Why Dikembe Mutombo was ‘more than a superstar’ to the NBA, the DRC and Africa

Dr. Groesbeck Parham remembers walking the streets of Atlanta with the late Dikembe Mutombo. “I was there visiting, and he had to get his passport renewed, so we parked the car and we were walking here and then we went and had lunch and whatnot. And you know, people recognized him and they would honk their horns.”

Parham remembers people shouting, “Hey, Dikembe!” Mutombo was beloved in Atlanta, where he played from 1996 to 2001. “But to walk with him in Kinshasa, man,” Parham said.

At the Biamba Marie Mutombo Hospital, which the Hall of Fame center opened in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s capital in 2007, Parham trained doctors to screen and treat breast cancer and cervical cancer. One night, he and his team, along with Mutombo, went to meet the new U.S. ambassador to the DRC.

“When we came out of the ambassador’s house, it must have been 9 o’clock at night, there must have been 500 people outside waiting,” Parham said. “I don’t know how they knew. They were [shouting], ‘Dikembe, Dikembe, Dikembe!’ We had to run in the car and they were beating on the car. Oh, it was just totally different.”

At the first day of hospital’s screen-and-treat camp in July 2016, thousands of women lined up. Their screaming of Mutombo’s name upon seeing him suggested that the program might not have been the main draw. When he approached the crowd, he looked almost embarrassed. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” Parham said, likening the “frenzy” to the hysteria that Michael Jackson inspired in the early 90s.

“He was loved, he was revered, he was more than a superstar,” Parham said. “He represented something very profound, I think, to the people of the DRC. He had left, he had made it big in the U.S., but he never forgot his people. He always poured something back into the community as much as he could. And he came back frequently. And he was touchable. He was visible.”

It is difficult to overstate how much Mutombo meant to the DRC and, more broadly, to the continent of Africa. More than just a legendary shot-blocker and finger-wagger, he was a humanitarian, a symbol of what is possible if you dedicate your life to improving the lives of others. In addition to the hospital named after his mother, in 2021 he opened the Samuel Mutombo Institute for Science & Entrepreneurship, a tuition-free school named after his father. He was a spokesperson for UNICEF and CARE, working to eradicate polio and educate people about HIV/AIDS.

“He was determined to make his life matter,” Kathy Behrens, the NBA’s president of social responsibility and player programs, said.

On Saturday, at the annual NBA Africa luncheon at All-Star weekend, commissioner Adam Silver announced the creation of a new award in honor of Mutombo, who died of brain cancer in September. The NBA Africa Dikembe Mutombo Global Humanitarian Award “will recognize individuals and organizations who have made exceptional contributions to global humanitarian efforts by advancing social justice, health equity, education and community empowerment,” per the league’s press release. It will be presented at the luncheon annually, beginning next year, and the winner will receive a grant “to further their humanitarian efforts” and a donation to the charity of their choosing.

The NBA also announced that it would build 55 courts in Africa featuring a “distinct design inspired by Mutombo.” The first will be in Kinshasa.

In 2009, months after Mutombo announced his retirement as an NBA player, then-commissioner David Stern created a new job for him: global ambassador. Mutombo was committed to the cause, though, before he had a formal role. When the league brought its Basketball Without Borders camp to Africa for the first time in 2003, Mutombo was not only a coach on the court but a behind-the-scenes resource. The NBA needed to bring 100 young players from all over the continent to Johannesburg, South Africa, for the camp. Amadou Gallo Fall, now the president of the Basketball Africa League, remembers working with Mutombo’s foundation to coordinate travel from the DRC. As the NBA’s presence in Africa grew, Mutombo was there “every step of the way,” Fall said, stressing that he was “not just showing up on trips, but being an active part of the efforts.”

“I think Dikembe really took it kind of like as a personal mission to help grow the game,” Behrens said.

Mutombo was a “North Star,” Fall said, for other African players, some of whom would go on to start their own foundations. “Especially in the early days,” Fall saw Mutombo “spend a lot of time providing advice, whether it’s unsolicited or unsolicited.” Gorgui Dieng, who had a 10-year playing career before becoming a basketball operations representative with the San Antonio Spurs, said that Mutombo was someone to look up to for the entire African population, not just those who were lucky enough, as he was, to call Mutombo a mentor.

“He was a great role model to all of us,” Dieng said.

‘He wanted all of us to make it’

Dieng, a Senegalese big man, first met Mutombo at Basketball Without Borders in Johannesburg in 2009. “He wanted all of us to make it,” Dieng said. With more than 60 campers there, that would be impossible, “but in his vision, he thought we should all make it and just make Africa better. And that was his speech.” All-Stars Chris Bosh, Dirk Nowitzki and Dwight Howard participated, too, but Mutombo struck a chord like no one else.

“Dwight was there, Dirk, who was there, all those guys, but they’re not Africans, you know?” Dieng said. “We see Dikembe’s story, where he came from and where he at today, I think we all could see ourselves in the same shoes.”

After winning MVP at BWB, Dieng spent a year at Huntington Prep in West Virginia and then went to Louisville. He encountered Mutombo again at home in Senegal, before he left college for the NBA.

“He was like, ‘Stay focused. I think this stage is very important for you. It goes by fast. You focus, you can make it. And it only gets harder once you get to the league,'” Dieng said. “He laid out everything for me, seriously.”

Throughout his career, Dieng “would reach out to [Mutombo], talk to him and pick his brain,” he said. Mutombo “always encouraged me to do the right things and help my people. And he made me believe whatever we are making here is not for us. We gotta share it with our people.” What he remembers most about their conversations is Mutombo’s continual reminders to “stay humble and help others.”

In Senegal, Dieng has, through his foundation, modernized hospitals, helped open a dialysis center and established an agricultural center to help farmers grow crops sustainably. He has also hosted basketball camps. When Dieng played for the Hawks, he held a fundraiser at his house. Mutombo attended and told stories to an audience that included Dieng’s teammates.

“I think, after that day, Trae [Young] always had a different approach toward me, and my teammates were also asking me what they can do to help,” Dieng said.

Mutombo was the kind of person who could give NBA players a “wake-up call,” Dieng said. He was also the kind of person who, when visiting Senegal, kept pestering Dieng to go out to eat with him. “He never wanted to be alone. He always wanted to be surrounding people and tell jokes. He was just a happy person. And he’s energy rubbed off on everyone as soon as he walked in the room.” Dieng believes Mutombo connected with donors and diplomats for the same reason that he connected with players: “He was just real. I think if you mean it, it’s not going to be hard to say it.”

Dieng laughed when recalling the time he briefly teamed up with a 49-year-old Mutombo during the 2015 NBA Africa Game. “He talked mad shit,” Dieng said. “It was amazing.”

Mutombo “gave us his time,” Dieng said, and “gave us his effort.” He opened doors for African players, and he helped them follow in his footsteps.

“He was a great mentor, and he had a big heart,” Dieng said. “He never saw himself as a superstar. He’s trying to blend in everywhere he goes. I remember we went to South Africa one time and, those different tribes, they were dancing and stuff. And I just looked back and I see him jump in and start dancing with them. So he was on the bus, I was making fun of him and he was like, ‘Man, this is amazing. I feel so great.’ I’m like, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Basketball connected us. You couldn’t do this without basketball.”

‘A consummate diplomat’

Sometimes, before a public appearance with NBA players, Behrens will say, “All right, everybody, let’s have good energy. Let’s be engaging.” With Mutombo, that kind of prompting was so clearly unnecessary that it would have been absurd.

“I don’t care whether it was a Special Olympics event or one of our Basketball Without Borders events or he was at a game in his suit, he always was smiling,” Behrens said.

When Mutombo was in New York City, “you obviously can’t always get in a cab with a guy who’s 7-foot-2, so we’d walk certain places,” Behrens said. “And he loved the reaction from New Yorkers. He could do his little finger wag and just wave to people.”

In Kinshasa, whenever Mutombo went to a restaurant, he’d be mobbed by people wanting pictures. “It would take you an hour from entering the restaurant before you sat down at the table,” Parham said. “He would just take time to accommodate everybody. Everybody.” He didn’t see the attention as an annoyance, and never seemed to tire of it.”

“It’s not easy being a celebrity and people always noticing you,” Behrens said, “but when you’re 7-2, when you have that distinctive voice, you’re not hiding. And he didn’t want to.”

For the NBA’s efforts in Africa in particular, Mutombo’s presence was powerful. “We were spending a lot of our time in the initial years engaging with heads of state, ministries of federation,” Fall said. “And he is a consummate diplomat. Whenever he walked in a room, people paid attention. I think working with him and just traveling with him and going to a lot of these parts of Africa in our early efforts really did half the trick.” Mutombo was skilled at “getting allies and recruiting people who could support, people could contribute,” and “a lot of it was natural.” Fall described him as “jovial” and Behrens called him “the definition of a gentle giant.”

Mutombo understood, though, that he could use his force of personality as a force for good. Even in the rare place where he wasn’t well known, like Cuba, where he went on an NBA trip in 2015, “he could connect with people and bring a smile to people’s faces,” Behrens said. “And that’s a gift. And he knew it, and he gave it away as often as he could.”

Commissioner Adam Silver encouraged Mutombo to come to the league office, so other employees could see him, talk to him and learn from him. “It was kind of neat to be like, ‘Oh yeah, there’s Dikembe over in the corner at the cafeteria,'” Behrens said. During Covid lockdown, Mutombo wanted to participate in virtual staff meetings.

“To watch [his wife] Rose get him to figure out how to get the Zoom camera on his face and not his head was fun,” Behrens said. “He loved that. He wasn’t just a ‘Global Ambassador,’ it really felt like he was a part of the league office.”

When the NBA opened its first office in Africa in 2010, Fall was its man in Johannesburg. Part of his job was to “convince people in Africa that this was not just the NBA going in to take photo ops,” he said. In this respect, Mutombo “made my job a whole lot easier.” Even before then, when the league launched BWB, Mutombo’s involvement helped combat the notion that the camps were “about finding the next big players,” rather than part of the wider project of improving the basketball infrastructure and increasing participation. Beyond investing his time and his money, Mutombo, because the life he lived, gave the league more credibility.

“These are the stories that we love telling to the young people and also to government officials,” Fall said. “And they knew, through the hospital and the work he was doing, they knew that hey, this guy, he left Africa, went to study [at Georgetown, on a USAID academic scholarship], became an NBA star, now came back to contribute to his country. So I think that was really something tangible in terms of the transformative power of basketball and sports in general.”

‘A man of solutions’

When Parham got to Kinshasa, he was struck by the “massive amount of energy from the the time the sun rises till late at night.” It has a population of more than 17,000, and it felt like everybody was on the move all the time.

“Large numbers of people, up and down the street, walking,” Parham said. “Wheelbarrows. People riding on the backs of buses. Couches on tops of buses so they could hold more people. People hanging off buses. It was just people moving, and everybody hustling, everybody trying to sell something.”

He was blown away by the Biamba Marie Mutombo Hospital. To merely establish health programs in places with this much poverty is “really difficult,” he said, because “there’s very little infrastructure, few doctors, few nurses, monitoring, evaluation, quality assurance. The equipment is just not there, it’s so unreliable. The supply chain is really unreliable.” To build an entire facility that operated smoothly? “That is a heroic feat.”

Mutombo announced his plan to build the hospital after Biamba Marie had a stroke and died at home, as a government-mandated curfew prevented her from getting to the hospital that was about 10 minutes away. It didn’t open, though, for a decade. Mutombo was famously frustrated by the difficulty of fundraising, especially when it came to his network of fellow basketball players.

“He and I talked about that a lot,” Behrens said. “My experience before I got here was in the nonprofit world, so we talked about the challenges of raising money: you have to ask 100 people because 90 of them are going to say no but you gotta get the 10 who will say yes.”

Mutombo “was never deterred by that frustration,” Behrens said. Parham said that he “had this bulldog tenacity, sort of a stubbornness about him. Once he locked in, that was it.”

Parham could sense that Mutombo had a “disdain for injustice” when they first met, he said. Parham was in the middle of a presentation about breast cancer and cervix cancer in women in Africa — the high death rates in comparison to those in the Western world, the limited access to screening and treatment, the ripple effects their premature deaths had on their families and communities — when Mutombo stopped him and asked how much money he needed to implement his program. A couple of months later, Parham was in the DRC.

Mutombo was, too, and, according to Parham, “he was involved, asking, ‘How can we make this better? How can we get more women in? How can we move faster, Doc?'” Parham once saw him in the operating room, wearing an enormous green scrub gown “and this crazy-looking hat,” observing a surgery. It was, he said, as if Mutombo had jumped off the bench and announced, “I want to play.”

In 10 years, Parham only heard Mutombo complain once. “He was a man of solutions,” Parham said. He wanted to focus on how problems could be fixed, not dwell on the problems themselves.

The approach proved effective. “The hospital has treated over one million people,” Parham said. “The program we started has screened over 50,000 women for cervical and breast cancer. He had orthopedic surgeons coming in, doing joint replacements, from other countries. He had hundreds of kids getting new hearing aids from the Starkey Foundation. He had surgeons come in to do cleft palate surgery. Hundreds of people, their eyesight was restored as a result of him having eye surgeons to come in to do surgery.”

When the wife of one of the cancer surgeons in Parham’s group died, Mutombo and Rose showed up at a small church in Tuskegee, Alabama, for the funeral. When a surgeon was given an endowed chair at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, they showed up in Little Rock for the ceremony and Mutombo delivered a speech.

“It was as if he had made us a part of his family,” Parham said.

Parham plans to open a facility in Lusaka, Zambia, to provide care for women who have completed cancer treatment. It will be called the Dikembe and Rose Mutombo Compassionate Care Center. At Mutombo’s funeral in Atlanta, Silver approached Parham, who had flown in from Lusaka, to compliment his speech. Silver then added that the NBA would like to support the work he’s doing in Africa.

Parham cannot imagine another scenario in which he and the commissioner of the NBA would have crossed paths. Even in death, Mutombo made a connection that could save lives.

“He was working from the casket, man,” Parham said.