly sparkled. Almost immediately upon entering the league after being selected fourth overall by the Nuggets in the 1991 NBA draft, Mutombo made his defensive presence felt. His imposing 7-foot-2-inch height and 7-foot-6-inch wingspan created nightmares for opponents attempting to drive to the basket. And his unaesthetic but often effective post-up game allowed him to become a centerpiece of fun, plucky Nuggets teams.
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In 1996, Mutombo left Denver to sign with the Atlanta Hawks, in what turned out to be a mostly disappointing run with an Atlanta team that never assembled a competitive roster around him, though his Hawks did lose to Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls during the ’97 playoffs — no shame there. When Mutombo was traded to the Philadelphia 76ers in 2001, he would finally have his chance to play for a championship contender. Teaming up with his fellow Georgetown alum Allen Iverson, Mutombo helped the Sixers reach the NBA Finals that same year, in which they lost to the Los Angeles Lakers in five games. Not even Mutombo, considered to be perhaps the best defensive center of his era, could slow down the freight-train force that was Shaquille O’Neal in his prime.
Mutombo became an NBA vagabond during the final stretch of his career, bouncing around between several teams before having a somewhat memorable run with the Houston Rockets, with which he backed up another foreign big man, Yao Ming, and was an important contributor to a 2007 Rockets team that won a near-NBA record 22 straight games. After Mutombo retired at the end of the 2009 season, he devoted himself full-time to his humanitarian efforts, which included the building of a hospital in his native Congo, financed in part by millions of dollars of his own money. His philanthropy, as well as his big heart and his voice that was so impossibly deep that just hearing it could make you laugh, were a few of the ingredients that went into making Dikembe Mutombo one of the most beloved basketball players of our time.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the author, most recently, of Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America.
