This was before the internet was really what it’s become, so you’ll have to trust some shape of my memory. It was the late 1990’s, ESPN had a thoughtful interview show (lol), and Dikembe Mutombo was a guest on it. He spoke in his thick Congolese accent, now known to all who love basketball, but at the time it was less familiar. Because in a popular advertisement he had been recently cast in, it was only his likeness that the brand was after, not his voice. They’d dubbed that, anglicized it. Mutombo, on the interview show, in his real voice, told Roy Firestone how much this offended him.
I thought of that, his searing pride, every time I saw him block a shot over the rest of his career, which was a lot of times. Only Hakeem Olajuwon has swatted the ball away from the rim more often in NBA history. Mutombo’s presence in the paint was, for at least a decade, a key part of the league’s competitive and mythological landscape. On the Denver Nuggets, he led one of the great upsets the playoffs have ever seen when he averaged 6.2 blocks per game as his 8-seeded team defeated the 63-win Seattle SuperSonics in the first round of 1994. When the job was done and he laid flat on the ground and shook the ball in sweaty smiling glory, everyone remembered.
He won the Defensive Player of The Year award the following season, and then three more times with the Atlanta Hawks. He also led the league in rebounds a couple of times, and is on the all-time short list in that category too. This was why the Philadelphia 76ers traded for him, mid-season, in the year 2001. Less than two weeks prior, he’d reminded the basketball world what he was capable of, in one of last dazzling, hotly contested All-Star games. Paired with the white-hot scoring of Vince Carter and soon-to-be teammate Allen Iverson, Dikembe pulled in 22 boards as the East roared from way behind for a thrilling one-point victory.
A few months later, Iverson and Mutombo went on to the NBA Finals together. A rookie at 25, the center was already 34 at this point, but his career’s final act proved longer than anyone could’ve expected. With the New Jersey Nets, New York Knicks, and then especially the Houston Rockets, he kept deterring scorers for eight more years. When he finally retired he was 42, the sixth oldest player the league’s ever had. He was ready to go, but only a year before, at 41, he wasn’t—Mutombo played 16 minutes per game for a Rockets team that set a modern record for winning with a 22-game streak. Mutombo was injured for about half of that run, but in the ten games he was healthy for, he played 19 minutes a night and averaged seven rounds and two blocks; a downright comical level of enduring impact.
Off the floor, in the 15 years between the end of his career and his tragic death this week, Mutombo remained impossible to forget. This was, in part, because he popularized one of the most enjoyable, hilarious, and addictive bodily gestures that popular culture has seen in my lifetime: the finger wag. Thousands of times, Dikembe sent an opponent’s shot in the other direction, and had chance to look them in the eyes, and shake his machete-like digit at them disapprovingly. Equal parts camp and menace, it proved too fun, costing him a lot of money in fines, and standing today as a quick but irresistible means of collecting a technical foul.
In 2013, Mutombo was re-born for a new generation when he starred in a commercial that was—whatever you may think of the art form that is 30-second product awareness blasts—iconic. In it, he hollered delightedly with his authentically deep, croaking vocal chords as he brought his shot-blocking prowess to everyday activities: throwing paper away, doing the laundry, paying a toll, shopping for cereal. He rejected all these basic tasks, and shook his finger at normal folks attempting them. Two years later, he was immortalized further when Kanye West, in one of his trademark explorations of the 21st century id, said “middle finger longer than Dikembe”—an expression of an almost unimaginable defiance.
The longest section in Mutombo’s biography, though, details his existence as a citizen. A committed philanthropist, he spent something like a quarter of his career earnings to build schools and hospitals in his native central African country. No one man, not even a man they correctly call a mountain, can make up for all the geopolitical ills that the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been subject to. That didn't stop Dikembe from trying. Both rich with gravitas and light-hearted and as can be, we will be lucky if the sport ever gives us another man so magnanimous and admirable.