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Friday, February 23, 2007
A renaissance man who happens to play hoops
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Let’s get the minor stuff out of the way involving Dikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean Jacque Wamutombo. He still is very tall at 7 feet 2, and despite spending his 15th NBA season on 40-year-old legs, he still is very good as the hidden star of the Houston Rockets.
Now on to the major stuff.
For instance: Exactly a month and a day ago, Mutombo was in such a rush to leave a practice in Houston for a 1,220-mile plane trip that he couldn’t change his clothes until he reached his destination.
Actually, before Mutombo arrived at the House chamber of the U.S. Capitol for the State of the Union Address, he took a detour to the White House. “From where I was changing, you could see the President’s desk in the Oval Office,” said Mutombo, adding his famously deep chuckle Friday at Philips Arena, where his nine points, 12 rebounds and three blocks couldn’t keep his previously streaking team from a 105-99 loss to the Hawks.
The House Chamber? The U.S. Capitol? The State of the Union Address?
The White House?
Who is this guy, and why can’t we have more folks like him in sports to replace all of these knuckleheads? “What Dikembe stands for, especially coming from [the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire], it could have been easy for him to leave that situation and come to America and be as successful as he’s been and forget where he came from,” said Steve Smith, a Hawks television analyst, who teamed with Mutombo on those efficient Hawks teams from the mid-1990s to the start of the new millennium. Sometimes, Smith and Mutombo discussed picks and rolls away from the locker room. Mostly, they spoke about everything else.
That’s because Mutombo is a renaissance man who just happens to play hoops. He would be a medical physician today, but after he arrived at Georgetown on an academic scholarship as a pre-med major, John Thompson talked him into dribbling for the Hoyas and beyond.
Even so, Mutombo already has a plaque in the Hall of Fame of Philanthropy. Among the slew of Mutombo’s beneficence, there is the pending opening of his 300-bed hospital and research center in his native Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. “It’s a journey just for him to get back home,” Smith said. “You’ve got customs, and you have to get a bunch of shots. I’ve seen him go back and forth to his native home three or four times a summer, and that’s not an hour flight.”
The same goes for a flight from Houston to Washington D.C. It takes three hours, but Mutombo couldn’t care less after he accepted a last-minute invitation from the Big Guy. This was after Mutombo took the first of three calls from the White House on his cellphone. The first call was short, vague and scary. “They asked me how the hospital was coming along, and I said, ‘It’s coming along very well. Hopefully, the opening will be July 15,’ ” Mutombo said. “Then they asked me if I’m an American citizen, and I said, ‘Yes.’ Then it was like, ‘Oh, well. We’ll talk to you later.’ I’m like, ‘What’s going on? What did I do? I don’t have any problem with the IRS.’ “
All the White House wanted was for Mutombo to attend the State of the Union Address as the President’s guest and to stay mum about it. The next thing you know, Mutombo was getting escorted from the airport to the White House by a bunch of secret-service agents. “The blue lights were flashing, the sirens were going, and I was thinking, ‘I’m on a different level,’ ” Mutombo recalled. Then, after that quick change at 1600 Pennsylvania, he was off to Capitol Hill. He was placed next to Laura Bush, the President’s wife.
Moments later, George W. Bush spoke in his address about Mutombo’s prolific work in Africa, and the Big Guy got a rousing ovation. Not the Big Guy at the podium, but the one who is helping to push the Rockets among the NBA elite when he isn’t helping to save the world.
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